Word: talisman
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...impossible. Only a handful of races--maybe 40 at most--were thought to be in play, so gaining six seats was a formidable task. Once-a-decade redistricting had helped the G.O.P. a bit. And Republicans believed that George Bush's sky-high approval rating gave them a powerful talisman against the off-year election jinx that often hits the President's party...
...impossible. Only a handful of races-maybe 40 at most-were thought to be in play, so gaining six seats was a formidable task. Once-a-decade redistricting had helped the G.O.P. a bit. And Republicans believed that George Bush's sky-high approval rating gave them a powerful talisman against the off-year election jinx that often hits the President's party...
...against godless communism, President Eisenhower urged Congress to add the words under God to the oath to reaffirm "the transcendence of religious faith in America?s heritage and future." Now faced with a war of uncertain definition and length, the country has once again embraced the pledge as a talisman against harm...
Conversely again, China's tenuous protest-music movement has focused on Western-influenced rock, which the government first banned (as a bourgeois and immoral influence), then in the late '80s grudgingly opened up to (as a talisman of capitalism), with heavy censor oversight. Just as China has spent the past decade trying to prove that communist capitalism is no contradiction in terms, so is it trying to show that defanged rock music can be the totalitarian capitalist's pal. (Take the danger out of rock and what do you have, if not a Britney Spears Pepsi commercial?) Arguably...
Democrats, of course, immediately pronounced the budget a fraud and a cheat. The Administration's central claim was that discretionary spending next year would rise 4%--a figure its publicists held aloft as a talisman of compassionate conservatism, at once generous and sensible. Not so, said the green eyeshades at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Leaving aside increases for defense, international affairs and a new reserve fund, "domestic appropriated programs" would increase a total of just 1.5% next year. Since any increase lower than the inflation rate is, by Washington tradition, considered a decrease, Democrats were happy...