Word: charme
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Election Day began badly for Donna Brazile, Gore's chief turnout strategist. Her suitcase had vanished. It contained her life she said, including her Bible and, most irreplaceable, her "grounding stones," which her grandmother had given her and which are sort of her good-luck charm. She was in no mood to be out of luck at that particular moment. The first alarms went off at Gore headquarters at 6 a.m.: workers there started hearing that voters in heavily Democratic Palm Beach County were confused by the ballots. "The ballots do not line up in the machine with the correct...
...shared books and jokes with him, and then, as Gore sees it, betrayed him not once with a shocking infidelity, but twice: By turning just enough voters against the administration with his various extracurricular activities, the President helped crush Gore's chances at victory Tuesday night. Clinton's inexorable charm got him elected, got him in trouble, and finally, set Gore up for a defeat. It was Bush, after all, who charmed voters, not Gore. It was Bush who managed to captivate with his easy laugh and his loose-limbed grace. Gore was stuck with the old caricature: A stiff...
None of this, of course, gives any indication of who to vote for in today's election, or whether the specific flaws of any candidate disqualify him from our highest office. But Americans should know as they go to the polls that character means something more than just charm or choirboy innocence. It is, rather, one of those qualities on which depend our hopes for change and leadership over the next four years...
Maybe a shy man needs to be a populist and promise to fight for little guys. Al Gore wasn't going to be their friend, he wasn't likely to charm them; but he could be their bodyguard and protect them from polluters, swindlers, profiteers. Gore had a crisis with politics after Vietnam. He drifted through divinity school and into journalism, but as his biographer Bill Turque notes, his longtime friends saw this as just stretching the rubber band before it yanked him back to the family business. Why else practice the tricks that help you remember people's names...
...Bush's goal in mastering a new issue is to learn the lay of the land; Gore isn't convinced he knows the terrain until he runs his fingers through the soil. Bush's experience tells him there are few adversaries he cannot bring around with his irresistible charm; Gore's experience tells him there are few he cannot conquer with an irrefutable argument...