Word: timidity
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Bush was frustrated. Deeply stung by domestic and allied criticism that he was drifting into a policy of pallid reaction to Kremlin moves, disappointed in the much touted "review" of Soviet policy that advised only a timid "status quo plus," Bush finally found the urge for action. More important, Baker returned from Moscow convinced that the Soviets were "really serious" about transforming the conventional balance. Gorbachev had laid out a forthcoming Soviet offer that looked as if it would produce both a propaganda coup and an opening for negotiations. Says a senior White House official: "Baker had a feeling that...
...consumption of gasoline in the U.S. The Administration is expected to announce soon that by 1991 automakers will be required to raise the average fuel efficiency of their fleets to 27.5 m.p.g., up from 26.5 m.p.g. this year. That is a step in the right direction, but an extremely timid one. The Government should be setting much higher goals. An even quicker way to curb fuel consumption would be to boost the gasoline tax, but Bush seems to be locked $ into his "Read my lips" campaign pledge to avoid new taxes...
...half- cocked," says a senior White House aide. "He has repeatedly said, 'I'm not going to make one of those big early-term mistakes like the Bay of Pigs.' " Yet faced with a political upheaval in the Soviet Union and its spillover in Europe, Bush seems almost recklessly timid, unwilling to respond with the imagination and articulation that the situation requires. "He is supposed to lead, but he is not even really trying yet," complains a British diplomat...
Much of it still does. Reni did not make things easy for himself. Apart from being superstitious (he kept seeing a phantom light over his bed) and timid to the point of paranoia (he refused any food sent to him as a gift for fear that it was poisoned), he was a compulsive gambler. It was his only vice. His sex life should certainly have appealed to prudish Ruskin, for it did not exist: he shunned women in the fear that they might be witches. But gambling debts led him to churn out hack paintings, with predictable results...
...Abyssinian congregation makes every timid white sojourner feel serenely at home. At the service's end, one parishioner approached a visitor, extended his hand and said, "Thank you for joining us. Won't you come again?" It is an invitation no "foreigner" could refuse, after a trip uptown that he began in fear and skepticism and ended by believing the unbelievable. "Harlem," he says, invoking Duke Ellington, "I love you madly...