Word: doles
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this presidential campaign has been less about policy than about progress. Dole sees change as an ordeal, a test of his toughness; Clinton sees it as an opportunity, a test of his flexibility. Clinton has learned to welcome uncertainty for the gifts it might bring; Dole has learned to put it through a metal detector. And so with a week to go and a 20-point spread in the polls, it may not be much of a race anymore; but it certainly is a choice...
...Dole doesn't like change much, in himself or the world around him. In his experience, change was often something to fend off; it was born of forces of nature--the weather changed in the 1930s, turned Kansas into powder--or forces of history, the war that injured him. He thinks of the U.S. as a constant, a fixed polar star of unchanged and unchanging values, like duty, honor, country, God. And he is proud of being much the same way. The places he knows best and loves most are not in flux; certainly not Russell, Kansas, not Bal Harbour...
...over yet--civil rights, sexual freedom and now the one under way, driven by silicon and imagination. And so the beautiful thing about Clinton and the horrible thing about him too is that he moves with these changes almost daily, modulating his positions to fit the changing moods. If Dole, in his style and syntax, often seems strangely off-key, Clinton is a tuning fork, banging himself again and again against the edge of the table to see if he can get even closer to perfect pitch...
Their particular qualities have helped and hurt them along the way. But if Clinton ends Dole's political life next week, the President's victory will reflect how well he managed to turn his own inconstancy into a virtue and how Dole has converted his steadfastness into a liability...
...taking them away. Clinton's theme was pure empowerment. The models are the G.I. Bill, the Homestead Act, land-grant colleges and the mortgage insurance of the 1930s. The risk was that even if these themes were not entirely new to Clinton, they were embedded like tissue in Bob Dole. Kansas was a homesteader's paradise; he remade himself with the G.I. Bill. He was the living embodiment of a government that helped those who needed it to succeed...