Word: craning
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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These men-Howard Baker, George Bush, Philip Crane, John Connally and Robert Dole-spent years of their lives in their efforts. They used up tens of millions of dollars of other people's money (plus a fair amount of their own), traveled hundreds of thousands of miles, gave tens of thousands of largely repetitive speeches, ate uncounted meals of numbing mediocrity, and largely abandoned their families and their usual pursuits. All in vain...
...Echoes Crane: "People ask me, 'What makes you think you are uniquely qualified to be President?' I say, I have never thought that.' The best qualified people, however, will never run for office in the first place. You know, how many people are willing to put themselves and families through that kind of an ordeal...
...Crane, especially, it was an ordeal. He announced before any of the rest and suffered under the personal attack of New Hampshire's sulfurous newspaper publisher William Loeb, who accused the Congressman of sexual excess and heavy drinking. Says Crane of his long campaign: "It's like the old moron joke about the kid who was hitting himself on the head with a hammer because it feels so good when you quit. I told the folks back home everyone ought to do this once in his life, ideally as early on as possible, because every day after...
After his campaign ended, Crane went on a vacation with his wife. Says he: "I had totally relaxed and decompressed, with one exception, and that was when I saw these fellows still out campaigning. You know, I would suddenly get a knot in my stomach. I would say, 'Good grief, surely I have got to be packing because we're going to be off and running at 6 a.m.' Suddenly I realized how dreadful it had been. I mean, I hadn't relaxed in two years. The times I thought I was relaxing, I wasn...
...Crane too was frustrated by the cycle of inattention. He blames the "liberal inclination" of the press, and he proposes that candidates who appear on television interview shows be forced to assign "a dollar value" to those appearances, which would count against total spending limits...