Abraham Lincoln stands out as a particularly strong example, since Lincoln was, not to put too fine a point on it, homely. One of Lincoln's legal colleagues said that he "had the appearance of a rough intelligent farmer." Rather than brood on this as an insult, Lincoln converted it into a strategy.
He let his opponents underestimate him, and then, when they grew puffed-up and overconfident, he led them neatly into traps of his own devising. "Any man who took Lincoln for a simple-minded man," said one of his legal associates, "would very soon wake up with his back in a ditch." People, however, kept on doing this; and Lincoln, even as president, kept on knocking them onto their backs in ditches.
