On education, where he speaks with some authority as a former president of the Board of Education, he is a moderate reformer: for charter schools, the Common Core and testing accountability, but for attempting to save failing schools before closing them, and for treating teachers as partners in reform rather than intransigent slackers.
They should be used as guidelines rather than as intransigent blocks to creative approaches and thought.
Mr. Hun Sen, for his part, could stake a claim of being willing to compromise, giving the appearance of being reasonable rather than an intransigent autocrat.
Suddenly health-care reform looks alive again, naysaying Republicans no longer look like the principled opposition party but rather a bunch of intransigent cranks, and the president comes off looking like a bipartisan rationalist.
But the Merseyside story offers hope that savings can be made in even the most intransigent public services by preventing problems rather than merely coping with them.
Are we, as Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, recently asserted in these pages, no longer "thought of as potential leaders for the country, but rather as apologists or appeasers for an intransigent, increasingly costly, and dated system of higher education"?
Kotler is intransigent, uncompromising and therefore, the book suggests, heroic: he would rather have his reputation destroyed than concede his principles.
It brought little change to the domestic economy, which has not been a motor of growth for decades, and where cumbersome regulation, protected monopolies and oligopolies and intransigent trade unions carry on much as before.The government, rather than contributing to a rebound, is making matters worse.
The Indian government has long been intransigent on the issue of Kashmir — preferring to blame Pakistan for fomenting violence rather than address Kashmiris' legitimate aspirations for freedom or honor its own promises to resolve the issue according to the wishes of Kashmiri people and investigate the crimes of its army.
Mr. Specter, who met with President Assad about a dozen times, said he and Dr. Albright interpreted the remark not as a reflection of the intransigent attitude of the father, who was an obstacle to American policy, but rather the more flexible approach of the younger man.
