Word: litmus
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...Democrats had squeezed into the Paris apartment for a fund-raising conference call organized by Democrats Abroad, joined by Democrats in Vienna, Strasbourg, London and Cambridge, England, in settings that no doubt were also jarringly different from St. Louis. In this audience, there was an obvious question - a "litmus test," as one Paris Democrat put it - for candidates: How would you have voted on last week's detainee bill, which allows for aggressive interrogation tactics to be used on terror suspects? "I probably would have voted yes," McCaskill said. Then, as the groans and jeers erupted from the European phone...
...Popular Movement. Deliberately, Royal is avoiding a direct battle with her party rivals, an indication, her campaign advisers insist, of her determination to create a new political dynamic in a France aching for change, one that depends on a direct connection to the voter. She has spurned ideological litmus tests in favor of a politics that helps people "construct their lives and the happiness of their loved ones," as she said recently to a massive crowd in Burgundy. That, say her aides, is evidence of the thing that most clearly sets Royal apart. She's a woman. In the view...
...American lives. More than television, the space program, computers or any of the other defining, and once controversial, technological icons of our lifetimes, freeways continue to divide Americans. To understand how 19th-century Americans felt about technology, historians often examine individuals' attitudes toward the railroad. Freeways offer a similar litmus: Although still beloved by automobile, trucking, construction, advertising and franchising executives, the roads are excoriated by academics, artists, writers and activists for diminishing communities, landscapes, public transportation and regional distinctiveness...
...easy running as a Democrat. There are litmus-test land mines in every audience. At the Montgomery County meeting, a local surgeon named William Epstein showed me his list: drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, abortion, gay marriage. "I'm afraid he's a mini-Republican," Epstein said at first. But later, after asking the candidate directly, he amended his judgment: "He answered me straight and passed every one of my tests." Webb is an outdoorsy hunting-and-fishing environmentalist. He is pro-choice, pro-gay rights. He has expressed nuanced reservations about affirmative action and women in combat...
...more than that: a campaign that will help determine whether Democrats have the expansive soul to become a majority party once more. Liberals hunt down heretics, Michael Kinsley once wrote, while conservatives happily chase converts. Webb is a convert in a party that mistrusts converts. His candidacy is a litmus test for a party that loves litmus tests...