Word: tacking
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...change in the Kremlin's rhetoric should not be seen as a sign that the Soviets have abandoned their belief in Communism or become converts to the West. The new tack seems motivated mainly by a realization that military competition and Third World adventurism are expensive and not all that rewarding. Keeping Cuba afloat costs the Soviets more than $4 billion a year; the Afghanistan occupation requires the deployment of close to 120,000 troops; the military budget consumes, according to some estimates, about 14% of total government spending. Gorbachev's domestic objectives will demand a massive reallocation of resources...
...tough amendment ("It's not protectionism, it's promotionism") and Dukakis staking out the internationalist position ("I'm somebody who believes that more trade is better than less trade"). Gephardt, who has been searching for a debating foil since Gary Hart left the race, took a far more aggressive tack with reporters, accusing Dukakis of following a "blame America first" line...
Lyndon Johnson, who reached political maturity under Roosevelt, was very much attuned to constitutional battles. The supreme legislator of this century as a Senator, L.B.J. noticeably changed his tack when he got in the White House. "I'm not going to leave this job weaker than when I came in," he told his counsel, Harry McPherson. But for all his muscle flexing, Johnson chose to retire rather than run for re-election in the teeth of the Viet Nam protests. Six years later, Nixon would resign, swept from power by public disapproval and Congress's instigation of impeachment proceedings...
This new "Yes, but it wasn't illegal" tack is part of a broader White House attempt to shift the focus of the Iran-contra drama. As long as Reagan and other top officials were pleading ignorance, each new disclosure about their ties to Oliver North's secret contra-supply network qualified as a front-page headline. Now the Administration is stipulating that it did indeed support the contra cause but that this was well within the bounds of the shifting congressional restrictions that existed between 1983 and 1986. Thus the very real moral and political questions about a secret...
Adler has typically been on the opposite tack from the majority since the beginning of his own education. As a precocious 15-year-old who often told chums, "Be quiet; I'm thinking," he discovered that John Stuart Mill had read Plato by age ten. Forthwith Adler devoured Plato's works. With equal speed and assurance, he acquired his scorn for educational conventions, not to mention conventional educators. Then, as now, he found no use for grades: "What do they measure? The ability of some children to bone up for examinations." Given the power, he would abolish all marks...