Word: gage
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Gage is the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror, due in February. She teaches U.S. history at Yale University
...Gage: The question of temperament can come to stand in for when there just don't seem to be a lot of other ways to predict someone's behavior ... and you've seen this much more in campaigns. George W. Bush is a good example. [He appeared] to be just very flat during the campaign. It was hard to tell what he thought ideologically. And how he behaved in office, of course, was different in those terms ... I was just trying to think of examples of moments that have become kind of our iconic moments of ideal presidential temperament...
...Gage: Well, maybe the question is ... To what degree does it matter? So we think of someone like L.B.J., who everybody knows had this very ... volatile temperament. He liked to kind of intimidate his staffers, bring them close, and you had this whole approach. And the question is, So to what degree did that matter? To what degree did that change political outcomes...
...Gage: We're getting a little mixed up with character and temperament. They're really hard to distinguish, but I think there is a way in which what Clinton seemed to lack was ... a personal filter or the ability to filter his own desires...
...Gage: The moments, again, that we seem to come back to ... when we're talking about temperament are moments of crisis. Right? And so, to the degree that being President means that you are experiencing moments of crisis, moments of responsibility that very few people ever have to experience and that you are tried in ways that you have never been tried before, there are aspects of an individual that come out in those moments that have been unseen before and untried before...