Word: reaganism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Rosty became chairman of Ways and Means in 1981. His tenure opened with a stinging defeat: the committee opted for Ronald Reagan's tax cuts over Rosty's opposition. But the chairman recovered to steer the landmark tax reform of 1986 past all sorts of shoals and obstacles to enactment. He has handled his colleagues adroitly, knowing just when to trade a tax break narrowly benefiting a particular committee member's constituents in return for the * member's vote on a more important matter...
...exulted whenever she met a White House veteran. A few years ago, at a dinner party on Martha's Vineyard given by Katharine Graham, then publisher of the Washington Post, she chatted animatedly with Nancy Reagan. "They were riveted by each other," says one of Graham's guests. "They compared notes on being First Lady, the problems of running the White House. It was like two suburban ladies talking about a good sale on V-8 juice...
...bound up in a flip essay with Aromavision (Clinton probably doesn't either, but one imagines he's grown used to this sort of thing). Thirty-odd years of expecting Presidents to be adept television performers and 30-odd years of Presidents' playing to that expectation -- the catch in Reagan's voice, the tug on Clinton's lip -- have chipped away at our notions of intimacy, dignity and content, leaving behind a fat appetite for sheer spectacle. Not always by design, the Clinton Administration is far and away the most entertaining in recent memory (excepting, of course, its wonky bits...
...ghettos. That's why the Murphy Brown passage -- criticizing the fictional TV reporter for having a baby out of wedlock -- got so much attention, as Quayle knew it would. Speaking in San Francisco shortly after the L.A. riots, Quayle was attempting to deflect any blame away from the Reagan-Bush Administration that had been in putative charge of the country for 11 years. But more than that: the attack on Murphy Brown was supposed to be a shot in the conservative cultural war. Coming just as the 1992 presidential campaign was heating up, it was supposed to be that year...
...Kempton is anything but doctrinaire. He sympathizes as easily with Richard Nixon during his troubles over the buying of a Manhattan co-op as he excoriates Alger Hiss for failing to offer State Department protection to an American victim of Stalin. His prescience is often uncanny. Writing of Ronald Reagan as Governor of California in 1968, he could have been summing up Reagan's presidency 20 years later: "For touching a people who want to forget ugly problems, no politician equals the one who has already forgotten them himself...