Word: maladroit
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...motif that remind one, without exaggeration, of Durer. In landscape his hand roamed free, giving the foreground hill in Volterra, the Citadel, 1834, a lively splotching of indeterminate dark scrub whose excited marks carry more visual weight than the distant hill town. But his early portraits are maladroit Ingres, and he was almost incapable of bringing off large biblical or literary compositions: his late painting of Dante and Vergil menaced by the she-wolf at the edge of the Dark Wood has to be one of the most bathetic illustrations for the Inferno ever made--not only the animals...
...convinced he is being exploited; his very smart, very pretty girlfriend (Tyra Banks), who is coolly intent on using the system to her advantage; a young white woman (Kristy Swanson), victimized by date rape, tempted by lesbianism, ultimately redeemed and betrayed by her idealistic political activism; a socially maladroit loner (Michael Rapaport), who finds a dank spiritual home with the local neo- Nazis. The rapper Ice Cube is on hand as a perpetual graduate student and guru to the black activists. Laurence Fishburne represents adult authority as an arrogant, challenging and ultimately wise and sympathetic political-science professor...
...when President Clinton began to speak, the atmosphere changed. Clinton laid into his aides for leaking information to the press and lamented his Administration's maladroit handling of the gays-in-the-militar y crisis. He warned his team to stop dumping on each other in print, to "rise above the Washington culture" and "live by your values, not theirs." The clear message, said a staffer, was that Clinton still believes he can change the way things work in the nation's capital...
...with the way all debates since 1960 have been organized. Multiple questions and time-limited answers (no candidate has ever been granted more than three minutes to respond; this year the maximum is two minutes) do not lend themselves to serious exploration of issues. Also, reporters have often been maladroit questioners -- precious minutes were squandered in the second 1988 debate when Bush and Dukakis were asked to name their heroes...
...experience in national government or politics to shake up the way Washington works. (If Perot's candidacy were a movie, the title might be Daddy Warbucks Goes to Washington.) But such speculation is premature: Perot might not run, his record might not survive public scrutiny, he may prove a maladroit campaigner, and his damn-the-torpedoes style may not sit well with voters. Still, the Bush camp, having already survived third-party threats from Buchanan and hatemonger David Duke, is taking Perot very seriously indeed. "There is contingency planning going on," says a senior Bush campaign adviser. "In places...