Word: awful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...impression that he is about as smart as a fence post. Around the office, his style is faded jeans, cowboy boots and turquoise jewelry. "Our personality is to be very loose. We aren't stuffed- shirt people," he says. His colleagues know him better. "Don't fall for that 'Aw shucks' stuff," says John Sidgmore, WorldCom's cerebral vice chairman and the architect of its strategy for dominating access to the Internet. "Bernie's extremely street smart. Most of all, he has a vision for the company. He's extremely aggressive and simply wants to build the biggest company...
...will take Sidgmore's word on that. Ebbers is as low frequency as any telecom executive can be. He favors faded blue jeans and golf shirts and on-the-road Willie Nelson tunes. While his 1.8% stake in WorldCom is worth more than $560 million, he likes to aw-shucks his own role in his company. "The thing that has helped me personally," he says, "is that I don't understand a lot of what goes on in this industry." So he relies on executives who come along with acquired companies...
Similarly, to praise Stewart as the embodiment of the aw-shucks American hero is really to patronize him. His true achievement is to have reflected the changing, aging, increasingly troubled face of America, from its early days as the new big likable kid on the block of world power to the questioning twilight between World War II and Vietnam...
...charm is of no avail. He is put-upon and victimized. In The Man from Laramie, his brother is killed, his wagon burned, his mules slaughtered. He is lassoed and dragged through a campfire. His right hand is held down while a sadist shoots a bullet through it. His aw-shucks tentativeness turns to high-pitched sputterings. His thin frame is shaken with the outsize energies of hysteria...
Negative ads, yes. Negative attacks, only with caution. Personal attacks work when delivered with an aw-shucks attitude or praeteritio, as Dole practiced it in the first debate: "I've never discussed Whitewater, as I've told you personally. I'm not discussing Whitewater now." And then he went on to press Clinton on the Whitewater pardons. Dole delivered his broadsides with a hatchet and a scowl; the other guy with a stiletto and a smile...