Word: bennette
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...Forstmann, a wealthy New York investor who had helped fund Empower America, the conservative Washington think tank that Bennett co-directs, got a taste of Bennett's attitude when Forstmann tried to recruit another Master of the Universe, Julian Robertson, to support the think tank. Forstmann invited Robertson to meet Bennett, Jack Kemp and others from Empower America at his home in Manhattan. Things started out cordially, but before long, a dispute broke out over abortion, with Robertson challenging Bennett's call for more restrictions on the practice. Bennett showed no deference to a potential benefactor. At one point...
...Bennett often approvingly quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes' line that "the place for a man who is complete in all his parts is in the fight." But there are doubts, even in Bennett's mind, about whether he is sufficiently complete to fight for the presidency. He knows little and cares less about economics and foreign policy, for example, and there was nothing on either subject in his book bag for the long summer holiday at his beach house...
Some take that as evidence that Bennett, now a millionaire, has grown complacent. "The kind of sudden fame and fortune Bill has earned, even though he has earned it, is not good for one's character," says David Tell, a writer for the Weekly Standard who has worked for Bennett and admires him. "Bill has a great capacity for work, but I don't think he's working very hard right now, in his reading or writing...
...honing his people skills. It's not just toadying to rich strangers that Bennett finds distasteful; he has little patience for any strangers. Even after his speeches, when he's surrounded by fans who just want a handshake, a few words, a signature in a book, he wears an alarmed and hunted look. He's polite, yet he can't wait to get away, back to his car and driver; to his cell phone and messages and the news clippings he's always reading...
...Bennett won't gladhand, neither does he pander. He frequently challenges his middle- and upper-class audiences, pointing out that men in the ghetto aren't the only ones walking out on their families these days. In a speech to the Christian Coalition, Bennett urged its members to avoid a "fixation on homosexuality" and instead turn their attention "closer to home," to the epidemic of divorce that poses a worse threat "in terms of damage to the children of America...