Word: bushed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Dole has gone hunting for reinforcements lately, but his aides have mishandled some of the approaches. Former Bush operative Mary Matalin, the wife of Democratic consultant James Carville, had no sooner quit her job on CNBC and joined the Dole campaign than internal feuding over her role spilled into the open. And so after several days of needless distraction, Reed asked her to step down. Last week a longtime G.O.P. operative put out a feeler to author Peggy Noonan, who wrote Bush's climactic convention speech, to see if she would assist on some convention-related "planning." But the move...
Oddly enough, amid all the confusion, a general consensus about strategy is starting to emerge. The preferred model for action at the moment is actually eight years old: in 1988 George Bush trailed Michael Dukakis by 16 points three months before the G.O.P. convention. So Bush and his advisers spent those months defining the candidate in a series of speeches. Dole has followed the Bush playbook through the primaries this year, and most of his advisers favor sticking with it through the summer, culminating in a defining address at the Republican convention. Another run at Noonan is inevitable...
Last week, when Dole sat down with Bush to discuss China and other matters, he could take comfort from the ex-President's experience. But not too much. Bush won the White House after facing one of the most hapless campaigners in memory. Dole is facing one of the best...
...much for the broken part. The fixing proved contentious. Most of the Governors were at pains to distinguish this summit from the gathering of state leaders assembled by President George Bush in 1989. That conclave, in which Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton played an influential role, wound up endorsing the formulation of federally developed national standards by which student competence would be judged. This decision not only ran counter to the nation's long tradition of local control (thanks to local funding) of public schools; it also proved embarrassingly hard to implement. A blue-ribbon panel dithered over a national history...
That helpless feeling has come back with a strange familiarity as I've watched Bob Dole tear through the Republican primaries. Dole, as I recall, was the guy to the right of Bush, the conservative we Democrats feared even more than Reagan's heir-apparent in '88. Dole might well be elected president, and there's not exactly anything I can personally do to combat that fact...