Word: adroit
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Gorbachev's timing was adroit. He has proved to be a virtuoso at playing on Reagan's romantic notions about peace and disarmament. Faced with an incoming President far more cautious than Reagan, Gorbachev finagled a meeting at which his own vision of the future would go unchallenged. Bush could not properly respond until he takes office next month, and Reagan seemed barely relevant as he bubbled his favorite Russian phrase, "Trust but verify," at a press conference following Gorbachev's departure...
Mitchell, one of the Capitol's most adroit phrasemakers, may prove more than a match for Bush in articulating his party's agenda. The next President will find the new majority leader less interested than his predecessor, West Virginia's Robert Byrd, in parliamentary procedures, more skillful in forming coalitions, and equally unwilling to let Congress play a fall-guy role if the President tries to extricate himself from his "read my lips" campaign promises not to raise taxes. Says his friend and mentor Edmund Muskie: "George is a liberal but one who can win the support of many people...
Estrich was, and is, an incisive thinker and an intense manager with a keen grasp of policy issues. But she and her lieutenants were simply not adroit in matching the strategic maneuvering through which the Bush campaign dominated the sound-bite agenda. In politics, as in war, whichever side chooses the battlefield is likely to win. Baker and his cadre were designating the battlefield every day. In addition, none of the top Dukakis command, with the occasional exception of Brountas, could tell the candidate things he did not want to hear or make him do what he did not want...
...Murphy has learned how to tell a story from Woodward and Bernstein, he has unfortunately allowed his historical imagination to take its cue from investigative reporters as well. Murphy believes that Fortas' story is murder-suicide because the justice and top adviser to Johnson, who proved so adroit in managing the crises that others confronted, suffered from personal paralysis when in similar situations. After all had not Justice William O. Douglas himself had an arrangement with the Parvin Foundation while on the Court that was remarkably similar to Fortas' own connection to the Wolfson Foundation...
...first three days of the Democratic Convention had been devoted to the quest for party harmony and the celebration of its attainment. Dukakis had been the adroit negotiator who had framed an unprecedented covenant of cooperation with Jesse Jackson. From his suite atop the Hyatt Regency, the Governor had proved in a way that was far more tangible than his stale talk about a Massachusetts miracle that he could handle tough problems and people. His prize was a choreographed convention, free of the furies that once plagued the party's psyche, but so denatured of passion that it could have...