Word: dismalness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Faculty members who led the cry for reform are concerned that, after a few dismal seasons, Dallas football nuts may once again slip payoffs to players. "The bottom-line question," asks law-school acting dean Paul Rogers, "is, Can we control the boosters?" Certainly everyone wants the reforms to work. The booster-club president, Bill Hill, insists that "alumni understand the situation now. We're going to be a model of integrity." Gregg adds, "A school can't live without the alumni." Old grads are after him, wanting to lend a hand. "Support us, come to our games," he shoots...
...hills are alive, with the sound of bitching. "This most dismal of presidential campaigns," wailed Elizabeth Drew, in her most recent "Letter from Washington" in The New Yorker, ". . . has set a new low in modern campaigning." A few weeks earlier Page One of the New York Times's Week in Review gave the cartoon expression of this glum sentiment: Michael Dukakis and George Bush, pint-size brats, sticking their tongues out at each other in infantile fury. The 1988 election is, by general agreement, the dirtiest and dumbest election in recent memory, maybe ever...
Rhetoric comparing 1988 with 1960 has a wistful, if cynical, political purpose. It attempts to make a live political connection through the increasingly important American sacrament of memory. It wishes to mobilize nostalgia in order to give glamour and energy to a dismal, weightless campaign. It is politics as seance...
...result, Harvard finished the first day of competition a dismal 38th overall...
DUKAKIS hopes that the dismal rural economy--as many as one out of every three farmers is in financial distress--will put farmers in the Democratic column. Bush is playing on farmers' social conservatism and distrust of a Northeastern liberal elite, while reminding them of the high interest rates and grain embargo of the Carter years...