Word: blunt
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Such a comprehensive settlement would almost certainly open more doors in Africa to him. It would probably blunt the sanctions drive in Europe and America. It might even be enough to launch the regional heads-of-government conference that Botha wants so much to attend. A senior British diplomat observes that the front line is holding firm now, "but it is beginning to wobble." In the meantime, Botha can count on two more summits in coming months when Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko and Mozambique's Joaquim Chissano pay the return visits they have promised. Yet the real payoff...
...Sheldon Danziger, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty, warns against anything other than closely targeted approaches to the problems of the poor: "In the 1970s I would have said we should have a guaranteed annual income. I don't say that now. We have learned that blunt instruments don't work." Making the income tax system more progressive would seem an obvious step, but economists warn that it has its limits. Says Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution: "There are estimates suggesting that if we raise tax rates on people making more than $40,000, they will actually...
...dialogue might have been taken from a sketch titled "The Case of the Frustrated Carnivore." In a blunt exchange of views with officials of a Siberian research institute in late September, Mikhail Gorbachev scoffed at statistics claiming that a typical resident of the city of Krasnoyarsk eats 156 lbs. of meat a year. Chronic shortages, Gorbachev implied, make that figure wholly unbelievable. On the other hand, he went on, anyone who travels to China reports that meat is "always in the shops, unsold...
Blocky and blunt, Sasso is neither intellectual nor especially articulate. He is a coalition builder who knows when and how to compromise. Unlike Dukakis, he reaches out to people, and people respond. He engenders loyalty and returns it. The civic-minded Dukakis sometimes gives the impression that he considers himself too good for politics. "What Sasso brought to Dukakis," says Paul Pezzella, the campaign's Florida director, "was the conviction that good government and good politics are one and the same...
Ailes' involvement has been crucial to Bush's candidacy. When Bush arrived in New Hampshire reeling from a third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, Ailes labored all night over the television ad that quashed Robert Dole's insurgent campaign. Known as the "Senator Straddle" commercial, the blunt spot asserted that Dole had waffled on tax hikes, oil-import fees and arms control...