Word: pragmatist
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...1870s, when on one side of Mass. Ave. lay Mass. Hall—then occupied by the newly-instated University President Charles W. Eliot, class of 1853—and on the other side, according to History Professor Donald L. Fleming, was the famed Metaphysical Club of the Cambridge pragmatist thinkers at Chauncey Wright’s apartment at College House...
...would be giving the Terminator a much tougher fight. Schwarzenegger looked politically dead just a year ago, when voters rejected a number of conservative ballot initiatives he backed in a special election and his approval ratings plunged. But the former action movie hero quickly recast himself as a moderate pragmatist, making deals with the Democratic-controlled legislature on bills ordering a minimum wage hike and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. His centrist image restored by late summer, Schwarzenegger pulled ahead of Angelides and hasn't trailed since. Along the way, he has benefited from the perquisites of incumbency, sharing...
...obsessive-compulsive tic. I counted no fewer than 50 instances of excruciatingly judicious on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-handedness in The Audacity of Hope. At one point, he considers the historic influence of ideological extremists--that is, people precisely unlike him. "It has not always been the pragmatist, the voice of reason, or the force of compromise, that has created the conditions for liberty," he writes about the antislavery movement of the 19th century. "Knowing this, I can't summarily dismiss those possessed of similar certainty today--the antiabortion activist ... the animal rights activist who raids a laboratory...
...Japan. "Abe will stand up and make firm decisions for the Japanese people," says Ichita Yamamoto, an LDP foreign-affairs expert and Abe ally. "But he's not a hard-liner against China or anyone. He's a strategist." A hard-line nationalist or a soft-talking, sympathetic pragmatist; an LDP man to the core or someone who will continue the turn-the-world-upside-down instincts of his mentor Koizumi, Abe is preparing to take the leadership of the world's second-largest economy?and Asia's most advanced democracy?as an enigma, inside and outside his country...
...because they view him in only one dimension?as a "splittist"?without seemingly taking into account the need for Chen, an elected official, to cater to his party and his supporters. Both those groups are more radical and ideological than Chen, who, in truth, is more of a pragmatist concerned with staying in office than a separatist obsessed with making Taiwan independent...