Word: wonking
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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World's Sexiest Policy Wonk...
There's no pleasing some folk: When Starbucks announced Monday that it planned a big push in the U.K. - opening a new coffee shop in London every two weeks for the next decade - one think-tank policy wonk regretfully told the Daily Mail that the behemoth of beans would not only accelerate the "cloning of the high street," but that its growth strategy would lead to the "closure of genuinely local coffee shops...
Nobody likes to hear couples argue in public, so France's presidential front-runner Segolene Royal has a delicate problem - her partner and the father of her four children, Francois Hollande, is a policy wonk, and not all of his policy positions are the same as hers. It gets a little more complicated, though, because Hollande is also the leader of the Socialist Party whose nomination Royal recently won. His deft behind-the-scenes management of rival factions prevented ugly splits during the party's hotly contested primaries - the holding of which earned him plaudits, since the party's nomination...
...Nixon, who clearly preferred foreign to domestic policy, emerges as a true wonk. He writes his own wide-ranging speeches, makes intelligent comments on staff memos, and scribbles perceptive notes to himself. In Washington, Nixon had jotted down the trip's priorities: "1. Taiwan-most crucial. 2. V.Nam-most urgent." One of the juiciest subplots in Seize the Hour involves the efforts of Nixon and Kissinger to keep Secretary of State William Rogers out of the loop. The State Department didn't know in advance of Kissinger's first secret trip to the mainland. And it was Kissinger, not Rogers...
Despite the policy arguments about media relations, this film is no wonk-fest; despite the condemnations of the monarchy, Frears creates recognizably human characters out of everyone but Prince Phillip. It is a continually involving look at the human costs associated with public service and experience, whether one chooses a post (Blair) or is born into it (Elizabeth...