Word: illusioners
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The nation is no longer moated -- economically, militarily -- by the Atlantic and Pacific. As Viet Nam instructed, what America touches does not necessarily become sacred -- an end of the Wilsonian illusion. America, which once cherished the conviction that God had endowed its national idea, began feeling lost in what might...
Ronald Reagan, a genius at this kind of thing, managed to recrystalize the national morale through his evocations of a simple and virtuous small-town America. He performed an optical illusion that was the equivalent of having Mickey Rooney, as Andy Hardy, standing tall in the saddle. That has been...
The evocations of the election of 1960 are a somewhat more youthful play upon the illusion, and more self-serving. Those candidates who have evoked the 1960 election were calling back not a time or place so much as a glamorous man -- John Kennedy.
Certainly the days of captive audiences and free-spending arrogance are over. "Network television is a mature medium," says Grant Tinker, the former NBC chairman who now runs his own production company. "There is no more audience growth. The universe is what it is." In a survey of top advertisers...
Bentsen also pressed the hot populist buttons that ignite Democratic voters. He played on nationalist sentiments by criticizing the trade practices of foreign countries and by ominously warning of their taking over American businesses. He raised the specter that Republicans are out to slash Social Security -- never acknowledging that he...