Word: populists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...referendum would earmark seven percent of the annual state budget for primary, secondary, and higher education. One of Tsongas' goals is to win back for public primary and secondary education some of the funds eliminated by another populist revenue control referendum, Proposition 2 1/2, which limited taxes on local property taxes...
Tsongas has a proven track record with state-level referenda, having successfully mobilized citizens behind a non-binding building moratorium on Cape Cod last year. Massachusetts will be better off if he can achieve similar success with this progressive and pragmatic funding initiative. Populist referenda can be simplistic and constricting. But in this case the end justifies the means...
...land hardly famous for political comebacks, Boris Yeltsin, the brash populist who a year ago was ousted as Moscow Communist Party boss and candidate member of the Politburo, has become a symbol of the opportunities and obstacles that Gorbachev now faces. Yeltsin's triumph, along with the defeat of party hacks from Siberia to Lithuania, represented a rousing endorsement of Gorbachev's vision of perestroika. But it also represented a feisty revolt against the failure of his reforms to improve the harsh realities of Soviet life...
Yeltsin, 58, ran as Moscow's Huey Long, stoking populist passions with his calls for an end to the party elite's special privileges and his frontal attacks on Yegor Ligachev. "You're wrong, Boris!" Ligachev had shouted during the emotional Party Conference last year at which Yeltsin sought rehabilitation after being kicked off the Politburo. YEGOR, YOU'RE WRONG! read the buttons sported by Yeltsin's supporters as they marched through Moscow shouting "Down with party bureaucrats!" during the days leading up to the election. Yeltsin ended up with an astounding 89% of the vote in the at-large...
During a session with Boris Yeltsin, the party-boss-turned-populist, photographer Ted Thai found it impossible to get him to smile. "So I went over and tugged on his cheek to show him what I meant," Thai recalls. The tactic may have been unorthodox, but Yeltsin is hardly the orthodox Soviet politician...