Word: wonderments
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...personal access to the candidates, charisma and charm have tended to overshadow all but the most transcendent election issues. But in an era of peace and at least a veneer of prosperity, the 1988 campaign has so far been dominated by slogans and sound bites masquerading as substance. Small wonder that, after two terms of aw-shucks Reaganism, the electorate seems to be measuring Bush and Dukakis by the same standards they assess Bill Cosby -- comfort and likability...
...there are those who wonder if the shuttle's aura can survive Trump's touch. Some suggest that the ascetic aesthetic of the old shuttle rather than a glitzier image of a flying casino may be better suited to its puritanical passengers. "It's pretty much a business operation," says airline analyst Raymond Neidl. "If he glitzes it up too much, the average guy will say, 'That's not my ball...
...Haitians. One shows Namphy with his arms around two Macoutes assassins killed by mobs during the coup. Namphy apparently also had a nasty temper; a Haitian businessman claims he vowed to murder two U.S. legislators if they showed up to observe last November's elections. (They never came.) No wonder no country has offered Namphy political asylum...
...drive west along the Mexican highway, listening to my car radio and its plaintive norteno corridos (a kind of Mexican country-and-western in which unrequited love, boozy camaraderie and unfaithful women are constant themes), I wonder about the growing clamor in the U.S. for more drug interdiction programs and even a military "sealing" of the border. Could a democracy manage such an operation in peacetime? And if the U.S. Government could not stop Americans from supplying guns to Colombia's drug cartel, what hope did it have of stopping non-Americans from catering to the U.S. addiction for drugs...
James Joyce had a lovely phrase in Finnegans Wake: "The hereweareagain gaieties." A Kennedy campaign always had the hereweareagain gaieties, that Irish quality of politics as frolic, overlaid with a unique elegance and a ruthlessness that advanced upon you with the brightest of teeth. No wonder that in the presidential campaign of 1988, Americans feel a nostalgia for the festive in their politics. American politics used to be fun. Once upon a time, lively, funny people practiced the art. In a priceless line about the 1988 race, Robert Strauss, former Democratic Party chairman and an accomplished humorist, said Dukakis reminded...