Word: referendum
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Last year Armstrong persuaded the advocate community in Texas to play nice in support of a referendum to spend $3 billion fighting cancer over the next 10 years. The passage of the proposal was a huge victory in a spend-wary state, and perhaps it was a model for others. The program makes cancer prevention and screening key components, which saves the state money in the long...
...Clinton really wants to give Obama a boost, he won't just try to re-litigate the 1990s. If this election were a referendum on the Clinton legacy, his wife would be preparing her acceptance speech instead of fielding praise for her endorsement speech. Tonight, the man who declared the end of the era of big government can make a more powerful statement by declaring the end of another era, his own era, an era of small politics. You could call it the Clinton-Bush era, an era of partisan war rooms and poll-tested spin and round-the-clock...
Over the past month, a foolish narrative has been abroad in the land: that this election is going to be a "referendum" on Barack Obama. This is not uncommon in presidential politics--John Kerry's consultants fantasized that the 2004 election was going to be a referendum on George W. Bush--but it is usually peddled by weak campaigns that want to avoid dealing with their own candidate's deficiencies. Presidential elections are never referendums. They are, ultimately, a choice. Two candidates stand on a stage in debate: they talk; you decide...
Quite often, though strangely not in Kerry's case, the referendum gambit is a rationale for mudslinging. This year we have John McCain's attempt to paint Obama as aloof, messianic ... a celebrity, like Paris or Britney. The McCain ads have the slightly sordid quality of an inside joke: Oprah Winfrey called Obama "the One," and McCain's dyspeptic staffers latched on to that moniker, and now there's a sardonic ad using the messianic nickname, filled with celestial images of Obama smiling and orating grandiloquently, followed by Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea. When Obama--correctly--said that keeping...
...attempts to dismiss Obama remind me of the Carter-Reagan matchup of 1980, another supposed referendum election. Ronald Reagan was ... a celebrity, a movie star, a right-wing lightweight. It seemed impossible--to most Democrats, at least--that he could win, although he did hold a slight lead going into the conventions. The fall campaign was very close--until, finally, the two candidates debated a week before the election, and the celebrity cleaned the President's clock. "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" Reagan asked in his closing statement. He seemed every bit as substantial...