Word: smear
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Urban thinker William H. Whyte has read endless obituaries of the American city. He has heard it called everything from "an ecological smear" to a "behavioral sink." The future, he has been told, is elsewhere: in the suburbs, the country, anywhere but the city. Nonsense, says Whyte. "The core of the city has held. It has not gone to hell." What is more, he argues, "the city remains a magnificent place to do business, and that is part of the rediscovery of the center. While we are losing a lot of functions that we used to enjoy, we are intensifying...
...employ muck mavens like Atwater -- even elevate them to prominence -- and then dissociate himself from their tactics. Last week the President acknowledged that the attack on Tom Foley was "disgusting . . . against everything I have tried to stand for in political life." Yet, though Atwater initially defended the Foley smear, Bush stood up for him. Atwater's fouling the civic atmosphere with vicious misinformation is bad enough; compounding that with White House hypocrisy is too much. If Bush really wants to prove himself a political environmentalist in search of a kinder, gentler America, he should sack Atwater...
...effective smear has at its core an outrageous charge that would be devastating if true. The author must be both coy and cowardly: he must make the charge stick while retaining deniability. Although Goodin, Atwater's friend of a decade, took the fall, the tactic bore the unmistakable Atwater stamp. As Bush's 1988 campaign manager, Atwater specialized in character assassination: last summer Michael Dukakis was dogged by rumors that he had been treated for depression. In a similar incident in 1980, Atwater was managing the campaign of South Carolina Congressman Floyd Spence when a reporter asked Spence's Democratic...
...mayor's rough-hewn style can provokeangry responses. At one recent council meeting,Councillor Francis H. Duehay '55 accused the mayorof trying to "smear" speakers by digging up thecity's ancient history...
That unanimity crippled efforts by Wright and his allies to portray the report as a partisan Republican attempt to smear a powerful political opponent, and it tilted the odds against the Speaker. Only a few weeks ago, Wright had seemed likely to hold on to his job. Now close observers of Congress, such as lobbyists and Democratic powers outside the legislative chamber, think the best he can expect is to retain the speakership until late in the year, before being pushed into resignation. House Republican Whip Newt Gingrich, who first called for the Wright investigation, went even further, predicting that...