Word: backroom
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...Wahid may have proved a deft manipulator of the complex backroom machinations that pervade Indonesian politics, but in the end he was simply a compromise figure sufficiently acceptable to the nation's political, business and military elites to preside over a temporary equilibrium. Now that the students are back on the streets, the currency and stock market are in the doldrums, the provinces are restive, the military is fidgety and the political sharks have smelled blood, the Wahid equilibrium may have been shattered...
...That's the name for the backroom boys (and gals) who, by well-aimed research, managed to change Al Gore's image from that of wooden Boy Scout into untrustworthy liar - and may have cost him the election...
...That's where Daley, master arm-twister, consummate backroom pol, comes in. Daley's job will be to keep the operation lean and on schedule, and keep Gore's political radar finely tuned at all times. But he does carry one piece of baggage: His ardent and very effective muscling of the China trade bill through the House last month. Gore did some serious tiptoeing to deflect most of the unions' ire onto Clinton, who could afford it; now Gore's got the China bill's - and NAFTA's - main champion as his right-hand...
THIRD Outsourcing. M.I.T.'s No. 1 computer guru, Michael Dertouzos, said India could easily boost its GDP by a trillion dollars in the next few years performing backroom white-collar tasks for Western companies. He guessed that 50 million jobs from the white-collar West could go south to India, whose population hit 1 billion last week. The average annual salary for each of those 50 million new Indian workers...
That task fell to Coelho, the wiry, intense former Congressman and backroom operator who had joined Gore's team in June. Coelho had been working to wrest Gore free from the office he inhabited. That was harder than it may sound. The Vice President's staff had such a tight grip on the candidate that top campaign officials sometimes couldn't get Gore's schedule. Coelho banished nearly all the White House aides from Air Force Two and froze out Gore's small army of ad hoc advisers--a dozen former aides who currently work as lobbyists, and showed...