Word: doled
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...September, Sipple quit the Dole campaign after Reed told him he was bringing in another media consultant. Reed replaced him with a soft-voiced Cuban-born adman named Alex Castellanos, who immediately put up a spot attacking Clinton on the drug issue. A federal agency had just announced that teenage marijuana use had almost doubled in three years, and Castellanos' spot combined that bit of news with a 1992 mtv clip showing a grinning, callow-looking Clinton confessing that he'd inhale if he had it to do all over again. It was Dole's best spot of the year...
...Look, I'm worried about this drug attack," he said. "How do we respond?" Dole hadn't put much money behind the ad, but the consultants decided to hit back hard. They came up with a spot highlighting Clinton's drug and crime policies, including the death penalty for drug kingpins, and hitting Dole for voting against creation of the drug czar's office...
Just as he was finding his target, Dole abandoned the drug message and switched to the charge that Clinton was a "spend-and-tax liberal." The Clintonites were relieved. "With the drug spots," says Penn, "Dole was getting some traction by painting Clinton as a social liberal. The notion that he was an economic liberal was less effective because the economy is sound...
...consultants didn't like Dole showing signs of life. It was time to kill him off. The message team unveiled its tactical nuclear weapon, an ad they called "Wrong in the Past." Using black-and-white images of Dole through the ages, the ad traced his 30-year history of votes on the "wrong" side of issues such as Medicare and education. The ad homed in on voters' perception of Dole; one poll showed that it made 66% of Americans less likely to vote for him. But the spot had no effect on the horse race. Nothing did. With...
...political afterthought. The Republican midterm landslide a few months before had depressed the President, and for good reason. White House polling showed that voters gave him especially low marks for "effectiveness" and "decisiveness"--two hallmarks of presidential leadership. Clinton's approval rating was in the 40s; he trailed Dole in the presidential horse race by 15 percentage points. Voters associated Clinton with three principal issues: gays in the military, the 1993 tax increase and the health-care debacle. In focus groups, says one of the President's consultants, "people didn't want to see his face or hear his voice...