Word: sideshow
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...conundrum for an Administration that considers foreign affairs a sideshow is that its policies require deeper thought and more salesmanship now that the communist menace has evaporated. Clinton is still looking for an easy grade on international studies: that the U.N. will coalesce around U.S. preferences, that there will be obvious connections between his foreign forays and voters' wallets, that foreign crises won't mess up his watch. But at home ^ and abroad, as Bosnia shows, consensus on hard problems means tough choices and firm leadership. The world expects and wants that from Washington, a legacy Clinton must live...
...haircut hubbub even had a complex sideshow: the disclosure that the Administration had abruptly fired seven longtime employees of the White House travel office, which handles trips for the press. The move should have been a public relations plus -- rooting out shoddy accounting practices and gross mismanagement in an office with large amounts of unaccounted-for cash and noncompetitive contracts...
None of this would have happened without Kelleher, 61, a folksy ex-San Antonio, Texas, lawyer who runs the company like a carnival sideshow. He schmoozes with employees, who know him as "Uncle Herb"; stages weekly parties at corporate headquarters; and encourages such zany antics by his flight attendants as organizing trivia contests, delivering instructions in rap and awarding prizes for the passengers with the largest holes in their socks. The wackiness has a calculated purpose -- to generate a gung-ho spirit that will boost productivity, the key to Southwest's goal of carefully scripted growth...
...themes stand out in this lumpy but fast-reading unauthorized biography, which gets the record straight yet seems to miss the inner man. (Shawcross, a British writer perhaps best known for his savaging of Henry Kissinger's Cambodia policy in Sideshow, managed to interview his subject. Murdoch read the manuscript but refused to comment on it.) One is that Murdoch is a daring but occasionally imprudent gambler, usually with other people's money. In 1990 News faced a liquidity crisis caused by the recession, a huge drop in advertising revenues, and Murdoch's reliance on short-term loans...
...that the games showcase amateur athletics was never more hollow than when attached to the U.S. hoop squad. The Dream Team (the N.B.A. 11 best players plus Duke's Christian Laettner) naturally gave opponents the DTs. It was a brutal, pointless spectacle, akin to the Harlem Globetrotters doing their sideshow humiliation, for fun and profit, of a flat-footed pickup team...