Word: voting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...against what they saw as an attempted White House whitewash. Nebraska's James Exon declared that the President should start seeking a different nominee. Michigan's Carl Levin asked for more time to look into even newer allegations against Tower. Reading the growing sentiment, Warner suggested that a committee vote be delayed at least until week...
Bush, for whom loyalty is close to a religion, quickly announced that he would carry the fight to the Senate floor. A vote by the full chamber may take place this week, assuming Tower does not take the White House off the hook by withdrawing. Considering that the Democrats hold a 55-to-45 majority -- and that, for all the sanctimonious clucking about Tower's personal habits, last week's vote was overtly partisan -- Bush is likely to suffer a second and perhaps more damaging loss...
...across to many people as a lightweight. Other debatable appointments were those of Boyden Gray, the ethics chief with ethical problems of his own, and chief of staff John Sununu, ! an abrasive former New Hampshire Governor untrained in the ways of Washington. Sununu was insisting "we've got the votes" to confirm Tower over the powerful Nunn's opposition, a boast echoed by other White House officials only a day before the committee vote. Bush's political judgment was no better. It was the President who proclaimed last Tuesday that an FBI report had "gunned down" the allegations of heavy...
...Washington it is necessary to deal with Democrats too. In the Tower case, he underrated the power of Sam Nunn, the owlish Democrat who has established such a reputation for disinterested expertise on military policy that he can take nearly all of his party with him on any vote on defense matters. Sununu compounded the trouble by turning over most of the pro-Tower campaigning to aides led by Frederick McClure, who landed the job of White House congressional liaison only after two other candidates declined to work for Sununu. McClure is a former Tower aide who proved curiously unaware...
After the vote, the White House went on a binge of finger-pointing. Some Bush aides blamed the stunning defeat on ex-Tower aides who, they said, had been lobbying ineptly on Capitol Hill without proper supervision. The Tower men scoffed back that they had been watched closely all the way by Sununu. Said one: "Sununu has been in on all the major decisions." But all sides agreed on the real villain: Sam Nunn. Several accused the chairman of deciding secretly two weeks ago that Tower had to go and then browbeating his Democratic colleagues into a party-line vote...