Word: darman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Later is now. And as the budget debacle in Washington demonstrated, Darman still has found no way to repair the fiscal fiasco that he, as much as anyone else, helped create. Last week, after more than five months of closed-door negotiations, he watched as timorous rank-and-file House members defeated a painfully crafted deficit-cutting deal worth $500 billion over five years. For once, Darman's goals had been economically laudatory, even politically reasonable. He had wanted to solve the deficit problem by shifting the government onto a healthier diet of lower borrowing. He had envisioned...
...clever by half. For the nearly 20 years that Darman has been shaping policy in Washington, that has been his reputation. A manipulator who could not be trusted. A hypocrite who, even as he preached against the shortsighted "now-nowism" that has afflicted American society, used ludicrously optimistic economic forecasts to delay the day of reckoning with the looming budgetary disaster. Former Senator Howard Baker even coined a word to describe his elliptical gambits: Darmanesque...
...policy at Reagan's Santa Barbara, Calif., ranch, Bush refused to rule out new taxes to cope with a growing budget deficit. Headlines appeared the next day, angering Reagan aides. A few days later, news stories, quoting a senior official, blasted Bush for the misstep. Bush's aides fingered Darman as the source. Bush crossed him off his A list...
Rehabilitation took five years. High as leaking was on Bush's list of unacceptable behaviors, "handling" was even higher. Bush thinks of himself as resistant to manipulation of any kind, and Darman had been perceived as one of Reagan's dexterous puppeteers. But heavy lobbying by James Baker, who with Darman formed an inseparable duo in the early Reagan years, eventually persuaded Bush to appoint Darman Budget Director. "When we went to see Bush about the OMB job," said Craig Fuller, Bush's transition co-director, "we only took one name...
...times the Sununu-Darman duet sounded discordant, but it was almost always planned. Their relationship had become the most powerful axis in the White House. Each gave the other what he lacked: Sununu provided Darman with access to Bush; Darman provided Sununu, a Washington neophyte, with a knowledge of the workings of Congress, government and Washington. The two men meet each morning at 7:15 and speak by telephone 20, sometimes 30, times a day. Both possess quick, assertive minds; both have a weakness for pranks and practical jokes. And both men are fighters. But where Sununu wrestles, Darman boxes...