In a debate with Chancellor Schroeder, she seemed comfortable paraphrasing Ronald Reagan’s words, if not his style. She asked voters to answer a question similar to the question Mr. Reagan posed to Americans in his debate with Jimmy Carter in 1980: “Are you better off now than you were seven years ago?” The chancellor, like the Gipper, is a great communicator, and she’s not. She’s a woman who’s regarded as “one of the boys.” She has tried to soften her image, but the physicist who grew up in East Germany is a “tough cookie,” and not even Helmut Kohl’s description of her as “mein maedchen” – my little girl – has changed very much. She’s become the Teflon candidate, and Herr Schroeder hasn’t cut into her 11-point lead in the public-opinion polls.
Political emancipation in Germany, as one woman in her own party observed, comes with a price: “conforming to the masculine.” (Sound familiar?) Certain feminists say she doesn’t understand the problems of working mothers because she’s not one, an argument much like the notion that only a whale could review “Moby Dick.”
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An op-ed chart in the morning’s New York Times bore sobering news for President Bush: when compared with previous two term presidents, Bush just isn’t very appealing. Of the last three reelected presidents–Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton–only the scandal-ridden Nixon had a more precipitous decline in second-term support, from 67% to 39%. Bush currently stands at just 44% approval.
But the NYT chart contained another juicy piece of information: favorable ratings for Congress have steadily declined over the same 30-year period. They’ve fallen from 79% (in 1973), to 57% (in 1985), to 52% (in 1997), to a current-day
Wong Kar-wai's swoonily beautiful "In the Mood for Love," released in 2000, was an ode to love and to restraint: Two people, Mr. Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung), living in adjacent apartments, are unhappily married to other people in 1962 Hong Kong. They adore each other but cannot conceive of dishonor, and so the romance mostly takes place in lingering looks, delicate touches, words that mean something else, and melancholy strains of music that wrapped itself around the would-be lovers like gentle arms. Unforgettable in its mood and elegance, it was perhaps the finest film of