Word: shrewder
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...solid 30 per cent of the vote just about any time, have learned their lesson. In 1961 hordes of them defected to vote for a small-time Republican political science professor named John Tower, thinking a good liberal could beat him easily the next time around. But Tower was shrewder than they had expected--he managed to build up a base of support that has sustained him in office. This election year marks the most serious challenge Tower has faced since he first went to Washington...
...sources. Given the circumstances, McCarthy must have been tempted to consult his predecessor's text. Yet she is footnoted only once in the biography, to recommend her work for a contrasting opinion. Considering the deft grasp of history displayed in Celine, you'd expect Patrick McCarthy to be a shrewder politician...
...French. The Soviets also committed horrible gaffes. They sent snowplows to tropical Guinea (they have since been converted to bulldozers) and modern toilets to its capital, even though Conakry had no sewage system to which they could be connected. But all that is past history. Soviet officials today are shrewder; they also keep a much lower profile. Having learned that too many white faces alienate African aid recipients, Moscow now uses swarthy Algerians and Cubans as stand-ins whenever possible...
Conceivably, the Kennedy bill might render officials even less communicative and more secretive, inhibited and legalistically subtle, more adept at what Carlyle called "the talent of lying in a way that cannot be laid hold of." Where virtue and veracity are concerned, it might be shrewder to make a sunny presumption of innocence and rely on the American people's proven talent for discerning, sooner or later, that they are being lied...
...Nasser mocked him as "old Goha," after a legendary fall guy in Egyptian folk humor. He insisted that "Sadat's greatest ambition is to own a big automobile and have the government pay for the gasoline." But on his own, old Goha turned out to be perhaps a shrewder politician than Nasser, and one of his most astute moves was to proclaim an infitah, or open-door economic policy. Two months after he was installed, he called for the repeal of the "sequestration" orders that Nasser had used to seize the land and property of the upper class. According...