Word: cuttingly
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...Back around last Christmas, both men made a defining choice, which looked like acts of courage given the climate of the times. Bush proposed his gigantic tax cut just at the moment when polls ranked taxes way down on the list of voter concerns, well below education and debt reduction and Social Security. Gore, meanwhile, remade himself as a Rock'em Sock'em Robot just at the moment people were saying they were tired of all the fighting in Washington, moving rhetorically if not substantively to the left when every pol in the world knew that whoever controlled the center...
...When bush started putting the puzzle together, the big fat piece in the middle of his candidacy was always going to be a tax cut. The party faithful would expect it; the threat from Forbes, with his $40 million war chest and his 17 percent flat tax, demanded it. But Bush also knew that the polls showed most people did not feel overtaxed; that Republicans in Congress were being filleted for their attempts at an $800 billion tax-cut plan. They traveled the country to drum up support in August 1999 and didn't come across...
...Bush was confident he could navigate the tax-cut terrain. After his first successful legislative session as Texas governor, when he and the Democrats in the legislature had cut deals on welfare and juvenile-justice reform, Bush proposed a total overhaul of the unfair property-tax system. His plan was widely viewed as a make-or-break gambit. "He absolutely cannot politically afford for it to fail," wrote the Houston Chronicle at the time, if he had any hopes of higher office. His plan would have slashed property taxes as much as 40 percent, but made up the lost revenue...
...worked hard with the legislature to muscle his plan - or some version of it - through, but the business lobby revolted, and in the end only the easy part got done, a straight property-tax cut, without the offsetting revenue measures. Bush claimed this is actually what he'd wanted all along. He called it "a noble effort...
...Bush wanted a tax cut that he could defend when the inevitable Democratic barrage began, one that would support his claim to be a different kind of Republican. For one with a reputation of not sweating the details, Bush was obsessed with that struggling working mom who earned around $20,000 a year but who was getting killed at tax time because of a quirk in the code. He said she faced a "tollgate" on the road to the middle class, and he ordered his economists to smooth the way. "I want a package that deals directly with this problem...