Word: populistic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...they be more alike, the two political princes, Texas and Tennessee, Harvard and Yale, the compassionate conservative against the pragmatic idealist? Could they be more different, one so unpolished it's hard to imagine, the other so shiny it hurts to look. Vice President Al Gore runs as a populist who doesn't talk much about the poor; George W. Bush, backed by more G.O.P. fat cats than any other Republican in memory, delivers "the best New Democrat speech ever given in prime time," says a former Clinton adviser...
Maybe a shy man needs to be a populist and promise to fight for little guys. Al Gore wasn't going to be their friend, he wasn't likely to charm them; but he could be their bodyguard and protect them from polluters, swindlers, profiteers. Gore had a crisis with politics after Vietnam. He drifted through divinity school and into journalism, but as his biographer Bill Turque notes, his longtime friends saw this as just stretching the rubber band before it yanked him back to the family business. Why else practice the tricks that help you remember people's names...
...always so clear-cut. Gore, it was noted in the summer, had historically large pockets of support on Wall Street. He represented a happy continuation of the policies that had brought the economy and the markets astounding success over the past eight years. But when Gore went populist, and Bush started to look acceptably reliable, the naturally Republican instincts of Street types took over. Price controls for pharmaceuticals? Big Bad HMOs? Rats in the barn? As a New Democrat Gore could be counted on to be sensible about these things; as an angry populist, he was a real bummer...
...Which Al Gore were you going to vote for, the environmentalist or the populist? Which George W. Bush, the tax-cutter or the anti-abortionist? Which Ralph Nader, the government reformer or the economic isolationist? Harry Browne makes it easy. A Libertarian government would hardly seem like government...
With the polls creaking in Bush's favor, Gore has returned as the hard-charging populist, a pose that helped revive his campaign after the Democratic Convention. "He knew he'd gone too far in the second debate, and he had to repair the damage," says a top Gore adviser of the matchup, in which the Veep appeared too docile. "And he'd had it with this idea there were no differences and this was about who's a nice guy. He wanted to show that there were differences and they were serious." Without someone in the public arena slugging...