Word: tinkering
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Other personality sculptors normally insist, with Guggenheim and Treleaven, that their role is supportive only, and that the candidate, not the playlet, is the thing. Occasionally there is a dissenting and disturbing voice of candor. Myron McDonald, formerly with Jack Tinker & Partners, the firm that created the widely applauded Alka-Seltzer commercials on television, has said: "We looked on the Governor [Rockefeller] almost as if he were a product like Alka-Seltzer." It had been a meeting of minds; Rockefeller's 1966 campaign manager...
William Pfeiffer, hired Tinker just because the Alka-Seltzer ads were so good. The firm is still doing Rockefeller's spots. Not only images but also their makers are sometimes flexible. In 1964, one of the West Coast's most important political management firms, Spencer-Roberts & Associates, helped Rockefeller pin an ultraconservative label on Barry Goldwater and his active backers, including Ronald Reagan. Two years later, working for Reagan, their first move was to try to remove...
...Administration's proposals if they were redrawn in such a way that they could not be turned against those whose offenses are trivial-or merely unpopular. Others go further. In a democracy, they say, mobsters have rights too. The most trenchant criticism against both bills is that they tinker with the tools of law enforcement instead of attacking more basic problems: crime-breeding courts and prisons, social inequities and public complacency about vice and corruption...
There is a sadness in Nilsson's work too, but, like the great tragic clowns, he feels that he may as well put on a cheerful front until proved wrong. His specialty is the melancholy ballad delivered with an upbeat melody. Mr. Tinker, for example, is about a tailor whose life has passed him by. "It isn't easy for a tailor/When there's nothing left to sew" goes one of its lines. The lyrics may be sorrowful, but the music is pure devil-may-care...
Another source of comfort used to be the countless signs of American inventiveness and ingenuity, a tradition stretching from colonial tinker to modern technocrat, asserting not only mastery over nature but also a sly, triumphant outwitting of every kind of adversity. It was the frontier spirit mechanized. Despite the triumph of the moon voyages, that spirit now seems suddenly unequal to mundane problems: they are beyond the powers of technological or scientific tinkering...