Word: pinkerton
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When top White House aide James Pinkerton first outlined the five principles of a "New Paradigm" last February, many dismissed the idea as mere rhetoric, an excuse for the administration's weak domestic policy...
...Pinkerton, who is only 32, a onetime libertarian, explains paradigms in terms of the Ptolemaic and Copernican models of the universe. The mind, in order to explore and solve problems, must operate upon certain models, certain sets of assumptions. For 13 centuries, humankind assumed, as Ptolemy taught, that the sun revolved around the earth. It was a workable paradigm of the universe, in its way, but became the Old Paradigm when Copernicus propounded the New Paradigm that the earth revolved around...
Early in his Administration, George Bush tried to sum up the spirit abroad in the world as the "New Breeze." The phrase evoked not history on the march but a summery midafternoon in Kennebunkport, Me. A young White House aide, James Pinkerton, has proposed the "New Paradigm" as the overarching idea, the signature, of the Bush years. We shall see. The President has used the phrase New Paradigm a few times in a glancing way, but the phrase may not be his style. Budget Director Richard Darman mocked Pinkerton's New Paradigm in a speech a few weeks ago ("Brother...
...Pinkerton's universe, centralized bureaucracy and Big Government are the Old Paradigm. The idea, of course, has been evolving since the abdication of Lyndon Johnson and the dawning realization that the American government does not have endless money to spend. In Pinkerton's New Paradigm, government would be subject to market forces as never before and people would be empowered to make their own individual choices (using school vouchers, for example), while government would be decentralized and decision making pushed down as close as possible to the level of the people affected. Programs would be judged by output rather than...
...this New Paradigm, as some say, only a bright intellectual flourish meant to cover the retreat of the Federal Government from almost everything? "No," says Pinkerton, "it is an intellectual construct to make things work. It is a way of thinking about change and making it rational. I have never said we should cut spending. The conventional wisdom around Washington is that nothing works. Americans don't believe...