Word: perots
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...disbelief sums up the mood on the Bush campaign plane Wednesday. Going into the three-week debate season, Bush's advisers had been hoping merely to survive. In their own minds, at least, they were facing the most celebrated debater of his generation, a professional who had decimated Ross Perot, humiliated Jack Kemp and skewered Bill Bradley. The Bush team worked that angle hard, raising expectations for the vice president and lowering them for the governor. In selling the spin, it helped that they also believed it. But after the first two debates with Al Gore, George W. Bush...
Their wives are Waitress (or Secretary) Moms, and they live in suburbs or small towns near cities. They're doing better than they were six or eight years ago, but have little savings. Many voted for Perot in '92 and even in '96, some for Clinton. They are leaning toward Bush. They respond to candidates who convey the capacity for leadership. Gore's "fighting for hard-working families" pitch is aimed their way. So far, it has attracted many of their wives, not many of them...
...years, Al Gore has debated 35 times as vice president and presidential contender. He's debated in groups, debated one-on-one, debated in town halls and on talk shows. He's debated dwarves like Gephardt and Dukakis, jocks like Jack Kemp and Bill Bradley, wild men like Ross Perot, pushovers like James Stockdale and supposed pushovers like Dan Quayle. He's gotten very good at it, primarily because he has a strategist's nose for weakness and the discipline to keep jabbing at it. And he will hit below the belt...
...Then came the NAFTA faceoff with Ross Perot. Gore lobbied heavily for the chance to take on the jug-eared billionaire in a forum Perot was at home in, CNN's "Larry King Live," at the height of his popularity/credibility as a national gadfly. Perot had been doing his "great sucking sound" charts-and-graphs act on infomercials and on King's show, and he was aching for a shot at somebody in the pro-NAFTA Clinton administration, and delighted to get somebody as high up - and as charisma-deprived - as Gore...
...Gore didn't give Perot the economics debate he wanted, instead targeting Perot's obvious weak spot: his temperament. With King obliging as ever, Gore dredged up the disastrous (and catchily named) Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, a facile comparison of eras that worked perfectly. Gore handed Perot a framed picture of the pair; he interrupted Perot incessantly, made him lose his temper. Gore's decisive victory was the saving of NAFTA and the beginning of the end of Perot as even a semi-serious public figure...