Word: governability
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...single sheet of paper. The 55-year-old will likely soon find himself thinking wistfully back to a time when his desk was bare. There can't be many other jobs in the world that present a new leader with such a complex array of challenges as trying to govern the 17,500 islands strung along the equator that make up the world's fourth most populous country. Still, in his first interview since being sworn in as the country's sixth chief executive on October 20, the former general appeared relaxed and confident. In a 30-minute talk...
...Washington Ellis gives us is not the customary figure operating serenely above the fray but a man constantly seeking to govern his own passions. Ironically, telling Washington's story truthfully requires Ellis to occasionally cast doubt on the great man's honesty. Washington could lie when he needed to--for instance, by misrepresenting for posterity his role in the disastrous engagement at Fort Necessity during the French and Indian War. And throughout his career, he feigned a lack of ambition as cover for a relentless impulse to move upward in the world...
There has been a fair amount of high-minded hand wringing about the negativity of the Bush campaign this year. There are ground rules that govern the slinging of mud in politics, and the President has tested their limits. But the Bush campaign's transgressions have more often been misdemeanors rather than felonies, involving style and volume more than substance. The President has spent more than $100 million in negative advertising against Kerry, and almost all of it has been within the bounds of standard political practice. Some has been quite brilliant: the "flip-flop" assault inflated Kerry's most...
...critical issue, of course, is how Islamic Sistani wants Iraq to be. He has made it clear that foreign powers cannot be allowed to dictate the country's form of government, nor does he want to replicate a Western model. He has said Islamic law should govern family and personal matters. "His vision of the good state," says a Western diplomat in Baghdad, "is not where my wife and daughter would want to live." But Sistani's aides say he considers the Khomeini and Taliban experiments in theocracy failures--too extreme and rigid for modern society, especially one as demographically...
Perhaps, then, another four years of Bush would be good. The left has hardly earned the right to govern, so maybe a further increase of military spending in place of better health care and public education has a positive side. Or, perhaps a new war with new enemies—we happily joined the last two, why not three? And, what about a continued loss of civil liberties, the basis of the American society? Maybe, just maybe, four more years of devolution under Bush might cause enough alarm for American Democrats to truly reverse the curse...