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The Best Notable Quotables of 1989:
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The No Agenda Here Award |
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First
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"Atwater's fouling the civic atmosphere with vicious misinformation is bad enough; compounding that with the White House hypocrisy is too much. If Bush really wants to prove himself a political environmentalist in search of a kinder, gentler America, he should sack Atwater."
-- Time's Laurence Barrett in sidebar to a June 19 article on the "Foley memo." |
Runners-up: |
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"At the same time, Atwater -- who cut his political teeth as a protege of South Carolina's once segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond -- downplayed his role in devising the crypto-racist Willie Horton ads that helped Bush win the White House. 'That's in the past,' he insisted."
-- Time reporters Jacob V. Lamar and Alessandra Stanley in the March 20 issue.
"Support Family Planning. In 1984 the Reagan Administration cut off U.S. aid to the two major international family-planning organizations...Unless the growth in the world population is slowed, it will be impossible to make serious progress on any environmental issue. The U.S. should immediately restore the aid it withdrew."
-- Time's recommendations on how to save the Earth, in the January 2 "Planet of the Year" issue.
"Propose deep mutual cuts in military forces and expenditures going well beyond those under consideration in START and conventional-arms talks."
"Offer most-favored-nation status, allowing the U.S.S.R. the same trading arrangements provided to most industrial nations, including Hungary."
"Relax technology-transfer regulations to allow sales of such items as personal computers and communications equipment that could spur autonomy."
-- Policies recommended by Time, November 6.
"The documentary has held up as both true and sadly prophetic. While Congress restored some of the cuts made in those first Reagan budgets, in the years since, the poor and the working poor have borne the brunt of the cost of the Reagan Revolution. The hardest-hit programs have been welfare, housing and other anti-poverty measures. Even programs that were not cut have failed to keep up with inflation. Meanwhile, rich people go big tax breaks. And the middle class kept most of their subsidies intact. As a result, the Reagan years brought on a wider gap between rich and poor."
-- Bill Moyers after PBS re-airing of 1982 CBS Reports "People Like Us," June 20.
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Walter Mondale Award
For Tax Hike Insistence
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First
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"We have this drug problem, we have an education problem in the country. All we keep doing is cutting the domestic budget because taxes aren't being asked for. When does it become necessary to start investing in our future by fixing these problems, and when you do decide it becomes necessary, won't it become necessary to raise taxes? And just isn't that a bald truth?"
-- Lesley Stahl to OMB Director Richard Darman, July 23 Face the
Nation. |
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Runners-up: |
"If we don't find some way to raise new revenues, that means taxes, we're going to continue this self-deception, we're going to continue to add to the national deficit, we're going to continue to cause this country to head toward an economic abyss."
-- Sam Donaldson on This Week, September 24.
"Returning from his foreign travels, George Bush came home to domestic economic realities today. To the stubborn budget deficit that most economists say will never be seriously reduced without the new taxes to which the President remains opposed."
-- Reporter Mark Phillips on CBS Evening News, July 18.
"The borrow-and-spend policies that Ronald Reagan presided over have bequeathed to his chosen successor a downsized presidency devoid of the resources to address long neglected domestic problems. The Bush campaign strategists -- with the candidate's active complicity -- burdened the new President with an obdurate stance on taxes."
-- Reporters Michael Duffy and Richard Hornik in Time, February 20.
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Award For The Most Inane Comparison
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First
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"Thousands may have been gunned down in Beijing, but what about the millions of American kids whose lives are being ruined by an enormous failure of the country's educational system...We can and we should agonize about the dead students in Beijing, but we've got a much bigger problem here at home."
-- John Chancellor's commentary on NBC Nightly News, June 20.
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Runners-up:
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"In a way, you might say that David Duke is the son of Willie Horton. Duke is more overt, of course, but he's really just pushing the same buttons and sending the same coded messages that the Horton ads did so effectively for the Bush campaign last year."
-- Reporter Judd Rose on ABC's Prime Time Live, November 2.
"Will the military leaders there b embarrassed by this, will this be something like Kent State was for our military?"
-- CBS reporter Eric Engberg referring to China on Nightwatch, June 7.
"Like North, Castro has always portrayed foreign policy as an endless struggle between darkness and light, and the Fidels and Ollies of the world desperately need each other. 'Great Satans,' observes Hunter, [of the Center for Strategic and International Studies] 'always come in pairs.'"
-- U.S. News & World Report Senior Writer Steven Roberts, April 17.
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