Word: wonkish
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...world now knows, that's precisely what happened. Once the toast of Wall Street, Netscape appeared to be toast. Its historic browser--the software that took the cold gray wonkish world of the Internet and made it multimedia, rendering the Net usable by millions--had at its peak accounted for 85% of the market. Now it has, at best, a 55%-to-60% share, and that's slipping fast. Its stock, which once soared above $85 a share (adjusted for a 2-for-1 stock split), lost nearly half its value during a three-month period and hit bottom...
...decades ago was empty grassland. Not long ago, upscale, sun-drenched suburbs like hers were solid Republican territory. But that was before the religious right colonized the G.O.P. So the well-educated secularites of the suburban Bay began in the '80s to lean Democratic and were ripe for the wonkish Clinton. He was fiscally disciplined, culturally tolerant and enthusiastic about the high-tech industries on which their prosperity was built. Tauscher followed in his wake. A millionaire former stockbroker and businesswoman, she looked, at first glance, like a Rockefeller Republican. Her husband actually was a Republican. In 1996 Tauscher took...
...patiently explaining chaos theory and fractals to staff members as they work all night at his house on an M.I.T. graduation speech, surrounded by note cards and bits of paper stuck on easels. "For him it's like golf. He loves it!" concludes an aide. But beneath this wonkish exterior, the President has found a smart politico. After the TWA 800 crash, Clinton named Gore head of a task force on airline safety--a delicate job, since the report he produces must be rigorous without implying that the President flubbed the issue earlier. Gore is also the favorite mouthpiece...
...excellent at dramatizing pain in a marriage--but surely she would choke on this line from James B. Stewart's Blood Sport: "You can't be a woman if you don't have children. It's the central mission of women," which Hillary wouldn't utter at her most wonkish. In the end, it's not surprising that Hillary, rather than the Governor, may have been more involved in Whitewater. Political wives are often left to build a nest egg while their husbands are building empires--see Marianne Gingrich (who has taken heat for career leaping from beauty consultant...
...fictitious couple's sponsor, the Health Insurance Association of America, agreed to soften one of the planks in the Clinton plan, a concept called community rating. That piece of jargon, which refers to the averaging of health-insurance premiums across a community, has just the sort of wonkish ring that would have made Harry and Louise grimace...