Word: du
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...political climate in which most candidates are searching their souls for a persona that voters can trust, du Pont stands apart. He considers the obsession with "character" and the media's ceaseless quest for revealing personal anecdotes slightly silly. To his closest aides, du Pont's unapologetic approach is not mysterious. "He doesn't need this," says his longtime aide Glenn Kenton, campaign chairman. "He knows he could do a good job as President, but he can live without...
...Pete du Pont hopes to distinguish himself as an iconoclast, a free-market conservative boldly willing to question sacrosanct social programs that his better-known rivals fear to address. He wants his ideas to speak for themselves, and loudly enough to drown out the murmurs about his patrimony. He has selected five issues that he believes can excite the electorate. It took the methodical du Pont two years to research and hone his message, and he has now compressed it neatly onto a single 3-in. by 5-in. card that he keeps in his breast pocket. Dispensing with...
Planning to follow family tradition, du Pont majored in engineering at Princeton and there met his future wife Elise, a finely chiseled Bryn Mawr student and Philadelphia heiress with bloodlines as imposing as his own. Du Pont retains fond memories of the cutthroat competition of Harvard Law School but only dim memories of what he calls his "very conventional" life before then. While at Princeton, he had a blind date with Vassar Student Jane Fonda but cannot remember what they...
...worst political crises occurred in 1977, his first year as Governor. Determined to cut state spending, he vetoed the legislature's budget. Those were impassioned, partisan days; the morning of the vote, one Democrat opened the session by praying, "May the nays be forgiven." When du Pont lost, his aides were distraught and defiant. Not the Governor. "He was very, very quiet," recalls Nathan Hayward III, a second cousin who was then head of Delaware's economic development office. Du Pont shifted to a more conciliatory approach that eventually won over the legislature and even labor...
...time he left office, Delaware's unemployment rate had dropped to 7% from a high of 13%, the top income tax rate had fallen from nearly 20% to 9%, and new businesses flooded the state. The experience converted du Pont to the supplyside philosophy of lower taxes and a strong free-market approach to the economy...