Word: nation
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Darman's observation -- oddly reminiscent of Jimmy Carter's much maligned 1979 "malaise" speech on the nation's shrinking horizons -- was acute. But even as he was speaking, Darman and others in Government were obscuring the size of the federal deficit through slick bookkeeping and legislative tricks and promising bold new programs that they knew the federal budget could not sustain...
...long-term goals, beyond hoping for a "kinder, gentler" nation, have been lost in a miasma of public relations stunts. The President's recent "education summit" with the nation's Governors produced some interesting ideas about national standards but little about how to pay the costs of helping public schools meet them. His much trumpeted war against drugs was more an underfinanced skirmish. Bush told voters last year that he is an environmentalist, but the most significant clean-air proposals put forth this year -- stringent new standards on automobile emissions -- were adapted from California's strict limits for the 1990s...
...they are symptomatic of governmental decay at all levels. Once a great engine of social and economic improvement, the Federal Government began to lose its bearings in the '60s and '70s in the midst of wars, both cold and hot, domestic upheavals and a worldwide economic revolution. As the nation's economic base began to contract, some basic elements of the American Dream -- homeownership, a college education -- began slowly to recede. The Government responded fitfully to these developments and eventually took on the form of a bloated, inefficient, helpless giant...
...nation's leadership often hears what it wants to hear, but few have seemed quite so deaf to the public's demands as East Germany's rulers. Thousands flee the country, protesters stage hunger strikes in churches, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev offers a gentle lecture in person -- none of it seemed to make a difference. But last week as the cries for democratic reform reached a crescendo in cities across East Germany, the leaders in East Berlin demonstrated that their hearing faculties were intact -- and that they were distressed by the rising noise level...
...warned that "there is a fundamental lesson to be learned from the counterrevolutionary unrest in Beijing." But the Politburo's subsequent statement suggests that many within the ruling elite were drawing different conclusions from the Tiananmen debacle. Reports circulated that the Politburo had demanded an account of the nation's "critical situation" from Honecker. Soon thereafter Honecker postponed a visit to Denmark, fueling rumors that he was struggling for his political -- and maybe his physical -- life...