Word: wimpish
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Since last winter, Bush strategists had known they had to spruce up the Vice President's image. George Bush was seen as awkward, wimpish, maladroit. So Bush's handlers engineered a makeover. They had him utter self-deprecating cracks about his lack of charisma. They arranged for him to be photographed amid his photogenic grandchildren...
...fair to Reagan. As many believe the Government frequently manipulates the way journalists report the news. Says Media Specialist Michael J. Robinson of Georgetown University, adviser for the latest poll, "It was a surprise to us to find that the public is more likely to see the press as wimpish than imperial...
...submersion of his own identity may be politically harmful. Says a former Bush aide: "It's a lapdog problem." If Reagan is reelected, his scrupulous sidekick may not strike voters as especially presidential four years hence. "It makes him look wimpish," says an adviser. "It makes him look like he doesn't have an opinion of his own." Just so. When Bush was asked about his views on abortion in September, says an aide, "frankly, he couldn't remember what his position was." Bush is motivated more by the old patrician devotion to public service than...
...just a likeness but some dominant trait that sums up the man. The result can be at war with the cartoonists' political sympathies. "I have a conflict," says Don Wright of the Miami News. "Basically, I'm rooting for Mondale, but sometimes he comes across bland and wimpish." Oliphant draws him with "sleepy eyes bringing out the boring aspects." The Los Angeles Times's Paul Conrad says, "I'd like to see him do better and don't take any relish in making him look incompetent. I'm despondent these days." Peters finds Mondale...
...misplaced. In the old noirs, women were mostly seen as black widow spiders, luring the wimpish male toward his doom. Placing a new, healthy vision of female strength in the old context is a beguiling notion. Not that Truffaut lingers over his cleverness in providing recall with a subtext. Mostly he is concerned with driving his vehicle along at a great pace, so that no one notices the occasional knocks in the engine or the potholes in the plot. With help from his cinematographer, Nestor Almendros, who perfectly captures the sleazy artiness of those long-ago B pictures, Truffaut runs...