Word: muldoonism
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...midst of New Zealand's election campaign, Laborite Prime Minister Wallace ("Bill") Rowling observed that if Opposition Leader Robert Muldoon wanted to know "why he is so unacceptable to many people, a quick glance in any mirror would give him the answer." Perhaps Rowling should have looked at the mirror himself. Last week, as he prepared to hand over power to Muldoon's triumphant New Zealand National Party, the outgoing Prime Minister allowed that he felt as though he had "been run over by a bus." In an upset, the conservative Nationalists won a 19-seat majority...
...election in the tiny (pop. 3 million) southwest Pacific nation was a contest in contrasting political styles. Rowling, a reserved, diminutive former schoolteacher and university lecturer, is most convincing with small groups, and tended at the outset of the campaign to avoid speaking before big crowds. Stocky, abrasive Muldoon is a cost accountant with a pugnacious political style that proved to be a powerful attraction on the campaign trail. Muldoon criticized Rowling as "too timid and too tentative" to be Prime Minister. Although New Zealand is not exactly beset by a crime wave, Muldoon promised law-and-order government...
...just finished talking to some nurses when Officer Muldoon, at least a close facsimile of the Fred Gwynne character but three times more dense, barged into the building we were soliciting, asked us if we had been sneaking around the neighborhood telling people we were rapists and stranglers, and not waiting for an answer whisked us out to a fleet of waiting squad cars. After manacling both of us, he threw us in the back seat, and while an Arlington townie gave us a few free elbows to the jaws, packed us off to the station house...
...stage, the maid Mrs. Drudge answers the phone with "Hello, the drawing room of Lady Muldoon's country residence one morning in early spring." The stock characters dash to and fro, pausing in place long enough to let the critics' discussion go on without competition. --Until the phone rings again on a deserted stage and Birdfoot leaves his seat to answer it; it's his jealous wife. And before Birdfoot can get back to his seat...
...What was the "Curse of Muldoon" and when was it broken...