Word: platform
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With surprising harmony, the Democrats all but completed drafting their platform last week. The relatively brief, 3,500-word document (the elephantine 1984 version was 40,000 words) signals a sharp break with the party's promise- them-anything past. This time there are no bold pledges to match earlier advocacy of guaranteed jobs (1972) and national health insurance (1980). Gone too is the usual laundry list of narrow causes like the 1984 vow to "eliminate ethnic stereotyping." The 1988 platform may be purposely vague, but there are hidden subtexts beneath the soporific rhetoric...
...awkward title says it all: the platform tries to meld the "competence" of Michael Dukakis with the "hope" conveyed by Jesse Jackson. "Restoration" can be seen as a small bow to the platform's author, Theodore Sorensen, who was John Kennedy's speechwriter. Sorensen's secret: exhausting run-on sentences that cleverly mask meaning with their painful paucity of verbs...
ABERDEEN, Scotland--Rescuers abandoned hope yesterday of finding more survivors of an explosion and towering fire that consumed the Piper Alpha platform and killed up to 166 people in the world's worst oil rig disaster...
Occidental Petroleum, owner of the Piper Alpha platform, said it believed a gas leak was to blame, but days or weeks would be needed to determine what caused and ignited it. Occidental said the three-quarters of the 649-foot-high rig was destroyed...
...number of men still missing and the dim prospects for finding them alive seem certain to make the Piper Alpha explosion the worst oil rig disaster ever, surpassing the 123 deaths when the Alexander L. Kielland platform capsized in Norway's North Sea waters in March...