Word: bushing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...miasma of public relations stunts. The President's recent "education summit" with the nation's Governors produced some interesting ideas about national standards but little about how to pay the costs of helping public schools meet them. His much trumpeted war against drugs was more an underfinanced skirmish. Bush told voters last year that he is an environmentalist, but the most significant clean-air proposals put forth this year -- stringent new standards on automobile emissions -- were adapted from California's strict limits for the 1990s...
...Abroad, Bush tends to turn Teddy Roosevelt's famous dictum on its head by speaking loudly and carrying a small stick. He did offer important new proposals on conventional-force reductions in Europe. Otherwise, he has allowed the Kremlin to trump him with a variety of strategic-arms offers, while he nonchalantly dusted off Dwight Eisenhower's "Open Skies" plan (to allow each superpower overflight inspections of the other's territory) and suggested a reduction in chemical weapons that Congress had long since ordered him to make. His offer of economic assistance to Poland and Hungary, as they attempt...
...Those who gain from such Government generosity vote -- and contribute money -- in disproportionately high numbers and are the heart of the Republican electoral coalition. As long as the middle class has remained relatively unaffected by Washington's retreat, the Republican strategy has paid off handsomely, most recently in Bush's 1988 election and his extraordinary 75% current approval rating in the polls. Making sure the Republican coalition stays intact seems to be the Administration's major priority. Secretary of State James Baker, asked to comment on Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell's criticism of Bush's tepid handling...
Jimmy Carter in 1976 and, far more stridently, Ronald Reagan in 1980 performed a valuable service by calling attention to the giant's weaknesses. But Reagan's approach, once he was elected, was fundamentally flawed. So is George Bush's. Government was not the problem. The problem was, and still is, that the country was being governed badly. The conservative complaint that only liberal elitists think Washington must actually do something is self- evidently silly. Of course, the Government must do something. That is why it exists: to act in ways that improve the lives of its citizens and their...
Sober analysts and perhaps Wall Street investors may be disturbed by Washington's status quo politics, but most Americans remain in a cautious, conservative mood. They seem even more detached than usual from combat in the nation's capital and content with George Bush's bland stewardship. A TIME/CNN poll last week demonstrated that Bush and the Republican Party have prospered dramatically in this atmosphere...