Word: ronalds
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Every now and then, magic can happen. It wasn't until Ronald Reagan demolished Jimmy Carter's repeated critique of his position on Medicare with "There you go again" that many Americans began to get comfortable with the idea of Reagan in the Oval Office. But more often, what voters take away from the debates is confirmation of their misgivings about a candidate: Richard Nixon's inner darkness, Gerald Ford's cluelessness, George H.W. Bush's aloofness, Gore's changeability...
Since the invention of the word, however, a long line of Presidents have gone out of their way to avoid using it. Jimmy Carter resisted branding the Khmer Rouge with the term. Ronald Reagan avoided applying it to Saddam Hussein. The first President Bush refused to apply it to the Bosnian Serbs. And Bill Clinton skirted the label for Bosnia and Rwanda. State Department spokeswoman Christine Shelly became the face of Clinton's semantic wiggle when she tried to insist that, although hundreds of thousands of Rwandans had been butchered, only "acts" of genocide were occurring...
Just as Jimmy Carter’s campaign failed to learn from his 1976 near-loss and let Ronald Reagan define the terms of the 1980 debate … just as Walter Mondale’s campaign failed to learn from 1980’s vacillation and never projected consistency…just as Michael Dukakis’s campaign failed to learn from 1984’s interest group liberalism and ignored inoculating himself from appearing too far left…just as Al Gore’s campaign failed to learn from 1988 and neglected to respond...
...Together, they crafted what would become neo-conservatism—an attack on Jimmy’s Carter weakness, but mainly a new conservative agenda to end arms control, rebuild the military, aid anti-Communists and thus (they believed) defeat the Soviet Union. This was the coherent policy vision Ronald Reagan could consistently embrace; this was the program the voters of 1980 understood they would be getting...
Dershowitz said that Tribe’s 1985 book was an effective element of “the Democratic arsenal” as liberals tried to block Ronald Reagan’s right-wing judicial nominations...