Word: quilting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...land in which the contest will be decided. Says Republican Consultant Stuart Spencer: "It's going to be a hell of a fight, with no prisoners taken. In the end, they'll be in the same states." What makes the current map such a crazy quilt is that the major battlegrounds stretch from New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the East through Ohio, Michigan and Illinois in the Midwest, to Texas and California. Several smaller border states, such as Kentucky and Tennessee, are also within reach of either Bush or Dukakis. Rarely since World War II has so much terrain...
...Atlanta, Jackson told the audience "I am somebody." He talked about his grandmother, his childhood, his goals. But in purely election-year terms, the speech earned a place in history for the variety and attractiveness of its metaphors. America is a great patchwork quilt. Jackson and Dukakis, anchored separately but coming together in the same harbor--going out to challenge the big ships in the ocean...
Jackson likes to end speeches with the story of his grandmother, who took odds and ends of cloth ("not hardly fit to wipe your shoes with, some of them") and stitched them into a quilt that kept him warm as a child. Then, referring to different minorities or excluded parts of his audience, he tells farmers, or strikers, or Hispanics, that "you're right, but your patch ain't big enough." The minorities must unite to extend their influence. He does not reach the real conclusion of his parable -- that the white patch ain't big enough either; the majority...
...drama of South Africa seems to be playing itself out with Aristotelian balance. There was a beginning, in the late 1940s, when the white minority government instituted apartheid, a crazy quilt of laws designed to restrict, presumably forever, the freedoms and aspirations of a black majority. The middle, the escalating restiveness and violence provoked by a system too rigid to bend, is now. And surely an end, whether it be awful or awesome, must come. Unlike such interminably troubled spots as Northern Ireland or the Middle East, South Africa generates each day one of the oldest questions to capture human...
...seemed easy in theory: getting a majority of Supreme Court Justices to sign a single opinion clarifying the rules for combatting discrimination. But from 1979 until the Johnson decision last week, that goal eluded a deeply divided high court, which had stitched together majorities through a patchwork quilt of separate opinions that raised as many questions as they answered. Which forms of affirmative action are legal? When are they mandatory? Are quotas ever permissible? Required? Even though the Supreme Court will continue to refine the boundaries of affirmative action through a case-by-case approach, the Johnson decision has helped...