Word: doled
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...political. And though many news reports have called this the first peacetime release of oil from the strategic reserve, it is not. The Clinton Administration has played election-year politics with the SPR before. In the spring of 1996, as Clinton was running for re-election against Bob Dole, gasoline prices shot up 20% in some states. Dole proposed repealing Clinton's 1993 gas-tax increase, and three days later the President responded. He seized on an obscure part of a bipartisan deficit-reduction bill and spun it as a relief measure for motorists. On a campaign trip to Florida...
Sound familiar? Maybe SPR stands for Strategic Political Reserve. Clinton used it to inoculate himself against Dole. And Gore has used it to inoculate himself against Bush, who for months has been hammering Clinton-Gore for having no coherent energy policy. But unlike the one in 1996, this year's release was not something that fell into the Democrats' lap. It was debated for months--and initially Gore and Clinton were opposed...
Indeed, the 1960s were an exceptional period in American life, and it is foolish and even delusional to imagine that one could recreate the voter interest generated by a Kennedy-Nixon race at the height of the Cold War in the prosperous and meretricious 1990s, with the lackluster Bob Dole facing off against the charmingly venal Bill Clinton...
...answer is by no means clear. From a purely instrumental standpoint, there is little evidence (at least in national elections) that boosting voter-turnout fundamentally alters the complexion of an election. Had the recent presidential campaigns been re-run with everyone voting, Clinton still would have defeated Dole and Bush the elder, Bush still would have trounced Dukakis, and so on, as far back as such statistics are kept...
...comparison, George W. Bush was nearly mute on what might have seemed an ideal issue for a Republican, commenting vaguely about the responsibilities of parents and movie theaters. It may be that his campaign decided that bashing Hollywood didn't work for Bob Dole in 1996. Or it could be that the entire subject is not particularly comfortable for a candidate who sat for 10 years on the board of Silver Screen Management Services Inc., a New York-based firm that financed more than two-dozen R-rated movies. The Hitcher, one of its films for Home Box Office (which...