Word: populistic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Fernández, like her husband and their left-wing ally President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, is a combative populist who critics say is too dismissive of the legislative and judicial branches, which are still weak institutions in Latin America. Her Sunday setback "indicates that Latin America's hyperpresidentialist project, which was fueled by the economic boom, faces walls and obstacles now," says Javier Corrales, a Latin America expert who teaches political science at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Another factor is the exit of U.S. President George W. Bush, whose own bid for excessive presidential power wasn...
...opponents who appear to have become unhinged. Technically - before Sunday, anyway - Honduras' Justices and generals could claim they held the legal high ground: Zelaya was, after all, blatantly defying a high-court ruling, as well as his legislature and attorney general. He was, they could argue, behaving like the populist caudillo his opponents warned he wanted to be. But their violent Sunday-morning response has made them look like the Latin oligarch lackeys of old - and has in fact lent credence to Zelaya's suggestion that they were indeed just defending a constitution fashioned exclusively for the haves of Honduras...
Jarvis created a similarly impregnable institution. When he rode the wave of anger over skyrocketing property-tax assessments to pass Proposition 13 in 1978, he included a two-thirds vote requirement for the passage of any new taxes in California - an insurmountable obstacle built on populist allergy to any kind of new levy. Beholden to a tax-averse electorate, the state's liberals and moderates have attempted to live with Proposition 13 while continuing to provide the state services Californians expect - freeways, higher education, prisons, assistance to needy families and, very important, essential funding to local government and school districts...
...flummoxed by a candidate who seemed to have been trained by some Iranian equivalent of Karl Rove. They appeared paralyzed by what they considered his coarse impertinence; in American terms, these might have been debates between George Bush the Elder and Newt Gingrich, a gentlemanly establishmentarian against a rude populist brawler. Ahmadinejad was a slick combination of facts and accusations. He spoke directly into the camera. He deployed little charts, as Ross Perot did in the 1990s, to show that things weren't as bad as people thought. His statistics were heavily massaged and challenged by his opponents...
...years, living a quiet life as an artist and architect until he re-emerged as a polite prototype of the north Tehran élite. These were people - like the two former Presidents who backed his campaign, Rafsanjani and Mohammed Khatami - who seemed as concerned with Ahmadinejad's crude populist style as with his crude populist economics. Mousavi's wife inadvertently made plain the mind-set when I asked her about her husband's art and she told me, "Artists exist at the very top of a society. When an artist becomes President, it is a step down. But there...