Word: wonking
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Yeah, right. Actually, I can easily imagine Senator Clinton chatting away with pals about the need for "cross-border cooperation on economic development with Mexico." She's a drop-dead policy wonk. And she's never going to be a warm, cuddly public person. She attacks her job like an assembly-line spot-welding robot, hitting each and every talking point precisely, even when she's rusty with allergies. And that, ultimately, is what she brings to this campaign: reliability, as opposed to experience. She has never been an executive decision maker, but she is solid as granite and righteous...
...result is not just the oil lobbyist caught editing science out of climate reports, or the energy lobbyist convicted in the Abramoff scandal. It's the scandal-free corporate welfare, tax breaks and other Big Government goodies for industry. Baroody is a family man, a policy wonk whose father founded a think tank. But he's been working the Washington henhouse since 1970, and he has fought to shield manufacturers from claims and fines. Giving a NAM lobbyist power over consumer safety would have been like giving a child power over bedtime. It's only a problem if you expect...
...almost any school administrator, education policymaker or think-tank wonk about NCLB, and you're guaranteed to get at least one sunny metaphor about how the law opened a window, raised a curtain or otherwise illuminated the plight of the nation's underserved kids. This is NCLB'S biggest achievement and the best reason for Congress to reauthorize the law. "At the end of the day, who can argue with holding schools accountable for all children?" asks Paul Vallas, outgoing chief executive of Philadelphia's schools and incoming head of the New Orleans school district. "Who can argue with...
...Baroody isn't that kind of guy. He's a policy wonk whose father founded the American Enterprise Institute think tank; he ran his own Republican think tank in the early 1990s before he was ousted for insufficient partisanship. His friends say the fox-in-the-henhouse caricature distorts a public-minded family man with 19 grandchildren. "Do you have a friend you'd trust with your child, or your grandmother?" said Dennis Whitfield, who served with Baroody in President Reagan's Labor Department. "For me, that's Mike Baroody. You think he's not concerned about the safety...
...WHEN HE WAS AN unknown foreign policy wonk in the Kennedy Administration, Warren Wiggins wrote an impassioned treatise on the promise of Kennedy's still nascent Peace Corps, urging its leaders to fight to make it more than just a small agency to generate good publicity. On reading it, Sargent Shriver, the Corps's first director, who was then trying to define the agency, distributed the memo to his staff and fired off a 3 a.m. telegram demanding that Wiggins meet with him the next morning. Within four weeks, an Executive Order gave birth to the Peace Corps. Wiggins...