Word: lyndon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...battle over taxes and spending, as well as the upcoming battle over health care and other issues, a handful of Senators now holds the keys to success or failure for Clinton in his first year in office. This pride of new Senate lions differs substantially from the Lyndon Johnsons and Everett Dirksens of the past. With one exception, the new breed are committee chairmen rather than members of the formal leadership (which was all but reformed out of business a couple of decades ago). In cutting deals, the modern lions rely as much on suasion as brute political force...
...behave so well. As much as the bills he introduces, the speeches he gives and the Executive Orders he signs, a President is defined by the small acts at the margin that burn themselves into the national consciousness: Jimmy Carter with his killer rabbit and lust in his heart, Lyndon Johnson displaying his surgical scar, Richard Nixon strolling on the beach in his wing tips. In years to come, the biggest small thing of the Clinton presidency may turn out to be The $5,500 Haircut...
...second is an ability to engage in inside bargaining, negotiating and arm-twisting. [Lyndon Johnson] could do this, and Clinton is a lot closer in this way to Johnson than he is to Carter. The last skill is communication. Clinton can do this very well with large and small audiences, as Franklin Roosevelt could, and Reagan and Kennedy," he says...
...Clinton has shown a brilliant ability to learn from the successes and failures of his predecessors. He used the Dukakis campaign as a how-not-to case study, and after the election he indicated that he would do the same with the Carter presidency. Initially, he seemed to enjoy Lyndon Johnson's rapport with Congress and Ronald Reagan's popularity among the electorate. And the first-hundred-days legislative agenda he proposed promised to rival Franklin Roosevelt's. But there is one person whose playbook he has neglected to borrow: his wife...
...problem is that Clinton, like Lyndon Johnson before him, is trapped in a logic of incessant escalation. Everything he does makes the situation worse; the worse the situation gets, the more insistent become the calls to "do something." Now that Clinton's prestige--and that of his country--are engaged in the conflict, he finds it terribly difficult to back...