Word: charisma
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Ever since the televised Kennedy-Nixon debates gave voters a sense of personal access to the candidates, charisma and charm have tended to overshadow all but the most transcendent election issues. But in an era of peace and at least a veneer of prosperity, the 1988 campaign has so far been dominated by slogans and sound bites masquerading as substance. Small wonder that, after two terms of aw-shucks Reaganism, the electorate seems to be measuring Bush and Dukakis by the same standards they assess Bill Cosby -- comfort and likability...
...ditty dedicated to John Francis "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, the grandfather of John F. Kennedy and the first in the family to have "the gift" for politics almost a century ago. Honey Fitz was a talker, a charmer, a politician who made it largely on the strength of his charisma. As the first mayor of Boston whose parents were born in Ireland, and the first Roman Catholic in the U.S. House of Representatives, Fitzgerald was noted for having developed "the Irish switch"--the art of shaking hands with one person while talking to another...
...South Boston. Bulger is both the wit and intellect of Boston politics--quick to lampoon fellow politicians, and always ready with a quote from Virgil. While on the road campaigning for Dukakis this summer, Bulger regaled the press corps with jokes about the candidate: "He may not have charisma," Bulger explains, "but he does have anesthesia...
...captain Phillips thus drew the honor of accepting the medal from his wife, who is president of the International Equestrian Federation. The team gold in the event went to West Germany, and the individual gold was won by New Zealand's Mark Todd, who, along with his trusty steed Charisma, repeated an L.A. gold- medal performance. "Charisma just rose to the occasion," said the former dairy farmer, who announced that the horse will soon enter a pampered retirement...
...late-blooming flower of incipient dotage. As a fledgling professor during the 1960s, Giamatti bore the plumage of the counterculture. His clothes were rumpled, his hair longish; he sported a goatee and an unassuming, downscale, fist-around-a- can-of-beer manner. Students were attracted by this charisma. They enrolled in his courses and came out of them equally entranced by their teacher, but for radically different reasons. Bart expected them actually to read their assignments. He believed in grades, tough grades; he argued that being a civilized human being is not a matter of instinct but of unrelenting hard...