Word: key
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...competence over ideology. For although Bush has said, "We're coming in to build on the proud accomplishments of the past, ((not)) to correct ((its)) ills," a failure to redress the Reagan era's greatest ill could consign this President to political oblivion. Ironically, given his insistence that the key lesson to be learned from Reagan is that a successful President takes "a principled position and stays with it," Bush's own success may depend on yet another 180 degrees turn: the far more difficult task of abandoning a cardinal promise while keeping the Teflon intact...
Still, the White House is considered a plum assignment, especially in television, because almost anything the President does or says makes the front page and tops the evening news. Exploiting this seemingly insatiable appetite for presidential news was one of the Reagan Administration's key contributions to the long history of White House press manipulation. By placing the President in attractive settings -- meeting foreign heads of state or splitting wood at his California ranch -- the White House p.r. apparatchiks provided the networks with the daily supply of visuals they desired, while cultivating the image of an active and accessible leader...
Reagan's proudest economic achievement, taming the inflation rate from 12.5% in 1980 to 4.4% last year, has also dealt a blow to some major schools of thought. Monetarists like Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, who believe that slow and steady growth of the money supply is the key to prosperity, expected inflation to shoot up when the Federal Reserve suddenly pumped cash into the economy to halt the recession of 1981-82. But inflation failed to ignite because the slump was so deep that it left the economy with plenty of room to grow without pushing up prices...
...surveyed more than 200 graduate students at six top economics departments. When the students were asked what it took to advance rapidly in the economics profession, an astonishing 68% said "a thorough knowledge of the economy" was unimportant. At the same time, 57% picked "excellence in mathematics" as the key to success. Said a bemused student: "You can walk in off the street and take the courses, and not know what the FORTUNE 500 is, and blaze through with flying colors...
...Soviet Foreign Ministry, recently admitted, capitalism has evolved a "mutually accepted legal framework," such that "class conflicts largely take place through the achievement of compromise." By adapting, capitalism disarmed the dialectic. The Soviets are now obsessed with adaptation. They recognize that the West's capacity for adaptation is the key to its success -- and the Soviets' incapacity for it is the cause of their decline...