Word: hot-button
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...wisdom among consultants is that you run in California by raising a lot of money and putting it all on television. The public has reacted to these soulless exercises with disdainful apathy; Californians tend to be more interested when the state's nutty kernel of political extremists put some hot-button initiative-about race, immigration or taxes, inevitably-on the ballot. Indeed, there is a weird karmic genius to the current electoral gimmick, the movement to recall Governor Gray Davis from office. It has turned politics itself into a ballot issue-with Davis in the dock, representing a system...
After the hot-button issues of race, crime and religion, the question of federal-state power sharing may not stir the blood. But it goes to the heart of the fundamental political struggles of the past century. The civil rights legislation of the 1960s, for instance, often used the power that Congress was granted by the Constitution "to regulate commerce ... among the several states" as the means to legitimize federal mandates on racial integration. To Rehnquist, this is a perversion of the Constitution, and he has been on a three-decade-long quest to rein in federal power. As early...
...American political campaign called Continental Divide, has mostly been talk up to this point. But what talk! The play has nearly 50 characters, rapid-fire dialogue and an impossibly complicated plot involving leftover '60s radicals, skeletons in the closet, the clash between ideals and pragmatism in politics, and a hot-button ballot initiative that would mandate loyalty oaths for all voters. And that's only half the story. Daughters of the Revolution centers on the Democratic side of a gubernatorial race in an unnamed Western state; its companion play, Mothers Against, focuses on the Republican side...
...pave the way for nominating the more moderate Gonzales. And perhaps to burnish his conservative credentials, Gonzales has helped select and then sell these judicial nominees. He has personally met nearly all the candidates for district and appellate seats and says they are never asked their opinions on any hot-button issues...
Even as an elected official later on, Cheney found himself in the position of serving another. Cheney was - or could have been - his own man politically after being elected to Congress in 1978. He could have associated himself with some hot-button issue or authored a major piece of legislation bearing his name. Instead Cheney followed the same pattern in the House that had worked for him to date: he quietly made himself useful - and then indispensable - to the higher powers in his party. Bob Michel, the G.O.P. House leader, repaid Cheney's loyalty by making...