Word: wonk
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...electoral defeat, Koizumi signed up as an assistant to an LDP heavyweight, Takeo Fukuda. The job involved answering the phone, greeting guests, running errands and even dusting Fukuda's shoes. It was Koizumi's political boot camp. His antiestablishment streak developed under Fukuda, himself a bright, squeaky-clean policy wonk who frequently took on the LDP's most powerful clique, headed by Kakuei Tanaka and filled with politicians with cozy ties to special interest groups like construction bosses, farmers and war veterans. This is the faction most dependent on pork-barrel politics, campaign war chests and the obtaining of government...
...meetings the President convenes are rarely forums for debate: nobody is expected to contradict the party leader. He recalls challenging Kim on a foreign policy issue. Instead of responding, Kim stalked out of the room. Today, few dare to dispute him. That's partly because Kim, a policy wonk, is usually better informed than anyone else. But it's also because he is convinced he has all the answers, says Sogang University's Sohn: "When old friends have critical comments, they are not invited back...
...Mulgan, 39, heads the Performance and Innovation Unit of the Cabinet Office and is central casting's notion of what the Americans call a wonk: the serious, policy-driven young man who can argue for hours in a windowless conference room about the fine points of progressive taxation. He is also seriously charming, disarmingly direct and an unusual marriage of fresh thinker and hustling entrepreneur. In his previous life, he organized rock concerts for Labour, consulted on telecommunications, wrote books and founded the respected Third Way think tank Demos. After working for Blair at Downing Street, where he helped launch...
...Sperling, 40, even issued the standard non-denial denial: "We're just friends." To be fair, Sperling is not all aggregate demand and no play. A few years ago, W magazine named him "one of the hottest catches on the Washington social scene" and "an unusually likable policy wonk." Campbell, 30, has been linked to Joseph Fiennes, Robert De Niro and U2's Adam Clayton, among others. She is also known to cause rapid GDP growth and demand-pull inflation...
Quiet and intense, O'Neill described himself recently as a "free-ranging, self-admitted maverick," but he's also a wonk, drilling down into the details of a problem personally until he finds what he wants. When Hillary Clinton's health-care plan came out in 1994, O'Neill stayed up all night and read the 240-page document. "Mention Social Security to some people," says former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills, who serves with O'Neill on the board of Lucent Technologies, "and their eyes glaze over. But Paul's eyes light up. He knows about the details...