Word: romney
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Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is taking flak this week for his use of the term "tar baby" while addressing a group of Iowa Republicans on July 29 in a reference to Boston's troubled Big Dig highway project. Was he offensive in doing so? The head of the NAACP, Bruce Gordon, believes the governor "made a bad choice" in using such a term, the civil-rights leader told the Boston Herald. But Romney has his defenders as well, among them a minister in the Nation of Islam. Romney's spokesman apologized on his behalf, saying the governor simply meant...
...wandering into that territory, Romney has plenty of company. In May, rookie White House spokesman Tony Snow was asked about the government covertly collecting phone records. "I don't want to hug the tar baby of trying to comment on the program...," Snow replied, which brought him an instant round of static. Two years ago, TIME used the phrase, reporting that John Kerry's presidential advisers were telling him to get away from "the Iraq tar baby...
...trap a person." The term itself was popularized by the 19th-century Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris, in which the character Br'er Fox makes a doll out of tar to ensnare his nemesis Br'er Rabbit. The Oxford American Dictionary defines tar baby much like Romney used it, "a difficult problem, that is only aggravated by attempts to solve it." But the term also has had racial implications. In his book Coup, John Updike says of a white woman who prefers the company of black men, "some questing chromosome within holds her sexually fast...
...maybe taste the fair's famed fried Twinkies. Also planning to visit Iowa in August: 2004 Democratic running mates John Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina, Republican Senators John McCain of Arizona and Sam Brownback of Kansas, New York Governor George Pataki and Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney...
Both Patrick and Christopher F. O. Gabrieli ’81, the 2002 Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, committed to joining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI)—a pact among several Northeastern states to reduce carbon emissions that Governor W. Mitt Romney opposes...