Word: scandalous
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...planes on training runs. It raked over his hard-partying past, his affair that destroyed his first marriage, and his second wife's onetime addiction to pain-killers. Before the final credits rolled, it had also worked through his involvement (and exoneration) in the Keating Five savings and loan scandal of the 1980s...
...presidential run, the Kennedys spread the story of his bravery in the Pacific, not his conquests in Georgetown. But that was when smart candidates wanted charisma. Now they want cover, which, oddly enough, requires them to make pre-emptive strikes on themselves. In the aftermath of the White House scandal, it's a good bet that "youthful indiscretions" will get you more press than anything you say about school vouchers. Will voters care? If the past year teaches anything, it's that, up to a point still undefined, they won't. But for now, it's a smart move...
...American political class--that loose aggregate of politicians, pollsters, consultants, campaign managers and media commentators--the questions about post-Monica fallout are anything but academic. The 2000 campaign trail is already moving through terrain pocked and cratered by the scandal. The early front runners are trying to define an acceptable zone of privacy, but they find themselves in a world in which the only rule is that there are no rules. Whether and how voters react to one's past may depend on how serious it was--a one-night stand or cartwheeling adulteries...
Some political pros are hoping that the revelations about Clinton and Monica--and for that matter Henry Hyde, Bob Livingston and Thomas Jefferson--will inoculate future candidates against damage. Clinton has made "remarkable scandal commonplace," says Republican consultant Alex Castellanos. "Now to get in trouble, it wouldn't have to be sex with farm animals but with alien farm animals." Ed Gillespie, an adviser to Ohio Representative John Kasich, chairman of the House Budget Committee and would-be President, says, "The public's definition of character has changed. They'd like the President to be an upstanding person. But what...
...scandal that is now mercifully over has helped introduce a new explicitness into our conversations. But the Lewinsky matter is only the latest in a series of episodes that have made graphic sex talk more common. The onset of the AIDS epidemic brought the clinical-sounding phrase anal sex into our homes, and the Clarence Thomas hearings gave the imprimatur of the U.S. Senate to dirty talk that would make us wince in mixed conversations. The rape trials of William Kennedy Smith and Mike Tyson accelerated the trend toward frank sex talk, and the rise of Viagra brought to mind...