Word: wonk
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Howard over the Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. These episodes - and several others - reveal that Latham has terrific instincts for the nitty-gritty of daily political combat. But the truly amazing feature of the rise of Latham during an election year has been that the one-time policy wonk has opted for slogans rather than details, symbols instead of costed measures. We've heard about Latham's "ladder of opportunity," but what kind of tax reform will secure the rungs? Although this policy-lite approach seems not to have hurt Latham's showing in opinion polls...
...admits he knew less about explosives than about oil--the stuff of real political power in Venezuela, which possesses the hemisphere's mother lode of petroleum reserves. "In the mountains, I organized seminars on oil administration," says Rodriguez, 66, whom fellow combatants remember as being the same energy-policy wonk then that he is today. "I committed myself body and soul to it." Not surprisingly, his petro-philosophy was more Marx than Rockefeller, and his rhetoric even now might give a capitalist oilman cold sweats. "The people are the owners of their natural resources," says Rodriguez, "so we all have...
...PDVSA-financed social projects, whose popularity among the poor may spell the difference for Chavez in the referendum. "We're going to be an even more model oil company," says Rodriguez, "because we'll be as visible in the barrios as we are in the markets." The policy wonk, in other words, is still a rebel. --With reporting by Brian Ellsworth/Caracas
...others increasingly believe that Okada-the scion of a Japanese retailing dynasty and a Harvard graduate-is the party's best long-term hope of presenting a unified front against the LDP. His reputation as a serious policy wonk-particularly on Japan's hot-button pension-reform issue-and his history as a committed consensus-builder, they say, have made him a potent contrast to Koizumi, whom voters have begun to think of as imperious and impulsive. "Okada is a leader for the times," says Etsushi Tanifuji, a political-science professor at Waseda University in Tokyo. "After 9/11, politics...
...instinctively recoil when we encounter any remotely scientific-sounding phrase—even if polite culture insists that we profess ignorance about science. But the challenge is two-fold: if those of us in science can’t make our research make sense to a poetry wonk, then our efforts are in vain. If we want our friends to understand our passion, we must make it more understandable than the latest issue of the European Journal of Biochemistry...