Word: backrooms
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...decidedly unusual man. At one level, the Prime Minister's appeal is easy to fathom. "He wants to destroy the things people hate the most," says Heizo Takenaka, an economics professor who last spring joined the Cabinet. At the top of that list: the crusty political barons and their backroom deals, the endless paving of highways that go nowhere, schools that stress conformity over creativity. Yet in any time but the present, Koizumi would never have been trusted. He has a reputation as a lone wolf, a bit of an eccentric. In the past, that would have doomed...
...clean-cut as Fukuda was, he was unable to connect with the masses and thus lacked the power base from which to do battle with the Old Guard. Koizumi carefully cultivated the image of the Outsider. He avoided the restaurants where politicians lived it up and cut their backroom deals. "Faction bosses would go out with their underlings, drinking and singing," says Takao Toshikawa, a political analyst in Tokyo. "But they would all look around the restaurant, and someone would say, 'Where's Koizumi?' He never went along. They all thought him strange...
...wasn't so very long ago that the name Donald Rumsfeld sent shivers down the spines of Washington's most battle-hardened bureaucratic warriors. In the 1970s, when Rumsfeld was chief of staff and later Secretary of Defense under President Gerald R. Ford, he was a fearless backroom operator. Henry Kissinger once admitted that Rumsfeld was the only person ever to get the best of him in a political fight. Rumsfeld's inside moves during the Ford years were so clever and complex that he developed a cult following among conservatives. He was the man who would stop at almost...
...Sukarno name, and the potent mystique it acquired in the Suharto years, and an abiding sense of entitlement that supporters see as explaining her reluctance to engage in politicking. But many observers suspect that she just may not be up to the cut and thrust of the backroom power-brokering that continues to define politics in Jakarta...
...Still, Megawati's presidency is a product of that very backroom intrigue she shuns. Her family may have been ousted from power by Suharto, but it remained part of Jakarta's fractious political and economic elite. The very same coalition of forces that united to keep her out of the top job after the 1999 election have now united to elevate her. Little is known of her political thinking beyond a broad echo of her father's nationalism. It's a nationalism strongly supported by the military, a nationalism that doesn't easily tolerate federalism or secession, which suggests...