Word: modestic
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...Clinton who used his speech to reassert his role as Daddy-in-Chief, while making sure to abide by the Morris-inspired axiom of triangulation politics: Keep ideology out of it, and keep it modest. The President had declared the era of Big Government over, so it would be hard to condemn him for thinking small. But when it comes to families, Clinton said, you can think big about many small things. His laundry-list speech included tuition tax credits, adoption tax credits, money for child care, child-nutrition programs, literacy initiatives, family leave, even an environmental measure to help...
...longer. The first modest assault on the long dominance of the King James version came in 1952, when the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S. released the Revised Standard Version. Thanks to 350 years of discoveries in archaeology and philology, the Revised Standard more accurately, if rather less poetically, reflected the original documents than did the King James. It quickly became the authorized text for most mainline Protestants. And after that trickle, the floodgates were opened...
Somewhat comically, in our political culture of grievance, almost no one is willing to admit that times actually are pretty good. Polls show the citizenry fairly gloomy about general economic prospects even while conceding that their own prospects are O.K. Republicans are reduced to grumbling that modest, steady growth is not good enough and that Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve Board, rather than Clinton, deserve the credit in any event. (There's an inherent contradiction here: If the Fed sets the rate of growth, how can Clinton be blamed that it's not faster?) Clinton, meanwhile, has the happier...
...finally and grudgingly, his own plan to balance the budget by 2002, and after two vetoes he reluctantly signed a Republican welfare-reform bill--to the screams of the left that he is committing the worst betrayal since that of Judas Iscariot. By Executive decree he has been pursuing modest and relatively uncontroversial but worthwhile goals--requiring teenage welfare mothers to live at home, for instance, and intensifying the pursuit of deadbeat dads, who have been forced to pay 40% more money for the support of their children. From Clinton's bully pulpit these days comes an endless succession...
...send Clinton a plan for some long-range reforms in that system; he ignored it. Meanwhile, the President has been proposing what would amount to an entitlement to two years of college education, to be financed by a $1,500-a-year tuition tax credit. The cost would be modest--an estimated $8 billion over six years--and the President has offered specific revenue increases and spending cuts to meet it. All the same, talking up a new entitlement is no way to prepare citizens for the painful future steps that will be needed to pay for the entitlements they...