Word: personation
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...were saying, hey, explain these differences between you and Reagan. Dukakis and Bentsen have a litany of differences. You can just walk through them, whether it's MX missile, support for the contras, support for the Reagan tax cut, gun control in the Southwest -- imagine trying to defend a person who strongly favors federal gun control in Texas. I don't think Bentsen will try to do that in Texas...
...first principle of vice-presidential selection is to find a fellow who can win his own state (the bigger, the better) and not hurt you elsewhere. Safe, practical politics. Michael Dukakis has often said his first principle in selecting a running mate was more exalted: to find the person, apart from himself of course, who would make a first-rate President. A noble, if slightly disingenuous sentiment...
...poverty rate that is the second highest of any American core city. When I lived in Atlanta, at the height of the struggle, the interests of poor black people and well-off black people seemed identical. To some extent, their interests still coincide. But a poor black person living in a crumbling slum may have good reason to feel that triumphs of well-off black people have nothing to do with his life. The well- off black people, after all, have their own suburbs...
...Greek identity would be clear to a person of Dukakis' intelligence growing up in a house where his grandmother spoke only Greek. Stelian and Michael had a second language they could use when they did not want their schoolmates to understand them (as Dukakis even now uses Greek with his aide Nick Mitropoulos when he does not want reporters to know what they are saying). His mother told Michael the Greek myths when he was a child. He thought there was something special about being a Greek, and there is. Precisely because he lacked the rub of real Greeks around...
...house so Michael would not see how many she had bought -- which means he did not keep track of the ones she wore. She walks on the border of his clear mental map, usually there but sometimes not. So did Sasso, proving that Dukakis can combine intimacy with a person and a carefully determined distance from some aspects of them, a distance so great as to defeat his vision...