Word: shopworn
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...most compelling case for Canada’s little-man complex, however, is its tendency to produce, on occasion, a public intellectual intent on gleefully pointing out the most obvious and shopworn defects of America’s politics and people. The newest excoriation comes from James Laxer, a Canadian political scientist and social commentator who teaches at York University. Laxer was a leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party in the 1970s and in recent years has been a staunch critic of economic globalism. His most recent book, Discovering America—published in Canada as Stalking...
That ol' Kennedy invincibility is getting noticeably shopworn--even in Massachusetts, where Kennedys have been on the ballot 20 times and never defeated. Not next year. Two prospective candidates and sons of R.F.K.--former Congressman Joe Kennedy II and his younger brother Max--backed away from what could have been brutal races. (Both declined to be interviewed for this article.) "It's not there for Joe and the others. There are too many problems," says a Kennedy friend. "And they're not prone to taking the kind of chances they would have at one time...
...would run up against the uneasy ethnic mix in Macedonia, the Yugoslav republic cursed with a contested name and surrounded by historically ill-willed neighbors. Match Macedonia with "powder keg" on an Internet search engine and you'll get 1,340 matches; "tinderbox" yields 332. Plenty of less shopworn slogans were brought to bear by diplomats and human rights monitors who made the same plea: we've got to do something...
...make their case against President Bush, the polls say their message should be selling. But it isn't. In fact, it's barely being heard, which has many in the party wondering whether the real problem is finding the right messenger--someone who can distill their many lines of shopworn argument into something that feels resonant and new. Which is why the name of John Edwards is coming up more and more in Washington these days...
Americans can take some comfort from the knowledge that most other advanced nations have voting methods at least as shopworn as ours. All of Japan uses paper ballots on which voters write in candidates' names themselves. On the other hand, sometimes the old methods have their points. The ancient Greeks, who invented the tumult of democracy, voted by tossing stones into a bowl: white for yes, black for no--hence "blackballed." There is no recorded problem of "hanging chads," though chipping might have been an issue. Best of all, it was cost effective. Rocks can be reused every year...