Word: raced
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...surprising that there should be a lag between a problem's first appearance in fact and in someone's stump speech. New issues have indeed been able to make their way into the campaign. Neither drugs nor the environment was a deciding factor in any recent presidential race. But after a year of national concern about crack wars, followed by a summer of worry over the greenhouse effect and kindred ecological disasters, Manuel Noriega has become the favorite foreign leader of Democratic speechwriters, while Bush has taken to deploring the condition of Boston Harbor...
...strange ways, 1960 is sacred in grainy national memory. Americans feel a wistfulness about that election, if only because it was a moment when they and the world were younger. Was the race a classic encounter between two smart and well-matched athletes working the game in its last good moment? Maybe. The drama lingers in images of black and white as a moment of moral sunshine for Americans, or of remembered innocence. The candidates, youngish veterans, connected them to the days of their last good war. The election of 1960 was the end of America's postwar political order...
...upon you with the brightest of teeth. No wonder that in the presidential campaign of 1988, Americans feel a nostalgia for the festive in their politics. American politics used to be fun. Once upon a time, lively, funny people practiced the art. In a priceless line about the 1988 race, Robert Strauss, former Democratic Party chairman and an accomplished humorist, said Dukakis reminded him of Cary Grant. Depressingly, Strauss was not trying to be funny...
...churchier precincts of the memory, the election of 1960 has, for some, a numinous glow. The election was the prologue to everything that happened after. It was the American politics before the fall. Its protagonists went on to their high, dramatic fates. Perhaps part of the magic of that race is that we know the tale to its dramatic completion...
...helped transform that election campaign into instantaneous myth was Theodore H. White. The Making of the President 1960 was the first of a series of five he wrote. White's description of the 1960 race, as one reads it now, seems an endearing period piece. One cannot conceive of writing such prose now, about the 1988 campaign. White invented the form. He absorbed politics and hymned it in an act of reportage and imagination that was a variation on Walt Whitman. White's descriptions of the 1960 race are bardic, Homeric. Political bosses are "chieftains." The "clashes" between Kennedy...