Word: midlands
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...strangest thing about it is, we've been here before. It all started with a little-known Oxford professor whose specialty was the West Midland dialect of Middle English. Beginning with The Hobbit, a story he invented in the early 1930s to amuse his children, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's novels first became merely popular and then turned into a phenomenon. When a pirate paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings was published in the U.S. in 1965, it and other versions sold more than a million copies within a year. GANDALF FOR PRESIDENT buttons appeared on wide late...
...place from which to drive economic policy. What would give him sway among elites, Wall Street and the media is the one thing Evans will not leverage: his friendship with the President. On the phone with Bush as many as three times a day, the longtime pal from the Midland, Texas, years has enormous influence. "He's just not forceful about taking this role," says a senior White House aide. Recently he helped convince Bush that the political timing was not right to embrace stimulative tax cuts for investors...
...place from which to drive economic policy. What would give him sway among elites, Wall Street and the media is the one thing Evans will not leverage: his friendship with the President. On the phone with Bush as many as three times a day, the longtime pal from the Midland, Texas, years has enormous influence. "He's just not forceful about taking this role," says a senior White House aide. Recently he helped convince Bush that the political timing was not right to embrace stimulative tax cuts for investors...
Bush came to his benevolent view of corporate America by way of Midland, Texas, where the young Harvard Business School graduate landed in 1975 hoping to strike it rich in the oil business. There, Bush recalls, businesses were filled with "good men" who would strike a deal on a handshake or the strength of a family name. When the oil boom went bust, as it did for Bush in the mid-1980s, small-business men didn't cash out their stock options and run; they took pay cuts and tried to help their employees. To Bush, Enron and WorldCom were...
What does make perfect sense to anyone from those Midland days is to blame Wall Street. Bush remains distrustful and not a little dismissive of the investment bankers who swooped into Texas with saddlebags full of cash when oil prices gushed but galloped out of town when prices sank. Back in April, when the Dow hovered around 10,000, a White House economic adviser told the President at a social gathering that "there's no reason this market shouldn't be around 7500." According to an eyewitness, Bush made a face, turned and walked away, as if the subject bored...