Word: pretending
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Most politicians try to impress people by showing how smart, how engaged and how busy they are. Bush does the opposite. He likes to be underestimated, likes to pretend you're telling him something he didn't already know. And he likes to be seen as unflappable. No problem is too tough that it can't be licked with a little of the common sense that rules on his 1,600-acre property in Crawford, Texas. If that means people think he's not quite as clever as all these city folks he has working for him, all the better...
Clinton was, Marcus writes, "out to show the country someone willing to cut himself down to size, and at the same time try to take off and fly. A man willing, for a moment, to pretend he could be Elvis...
Clinton made mistakes early on as a campaigner, many of which came from trying to pretend that her birthplace of Chicago was an outer borough of New York City. It bordered on the sacrilegious to don a Yankees cap when she had been a well-known Chicago Cubs fan. It remained such a toxic moment that she couldn't risk taking the D train to the Subway Series to join in the purest of Big Apple moments. Rather than the usual grip and grin, she embarked on a listening tour, looking at times like Margaret Mead visiting the Samoans...
...about the Beautiful South to American listeners is the overriding lack of interest in aural shock. There's no shouting, no distorted guitar noise and rarely an unexpected chord change. Instead, the group's songwriter Paul Heaton rolls out slow, beautiful pop songs backed by melodic tunes that never pretend to be anything but accompaniment. This is not to imply that something is lacking in the music. It is rich, profound and mood-setting-qualities which have made the band's albums bestsellers in their native Britain...
...material, not once has anyone hesitated to express a view, no matter how radical or revolutionary. Our only "discussion" stumbling block reared its head Tuesday, when someone questioned the snobbish futility of a bunch of elitist Harvard students sitting around a table halfway across the globe and attempting to "pretend we know what it's like." To which someone else shot back that America was the "last hegemonic power on earth" and that we "screw with a lot of countries we might as well know who we're screwing with." As usual, no holds barred...