In an era when publicity departments hotly compete with editors for space in the offices of financially challenged publishing houses, the old adage about how you shouldn't judge a book by its cover is truer than ever.
If huge numbers of voters in the nation's largest state say that McCain would hotly compete for the state in November and Bush would write it off, as his father did in 1992, then practical pols here and elsewhere would suddenly rethink all previous conceptions.
Built originally for Tsar Nicholas II as a summer home away from pre-revolutionary Russia, the Carlton was turned into a hotel in 1913, one of five five-star properties that have competed hotly for the more-money-than-sense market for the past 100 years.
Both parks are in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., competing in the hotly contested Orlando market with the Universal parks and Seaworld, owned by Anheuser-Busch.
In the mid-1970s, when I covered tennis, Renée Richards was a supremely strange phenomenon as the pro tennis and legal worlds hotly debated the fairness of a "he/she" competing against the likes of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova.
His political and military advisers are competing for his attention, as he decides how hotly to pursue the war at a time when the economy is foundering and deficits are back.
The result, in the anti-Washington season of 2012, was a Republican primary campaign that was hotly contested yet intellectually sterile, with the anti-establishment candidates competing on style rather than substance, and the (obvious) populist case against Romney bubbling up in weird, substance-free ways, from Santorum's sweater vests to the policy-free Gingrich-Perry attacks on Bain Capital.
Coffman is competing against Democrat Andrew Romanoff in one of the most hotly contested congressional races in the country.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences unanimously agreed to allow Rahm Emanuel's name on the Oscar ballot in the prestigious and hotly contested category of Best Supporting Actor, in which he will be competing against Christian Bale, John Hawkes, Jeremy Renner, Mark Ruffalo and Geoffrey Rush.
By comparison, the highest-paid outside director at nearby Nike, which is eight times as big and competes in hotly contested apparel markets worldwide, received $59,500 last year.
