In the end, the government's listening exercise recast the changes so that England's biggest quango, the National Commissioning Board, will be effectively in charge.
The director is Thea Sharrock, whose recent film of Shakespeare's "Henry V" for the BBC recast a putative exercise in historical jingoism as a contemplative piece about an uneasy king's relationship with God.
But European films have not shaped the way that Europeans live, though it is an interesting exercise to imagine our lives recast as a Swedish film, an indoor desert of glacial silences, or as a Japanese film, a fraught space of stares and psychotic violence.
This exercise requires, of course, a recasting, already adumbrated by Baron, of Machiavelli as thoroughly republican, not primarily interested in the workings of power, but in exalting the satisfactions of active citizenship.
To make the change, the commission would have to recast legal definitions that govern how campaigns are conducted, a difficult exercise that requires interpreting laws decades old, as well as the McCain-Feingold legislation and subsequent court ruling.
Instead of personal responsibility, agencies could design training exercises (like fake fires) that emphasize leadership and crew cohesion or recast the fire orders to stress teamwork.
It's not exactly been a high-level seminar in public policy, more like an exercise in political transvestism – the Tories posing as warm-hearted, open-walleted splashers of cash, Labour recasting itself as the hard-faced wearer of a kinkily tight fiscal corset.
The partners are now going through a similar financial exercise on another proposed building across the street, which was to house 225 condominiums but now could be recast as a rental building as well.
McCain, who was reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee in 1991 for exercising "poor judgment" by intervening with federal regulators on behalf of a corrupt savings and loan executive, recast himself as a crusader against special interests and the corrupting influence of money in politics.
Recast it or break it up.
