Word: problems
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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...
MCCAIN The first bill to land on President Bush's desk next year could end up being his first big problem. Senator John McCain, Bush's primary-season rival, is pressing moderates and liberals in both the House and Senate to make sure that campaign-finance reform is the first bill the new Congress passes. How could this embarrass Bush? Because the "Reformer with Results" doesn't want to sign it. Conservatives hate it. McCain is working the issue on TV and behind the scenes; he says he already has the 60 votes he needs...
...Bush obviously figures the best immunization against a spring contraction is to give plenty of reminders that it'll be a problem he inherited from Clinton. And a little gloom and doom is the best sales pitch in years for big across-the-board tax cuts, which haven't been popular since Ross Perot made fiscal responsibility cool again. So Bush has little reason for public optimism...
...China's water problem is far from unique. Drinking water, in fact, is shaping up to be the single most contested resource on the planet. While "Global Trends 2015" is confident that sufficient food and energy resources will be in place to meet humanity's needs (perhaps because we're already easily able to produce enough food to feed the planet; the reason people still starve today are primarily economic, not agricultural), it notes that almost half of the world's population will live in "water-stressed" societies. And that's going to drive a number of regional conflicts...
...problem of managing global affairs is made much more difficult by the diminishing power of the state. The Cold War, artificially, managed to organize almost every regional conflict in the world into a global system of conflict, which was managed at the top by two states that had an overarching interest in avoiding instability that could drag them into a very dangerous confrontation. After it ended, many of the states of the old Soviet empire began to collapse, accelerating crime, lawlessness, tribal violence and terrorism. And the problem acknowledged in "Global Trends 2015" is that governments don't have very...