Compassionate Conservative

[Fred Shapiro]

On Fri, 4 Feb 2000 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:

> of Bush's rivals for the Republican Presidential nomination, Utah Senator
> Orrin Hatch, first used the term in 1981.  "I'm a conservative, and proud of
> it, but I'm a compassionate conservative," Hatch told The New York Times
> after saving the Jobs Corps from the Reagan Budget knife.
>
>      The Lexis-Nexis Universe didn't locate this citation from 1981--perhaps
> the full Nexis does.  No other hits on Lexis-Nexis or Dow Jones are earlier.

The great oxymorons:  Military intelligence.  Legal ethics.  Jumbo shrimp.
Compassionate conservative.

Yes, the full Nexis has the following:

1981 _N.Y. Times_ 13 Mar. (Nexis)  "I'm a conservative, and proud of it,
but I'm a compassionate conservative," Mr. Hatch said.


Fred R. Shapiro                             Coeditor (with Jane Garry)
Associate Librarian for Public Services     TRIAL AND ERROR: AN OXFORD
  and Lecturer in Legal Research            ANTHOLOGY OF LEGAL STORIES
Yale Law School                             Oxford University Press, 1998
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               ISBN 0-19-509547-2