Word: commandant
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Dukakis, the Wake Forest wordfest may have been the moment he badly needed. Given his limited emotional range and his earnest, smartest-boy-in- the-class presentation, his command of the debate was his strongest performance since the Atlanta Convention. If the exchange, watched by 100 million viewers, does not help him rebound in the polls, his political outlook is cloudy, since he is unlikely to surpass this performance again. For Bush, with a well-orchestrated campaign and far less to lose, it may be enough that he survived without permanent damage. If the Vice President made no new converts...
...simply not adroit in matching the strategic maneuvering through which the Bush campaign dominated the sound-bite agenda. In politics, as in war, whichever side chooses the battlefield is likely to win. Baker and his cadre were designating the battlefield every day. In addition, none of the top Dukakis command, with the occasional exception of Brountas, could tell the candidate things he did not want to hear or make him do what he did not want to do. By early September, even Dukakis realized this was a liability...
...staff as the effort expanded, Sasso just worked around them, relying on new, more seasoned hands that he recruited. As a result, there are in effect two campaign hierarchies: the paper structure and the de facto one reporting to Sasso. Even though Baker might blanch at such chain-of-command chaos, a tendency to paper over personnel problems is typical of presidential campaigns but can be near fatal in a President...
...Dean Tosteson, you have extremely enlightened leadership," Graham said. "Corruption of a program is certainly something you don't have to be concerned about with him in command...
...Appearance of Coherence. With no response longer than a network commercial break (two minutes), it will be easy for the candidates to appear in command merely by adopting confident tones in the first and last sentences of their answers. Listen instead to the middle sentences of each answer. It will be particularly telling if Dukakis consistently stumbles in articulating nuclear strategy or if Bush fails to explain what he has been doing for a living these past eight years. Deduct 3 points for every answer that sounds like a Marx Brothers routine...