Word: rye
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...them, she swears, "I'll lock them in every afternoon"--but she looks doubtful even as she says it. Ultimately, she hopes, the striving for success they've grown up with will check the urge to rebel. "I want to be like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye and stop these kids from going off the cliff," she says. "But then I look at the breadth of the problem and think...
...Bill Clinton really wants to be: it turns out he is Holden Caulfield. Near the end of J.D. Salinger's classic novel of teenage angst, which Hillary Clinton bought a copy of during the Clintons' 1993 summer vacation on Martha's Vineyard, Caulfield explains what the "catcher in the rye" means...
...keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye, and all," he says. "Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean, if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just...
What all these moves have in common--and there will be a parade of such initiatives from now until November--is that they are designed to cast the President in effect as the energetic young man standing in the rye, protecting our children from running over the cliff. It is a strategy designed to recast the image of government: instead of the supercilious bureaucrat with mountains of paper and regulations, government now becomes the safety-patrol volunteer, the lifeguard, the friendly cop on the beat buying a lost child an ice cream cone before calling his worried parents...
...they would most trust to care for their children. It was his attempt to cast himself as the responsible adult in the race. He never dreamed that the Clinton campaign had already decided to offer up a young, energetic President standing between their children and the abyss beyond the rye...