Word: pragmatist
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...shocked" when he learned of Gates's nomination to be defense chief. "He's a terrible micromanager and I just can't see him existing in that Pentagon structure." But Gates, 63, has won friends among both Republican and Democratic foreign policy gurus. "Bob Gates is a pragmatist and problem solver," says Richard Holbrooke, U.N. ambassador during the Clinton Administration...
...senators who weren't in the chamber back in 1991 don't seem inclined to dredge up an old dispute. "I've gotten to know him over the last several years," says Jack Reed, an influential Armed Services Committee member. "And he strikes me as someone who's a pragmatist. He strikes me also as somebody who will listen, particularly to the uniformed services. In that respect, he'll be a very pleasant change from Secretary Rumsfeld." -with reporting by Massimo Calabresi
...Royal will have to come up with more policy answers of her own to match Sarkozy, a crafty pragmatist happy to jettison ideological ballast when it restrains his progress. But at the same time she'll be seeking to broaden her success so far by keeping the spotlight on values rather than policies. Her main theme: bottom-up democracy. "S?gol?ne wants to get the citizens pulling along in solving the enormous problems we have," says one of her key spokesmen, National Assembly deputy Arnaud Montebourg. "We need a democratic revolution." Easy enough to say. But the French love irony enough...
...should be free,” concedes Besselle. “Everything costs something and you can’t get something for nothing. The kid’s not getting ripped off.”“I guess I’m a pragmatist when it comes to something like this,” says Jue Wang ’09, who has helped Green and Ramaswamy with Ivy Insiders. “This isn’t a situation where you can really change anything whether or not you offer the service to people...
...thanks to the democratization and coarsening of culture, hardly anyone reads the classics of the Western canon anymore (the pragmatist will object that at least they can read, as well as feed their families). A familiarity with canonical texts is no longer considered an essential prerequisite of citizenship in our society. More and more, humanities departments are resembling Swift’s fanciful flying island of Laputa, in which abstracted philosophers hover over the common people, lost in sterile speculative dreaming. Indeed, the Harvard Task Force on General Education has ratified this irrelevance by subjugating the study of literature...