Word: appealing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That audacious act neatly summarizes the burlesque appeal of one of the most astute political grandstanders Russia has ever seen. The extended striptease by which Zhirinovsky both reveals and conceals his lust for power is at once vulgar and, at least by Russian standards, wildly entertaining. It is also a routine that has enabled him, in just three years, to become one of the most formidable -- many would say farcical -- forces in Russian politics. He has done so largely by trawling the darker emotional currents of humiliation, impotence and abandonment coursing through Russia's muddy provincial towns and overcrowded apartment...
Part of the secret of Zhirinovsky's appeal is his ability to combine populist rhetoric with a crude yearning for ease and glory. Proclaiming slogans like "I'm just the same as you," he careens through Moscow in a motorcade of limousines, accompanied by a cadre of thuggish bodyguards that has included at least one member of the infamous Black Berets, the regiment of ^ Soviet commandos that once terrorized the Baltic states. Even now, notes Oberlin College's Frederick Starr, he adopts "the full trappings of a tin- horn dictator...
...take it only after he was satisfied that Clinton was personally committed to building a strong, forward-looking national-security policy with bipartisan support. Though impressed by Clinton, Inman still hesitated until his old friend "Chris," as Inman calls Secretary of State Warren Christopher, stepped in with an appeal. When the deal was finally cut, the President was particularly pleased that word of Aspin's departure had not leaked. On Wednesday he remarked gleefully to an aide, "It is absolutely astonishing that this thing has held...
...Zhirinovsky's appeal was read much like the maverick presidential challenge mounted by Ross Perot in 1992. Zhirinovsky, too, campaigned skillfully as an outsider. He slung verbal Molotov cocktails at a system tainted by gridlock and inefficiency. And he aimed right at Russians' pocketbooks, denouncing the economic reforms that have hiked the price of metro tickets from five kopeks to 30 rubles, pushed middle-income households toward the poverty level and withheld wages from such key constituencies as the coal miners. But like the U.S. billionaire, Zhirinovsky had far more to offer in the way of firebrand bombast than coherent...
...Blind Melon concert garnered much broader support within the council, passing almost unanimously. Gabay attributed the turnaround to the more mainstream appeal of Blind Melon, as well as the changed date...