Word: beholden
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Limbaugh's listeners do not always agree with his often offensive rhetoric, but the radio pundit remains popular because he has tapped the growing public sense that something is seriously wrong with our political culture. It has become conventional wisdom that our special-interests-beholden political parties are barely distinguishable from each other...
...today it is Boris Yeltsin's weakness. The primary reason offered by U.S. officials for keeping the East Europeans out of NATO is the fear of provoking Russia's nationalists at Yeltsin's expense. Yeltsin endorsed NATO expansion last August, but Russia's military, to which he is clearly beholden, forced a retreat. It is unclear whether Moscow's generals are seriously worried about Western encirclement or want to preserve the option of reclaiming the nations Mikhail Gorbachev set free five years ago. But the effect is the same: Yeltsin now says enlarging NATO would be a hostile...
...Hosokawa taken on the rice farmers, one of the most powerful lobbies in Japan? The answer is shifting power. Unlike the long-ruling L.D.P., Hosokawa and his coalition are not beholden for their Diet seats to the ubiquitous nokyo (agricultural cooperatives). Moreover, under his reforms, the country's shrinking number of rice farmers will exercise still less influence in the future. Says Takeshi Sasaki, a political scientist at the University of Tokyo: "The old consensus was always to put domestic issues like rice first, but now political reform is breaking that consensus down. Also, when you are getting white-collar...
...most sought-after foreign lobbyists have attached themselves to the campaigns of Bush and Clinton, offering advice about politics, trade and international affairs, usually for no salary. The contribution enhances a lobbyist's value to his clients, but it creates at least the appearance that candidates are beholden to the foreign and domestic clients who pay their advisers' salaries. "When lobbyists and politicians team up," notes Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, "there is a sense that only access and influence matters, and that erodes public trust in government...
Since then, Reagan and Bush appointees to the high court have protected the rule, and a politically beholden Bush has vowed to support the far right's position on every abortion measure--even to the length of spitting on the Constitution...