Word: themes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Texas, though beginning to recover from a severe oil, real estate and banking slump, is still depressed enough in some areas to deny Bush half of the peace-and-prosperity theme he is pushing elsewhere and to open at least some ears to Dukakis' time-for-a-change argument. While the unemployment rate has dropped to 6.8%, it is well above the national average of 5.6%. Texas continues to reel from bank closings -- 93 as of last week -- and failures of savings and loan associations. Says Luan Tatum, Democratic chair in Angelina County: "I watch the TV and hear them...
...carried out the theme set for the IOP by Governor Thornburgh [the IOP director] that was to give a priority to elective politics, and we have three people who have held elected office," said David R. Runkel, the IOP's deputy director. "The others have been closely associated with political campaigns and have worked directly for people who have held elective office...
...efforts to impugn Dukakis' patriotism are part of a larger, time- tested Republican theme: to portray the Democrats as the inheritors of intellectual doubt and malaise, the party that is soft on defense, that perceives America as being on a long, slow decline. The Republicans, by contrast, have successfully cast themselves as the party of stand-tall patriotism and vigilant anti-Communism. As the hawkish Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich of Georgia put it, "If this election is between George Bush and someone who is more liberal than George McGovern, we win. If it's an election between two competent leaders...
...modern American readers, Tolstoy's life sometimes reads like a 19th century version of Portnoy's Complaint, in which the protagonist never stops griping that his desires are repugnant to his morals. Tolstoy's diaries and instructional writings are engorged with this seriocomic theme, a fact that led Biographer Henri Troyat to conclude more than 20 years ago that Russia's literary icon was "a billy-goat pining for purity...
...variation on the sage theme comes from Claremont Scholar Burton Mack, who sees Jesus as a "rather normal cynic-type figure," using the term not in the modern sense but referring to a particular school of ancient Greek philosophers, Diogenes among them, who advocated virtue and self-control. Like them, he made ample use of a biting sense of humor ("Let the dead bury their dead"). "Jesus wasn't reforming Judaism," Mack insists. "He was just taking up a Hellenistic kind of social criticism...