Word: backgrounder
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...thing that will be very familiar to the new First Family is city life. Unlike every other President stretching all the way back to Theodore Roosevelt, Obama has spent his entire life living in urban areas. Some of his supporters believe this background makes him more culturally sophisticated than many of his predecessors (they're relieved he won't call the city "Warshington"), while others say it allows him to better understand multicultural, 21st century America. But the fact that Obama has spent weekends walking down the street to the barbershop instead of riding a 4x4 across a ranch...
There is little doubt that Obama's city background has shaped his policy priorities. Of all the candidates in the 2008 primaries, says Glaeser, "Obama was clearly focused on issues of the city, like the Harlem Children's Zone," a nonprofit antipoverty effort that Obama hopes to replicate in 20 cities across the country. When Obama got involved with civil liberties issues as a state legislator, it was to spearhead a law requiring the videotaping of all confessions and interrogations in capital cases, which disproportionately involve urban defendants in Illinois...
...Religion and politics will never go together," says Emad al-Azzawi, a mobile-phone vendor in Hurriya district who says he too would vote for al-Maliki's Dawa Islamic Party, despite its predominant Shi'ite background. Indeed, al-Maliki has also found friends in a host of new tribe-based parties that have grown out of Anbar's largely Sunni Awakening movement. (See pictures of a summit of Anbar's sheiks...
...Whether it's Mr. Panetta or someone else, it's critical that the agency move in a new direction.' Representative PETER HOEKSTRA, ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, saying Panetta's civilian background would bring a much needed "change in culture...
...deal with it. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said he doesn't intend to topple Hamas; he knows Israel can't fill the vacuum of leadership that its elimination would produce in Gaza. Neither can Mahmoud Abbas, Israel's preferred Palestinian leader, who is fading into the background in the West Bank. So Israel has said it will be satisfied if Hamas stops shooting rockets and an international force polices the Egyptian border to keep the militants from re-arming themselves with weapons smuggled through tunnels...