Word: spencers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When the time comes to get back into politics, however, selling access can have its downside, as two top Bush campaign consultants, Stuart Spencer and Charles Black, are finding out. Each had what seemed to be a perfect client: the government of General Manuel Noriega of Panama (Spencer) and that of Prime Minister Lynden Pindling of the Bahamas (Black). Both politicians headed regimes that had full treasuries and lots of messy problems. But these drug- tainted leaders are proving to be unsavory associates for aides to a presidential candidate who favors the death penalty for drug dealers...
Like all other U.S. elections, this one will boil down to individual skirmishes in a handful of key states. Seven of the largest, with a total of 184 votes, form the no-man's-land in which the contest will be decided. Says Republican Consultant Stuart Spencer: "It's going to be a hell of a fight, with no prisoners taken. In the end, they'll be in the same states." What makes the current map such a crazy quilt is that the major battlegrounds stretch from New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the East through Ohio, Michigan and Illinois...
...makes no sense and does no good to lament little deteriorations on every side. Constant comparisons with better old days are illusory and unreliable. It's enough to say we used to have Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn and now we have Michael Douglas and Cher. If anything has been lessened at Wrigley Field, it is probably something quite small, certainly nothing to cry over, only a momentary feeling of letdown, like missing the train...
Italy, of course, is a favored setting of English and American fiction in which innocents abroad are stirred by art and sensuality. Spencer continues to use the convention effectively. The Cousins, a story in her newest collection, Jack of Diamonds, could be titled Maidenhead Revisited. Ella Mason, 50 and recently widowed, returns to Florence, where she and her hometown cousins from Martinsville, Ala., enjoyed a summer's frolic 30 years ago. One of them, Eric, now lives in Italy, and through a pleating of conversations and memories, Spencer reveals a complexity of attitudes and relationships. Not the least of them...
...Spencer's sociology and cosmopolitan tastes are not obvious. Geography, class and manners are surfaces that refract the deeper feelings and emerging awarenesses of her characters. Some are confronted with familiar situations. The young woman in the title story learns the truth about her parents' marriage after her mother dies and her father's new wife tactfully but deliberately eliminates traces of her predecessor. The plot of The Skaters is complicated and, yes, Jamesian: a disinherited son is helped by his lawyer's wife, whose lover steals the original copy of the damaging will. Spencer is dispassionate about domestic morality...