Word: wonk
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...policy-wonk heaven," said Bergthold, who noted that years of health-care ideas were being dusted off and hotly debated. And the details came together. Benefits moved fast: at a Saturday-morning session in the Roosevelt Room, a jogging suit-clad Clinton ordered Magaziner to come up with a standard benefits package as good as or better than that of the typical worker, which meant the plan had to emphasize preventive care, including physicals and baby checkups, and some controversial procedures like abortion. But it would exclude cosmetic surgery, eyeglasses and borderline therapies, such as weight reduction...
During this period, Clinton's religion found a dual expression, matching in some ways the tension in his personality between his populist leanings as an Elvis Presley-loving son of a small-town nurse and his intellectual elitism as a Rhodes scholar and full-time wonk. He developed an intense relationship with the Rev. W.O. Vaught of Immanuel Baptist, a biblical scholar known for his erudition, whose sermons were drawn directly from Scripture. Friends of both men say Clinton, who lost his father to a car accident before he was born, was drawn to him for his paternal and nonjudgmental...
...more than 20 years, Congressman and military wonk Les Aspin fantasized about becoming Secretary of Defense. Now, as he sits behind the huge desk in room 3E880, the top office in the Pentagon, Aspin's dream job has become something of a nightmare. His problem is in the timing. Rather than building an empire as his cold-war predecessors did, he has the task of bringing the Pentagon down to size and opening it up to diversity. That means smaller budgets, fewer troops, less new hardware, a streamlined bureaucracy and the possible integration of gays into the service. Making matters...
...fact, the style of the three fits in well with the somewhat technocratic, efficient and educated image the Clinton camp has projected in the past, Mankiw said, although he did not accept the characterization "policy wonk...
...friends in the intellectual elite and his friends in Arkansas. "He has tried to present the ideas of the elite to ordinary people, and he has tried to present ordinary people to the elite," observes Ralph Whitehead, journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "He can speak wonk, and he can speak American." But that is too rare a skill in his present circle. "On the campaign trail, he had Jim Carville, who had no trouble making himself understood in barrooms. He needs people in the Administration who will do the same...