“I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.” [NRO Campaign Spot]
I have often thought that political culture rather neatly divides between those who talk about doing things and those who actually have to get things done.
It’s something like the divide in the sciences between theoreticians and experimentalists. Theoreticians get their names in the history books but the experimentalists do the actual science that converts a theoretician’s hypothesis into scientific fact. Tellingly, humans suffered for millennia from an abundance of theoreticians before the experimentalists arrived on the scene to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Leftists love theory and fantasy. Rightists eschew both for the proven and practical. Leftists want to make great leaps “forward” based on elitist insight. Rightists prefer incremental evolution based on day-to-day experimentation and tinkering.
“If you want something said, send a man. If you want something done, send a woman,”
– Margaret Thatcher