Word: explainer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...high and low points of Dole's campaign to date are nearly impossible to explain without some archaeology into the soil he sprang from and the paths he traveled to get here. We all have the defects of our qualities. In Dole's case, the very traits that help account for his successes--the cutting wit, the stubborn independence, the refusal to ask for help even when stakes are highest--also produced the more horrible moments of this campaign, when he seemed to be running for some other office in some other century on some other planet. Ultimately, says...
...Dole's tax-cut proposal, and campaign advisers are happy to give a political answer. For instance, Why did Dole make a 15% slash in individual income-tax rates the centerpiece of his economic program rather than feature a more complex, rival alternative? Because it's easier to explain to voters, says Michigan Republican Senator Spencer Abraham, who helped sell Dole on the idea. Whatever the economic merits of the other plan, "people would have to think about their adjusted gross income and payroll tax. The concept doesn't translate to everyone...
Sound implausible? Consider the alternatives. Sir Fred Hoyle, the distinguished British astronomer, favors an even more radical theory. The idea, known as panspermia, is that billions of years ago, the solar system was peppered by biological "seeds," which took root wherever conditions were right. That would explain how life may have arisen at roughly the same time on Earth and on Mars. But it also raises awkward questions about where those seeds came from and what, or who, sent them flying through space...
That helps explain the appearance of not one but two books that dip into the seemingly bottomless well of Kennedy effluvia. Despite enough volumes about the clan to line a presidential library, no biographer until now had chosen to focus so explicitly on the relationship between the fun-loving, womanizing John Kennedy and the more aloof Jackie--perhaps no one dared do so until Jackie was safely in her grave. But though both Christopher Andersen's Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage (Morrow; $24) and Edward Klein's All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie...
Watching cartoons with his two children one Saturday morning last year, Thomas James Leyden Jr. was startled when his elder son, then 3, abruptly turned off the television. "Mom says we can't watch shows with niggers on them," the boy explained. The ugly word--and the sentiment behind it--did not exactly spring unsolicited from the preschooler's head; his dad sports enough neo-Nazi tattoos and credentials to explain the boy's action. But hearing his son talk that way, says Leyden, 30, "hit me like a ton of bricks. I knew I was taking him down...