In military history, the quote “Get there firstest with the mostest”—that is, strike first, and strike hard—is often attributed to the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest apparently never said it, but for sure, he practiced it. In the Civil War, he was the leader most skilled at combining mass and maneuver. A century later, another Tennessean, Howard Baker, made much the same point, although admittedly in a vastly different context. Baker was the leader of the Republicans in the Senate from 1976 to 1984, and he, too, had his share of victories. Most notably, in 1981, Baker guided President Ronald Reagan’s big tax cut through the Senate; indeed, later in the 80s, he served as Reagan’s White House chief of staff. Baker liked to say that he learned the secret of politics in the first grade: “I learned how to count.”