Word: airs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Even his admirers can find inconsistencies between the moral imperatives he embraces in places like Kosovo and the means he is willing to employ to reach them. Gore was a leading advocate of the air war but one of the loudest voices against ground troops. Says an ardent if puzzled supporter, New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz: "He puts himself into [Clinton's] policy even though I suspect his policy would have been rather different. He would have been earlier and stronger...
While Gore's aims can seem mushy, his methods are not. In a White House whose first reflex is to try to talk every problem into submission, Gore's instinct is to send in the Marines--or, lately, the Air Force. In Haiti the Vice President took on the skittish tacticians who fretted over the risks of invasion and the futility of trying to salvage a country that even in its better days was a social and environmental disaster. Citing the very real danger of waves of refugees hitting the Florida coast, Gore contended that "what was at stake...
That was not the only time Gore's pitch for force carried the day. In mid-1995, as a frustrated Clinton agonized over air strikes in Bosnia, Gore described photos of a Srebrenica woman who had hanged herself in despair and how they had haunted Gore's 21-year-old daughter. What Karenna Gore couldn't understand, the Vice President said, was why the U.S. was not doing more. At that moment the decision crystallized to make the U.S. bombing threat a real one. "We've got to try something," the President concluded. Giving war a chance helped push...
That's harder than it sounds. After all, when Seinfeld went off the air, NBC couldn't run a test pattern, and by the way, now that Michael Jordan has retired, how are the Chicago Bulls doing? Summers, currently the Deputy Secretary, is following a similarly tough act. Robert Rubin, perhaps the most popular Treasury Secretary in the postwar era, redefined that Cabinet post from discreet adviser and signatory of our currency to a sort of global emissary and projection of American geopolitical clout as it is expressed now--not in warheads or throw weights but in loan guarantees...
When Boris Yeltsin was baptized, a tipsy priest dropped the baby in the font and left him there, struggling for air, until his terrified parents persuaded the priest to fish him out. The priest was not fazed, Yeltsin recalled in his autobiography. "The boy's a fighter [borets in Russian]," he said. "We'll call him Boris." Yeltsin is still a fighter, and still has luck on his side, as the collapse of an attempt to impeach him last weekend shows. He also has cunning, and a formidable state patronage system that works for him, as well as a constitution...