But the three top centrist contenders a mild Islamist, Abdel Moneim Abolfotoh; a mild liberal, Amr Moussa, tainted with long service under the old order; and a populist socialist, Hamdeen Sabahi split what should have been a dominant centrist clutch into losing fractions.
On home visits, it emerged that I cooked; my father looked at me with a mild liberal suspicion that he had previously deployed when I was spotted reading "The Communist Manifesto," or when I forced him to listen to Bartók string quartets.
As a teenager, she rebelled against her intellectual, imperious mother and her mild, liberal father by taking up with a reckless girl called Misty Mueller, who lived with her crabby, drunken grandmother in a disorderly household three doors down from where a serial killer had struck.
My mild-mannered, liberal friend is no match in an argument with his volatile Gallic partner.
He also assigned several dissents last term to his usually mild-mannered liberal colleagues — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and David H. Souter — that inspired some of their most scathing and memorable expressions of frustration with the court's turn to the right.
The resulting show started on the same day as the Fox News Channel, Oct. 7, 1996, as "Hannity & Colmes," with the mild-mannered liberal Alan Colmes cast as Mr. Hannity's sparring partner.
Among these 100 stars, there is hardly a poet who reveals himself/herself to adhere to anything other than a strict middle-of-the-road Democratic politics--the mildest of liberal correctionism in response to the Bush agonies.
Over the course of his campaign, the mild-mannered boomer liberal skidded from scandal to lucky accident, rebranding himself like a cola, until his candidacy was stubbed out in a burst of bureaucracy at the convention.
The mild-mannered, impeccably liberal TV host had had some far-out guests on his ABC talk show, but no one like Sylvester Stewart had ever plonked himself down in the guest armchair before.
Finally, consider that most mild-mannered of liberal pundits, the Times' Nicholas Kristof, who on Sunday actually called for the formation of a truth commission in the manner of post-apartheid South Africa "to lead a process of soul searching and national cleansing".
