Word: tests
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hard to know which was worse about Barack Obama's dismissal of small-town voters as narrow-minded, churchgoing gun nuts: the original arrogance of his remarks or his repeated attempts to explain them. If there was any consolation to a campaign facing its most serious test yet, it was that attempts by both Hillary Clinton and John McCain to make hay at his expense did not go over very well either--which just serves as one more reminder of the challenge politicians face when they talk to and about voters who have lost the most in the economic earthquakes...
...study for the Brookings Institution, visiting fellow Ruy Teixeira and Emory University political-science professor Alan Abramowitz argue that the test for Democrats is not whether they can win working-class whites outright but whether they can hold their losses among these voters to 10 percentage points or less. In 2000 Al Gore lost them to George W. Bush by 17 percentage points; four years later, John Kerry lost them by 23 points. By contrast, Democratic candidates in the 2006 midterm elections ran 10 percentage points behind Republicans among working-class whites--and managed to win back the House...
...Even the two dissenters, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter, weren't much comfort to the inmates. Their opinion would have sent the case back to the Kentucky courts to decide whether the execution team should use some test - like checking the condemned prisoner's reflexes by brushing his eyelashes - to determine whether he's unconscious before administering the second drug...
...about their prospects at the next election (which doesn't have to be held until 2010), openly wonder whether Brown's long time in Blair's shadow has truly prepared him for the top job. Seen through that prism, his U.S. trip and other such international fixtures are a test he cannot afford to flunk...
...doesn't have to test these findings in parliamentary elections anytime soon. But there's talk in Westminster of a plot to oust Brown, and there's a swell of open hostility toward him in the British media. Last fall, he flirted with calling a snap poll to win a new mandate in his own right - a gambit that proved disastrous when he balked at holding elections in the face of an upswing in support for the Conservative opposition. Another well-polished asset, Brown's reputation for sound economic stewardship, has become ever more tarnished as Britain's economy takes...