Word: boosterish
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With his broad shoulders, silver hair and deep, drawling voice, Thad Cochran seems a paragon of the old-fashioned Southern politician. He is not. As the first Republican since Reconstruction to win a Senate seat from Mississippi, Cochran, 46, personifies the changing face of the Deep South. A boosterish supporter of Reaganomics, Cochran is less conservative on civil rights and funding for public education. His easygoing geniality, moreover, has an appeal that extends far beyond his white, urban, upwardly mobile core constituency. Even Democratic Challenger William Winter concedes, "There is no way I would win a popularity contest with Thad...
Change, when it was constant and fairly manageable, used to be called progress. At the deepest point in the Depression, Chicago held a 1933 World's Fair gamely celebrating "The Century of Progress." The slogan was forgivably boosterish then, but now change is regarded far more neutrally. The word describes not merely the advances but all the tumults, the violence, the wrenching readjustments of our era. Even necessary change has its costs, for as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it, "It is the first step in wisdom to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which...