Word: sununu
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Deep coughing, a predisposition to sickness and a perpetual sluggishness were hints that something was up. But just as one-time MIT engineering professor John Sununu can decry the "fuss" over global warming and ozone depletion, the public relations experts from the tobacco industry continued to assuage the doubts of their wheezing and cancerous customers with advertising like, "More doctors smoke Camels than any other brand...
Example: on the eve of the Nicaraguan election in February, "everyone here hoped the resistance would win, but only Sununu really believed it and said so," recalls Robert Gates, the deputy national security adviser. When intelligence experts predicted victory for the Sandinista government, Sununu argued that they must be missing something: Nicaraguans had to be fed up with their crashing economy, even though under such a repressive regime they would be afraid to tell pollsters the truth. During Bush's morning intelligence update on the Friday before the election, a CIA briefer again predicted a Sandinista victory, and Sununu puckishly...
...Simpson of Wyoming, the assistant Senate Republican leader, insisted that the President was not talking about income taxes, for heaven's sake. Maybe excise taxes, or energy taxes, or a kind of national sales tax, or something or other, but never income taxes. Bush's chief of staff, John Sununu, speaking as "a senior White House official" -- a transparent disguise -- then gave a novel definition of what "no preconditions" meant. The Democrats, he said, were free to propose a tax boost, but "it's our prerogative to say no. And I emphasize...
...Sununu, whose task was to keep the Republican right quiet until the summit concluded, apparently did his job with far greater zeal than Bush intended. Sununu's efforts almost torpedoed the summit before it started. Democrats immediately took them as confirmation of their darkest suspicions -- that Bush is again trying to portray the Democrats as the high-tax party, by euchring them into proposing an increase that he could either virtuously reject or pretend had been rammed down his throat as the price for shrinking the deficit. "Now I wonder if this ((summit invitation)) is a good-faith effort...
With the deficit rising and revenues falling, the President calls a budget summit with "no preconditions." But the talks are nearly torpedoed by the brusque remarks of the White House chief of staff. -- Big Bad John Sununu is not much good at making friends, but Bush's right-hand man is a whiz at influencing policy...