Word: doled
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...succeed in 1996, Clinton and his consultants would have to win two campaigns: the first against the President's own unpopular and liberal image, the second against his eventual opponent, Bob Dole. Only by achieving victory in the first war would they acquire the weapons to fight the second. In the end, they assembled a big-spending war machine fueled by "soft-money" donations to the Democratic National Committee and founded on a rocklike faith in opinion polls. The surveys were used not just to gauge voter attitudes but also to shape Clinton's arguments, test and refine his television...
Clinton knew the campaign would be won or lost before the summer of 1996; Dole assumed that it began on Labor Day. While Clinton poll-tested every family-friendly policy, every nuance of strategy, Dole never had a strategy to test...
...Dole did not so much assemble a team as begin a desultory conversation with those already around him. The Dole clan was like a dysfunctional family, a cool, taciturn group whose members spoke in shorthand and didn't probe one another's ideas or motivations. There was longtime confidant Mari Maseng Will, a tall, genteel woman who had a real feel for what voters cared about. There was Bill Lacy, a buttoned-down Marylander and trusted Dole aide who would run strategy and message. There was a veteran G.O.P. fieldman named Tom Synhorst, who had managed Dole's winning...
They cared deeply about Dole but were not at all sure if Dole was serious about making the race. They believed in letting Dole be Dole. The Senator himself had been convinced just two years earlier that he was too old to run again. But with Clinton looking vulnerable, Republicans riding high and an underwhelming field of rivals, Dole thought, Well...
...Dole dithered for months over his decision. Not even Elizabeth Dole knew what her husband was thinking; she only knew that he was. When he finally decided to run, he didn't bother to tell his group of advisers; instead, he tossed off the news in an aside to the Associated Press. Coe learned that her longtime boss was running for President from the newspapers...