Word: lapdog
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...critics to wonder about Bush's "corruption of ambition." Even George Will, one of the conservatives whose support Bush most coveted, was repelled. "The unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one conservative gathering to another," wrote Will, "is a thin, tiny 'arf' -- the sound of a lapdog...
Roger Ailes, Bush's media adviser, is credited with (or blamed for) inventing the Pledge of Allegiance issue, the Willie Horton scare, the A.C.L.U. attacks. All were leftovers from the Robertson campaign. Bush had been criticized as a "lapdog" early in 1987 when he courted the religious right, calling himself a "born again" Christian. It was assumed that he had to undergo these rituals, but that he would move to the center after surviving the Kemp challenge. What Ailes and his campaign allies did was take the Robertson base and build on it, incorporating all its major themes...
...mentioned George Bush in a game of word association for political insiders just six weeks ago, the responses would have been devastating: loser, wimp, preppie, lapdog. Mention the Vice President now, and the chorus would be loud and clear: Republican nominee for President...
Hart's single most successful tack during the primaries was charging Mondale with lapdog allegiance to the AFL-CIO. The extreme affinity between organized labor and the Democrats has become a central political concern. Democratic leaders must convince organized labor that the shifts in the U.S. economy-away from heavy manufacturing toward high-technology and service industries-need not be antithetical to workers' long-run interests. "Labor has a massive job of self-education to do," says Iowa Party Chairman David Nagle. "Labor will have to weed its own garden...
...submersion of his own identity may be politically harmful. Says a former Bush aide: "It's a lapdog problem." If Reagan is reelected, his scrupulous sidekick may not strike voters as especially presidential four years hence. "It makes him look wimpish," says an adviser. "It makes him look like he doesn't have an opinion of his own." Just so. When Bush was asked about his views on abortion in September, says an aide, "frankly, he couldn't remember what his position was." Bush is motivated more by the old patrician devotion to public service than...