"Perfection has to do with the end product, but excellence has to do with the process"
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“Perfection” is the politician’s favorite mirage: a shiny, finished thing you can point to at election time, ideally with a ribbon-cutting photo and a clean narrative. Moran’s line neatly punctures that obsession by demoting the end product and elevating the grind. It’s less self-help mantra than governing philosophy dressed as one. In public life, outcomes are always compromised by constraints voters rarely see: committee horse-trading, appropriations math, federalism, court rulings, timing. By shifting the moral center from results to method, Moran offers a defensible standard for work that can’t reliably produce perfect wins.
The subtext is also protective. If perfection is the bar, politics becomes a perpetual failure machine: every bill has loopholes, every program has unintended consequences, every victory is partial. “Excellence,” framed as process, lets a lawmaker claim integrity even when the final product disappoints. It’s an argument for competence and craft: show up, negotiate seriously, do the unglamorous oversight, sweat implementation. That’s a subtle rebuke to the performance politics of viral outrage and “messaging” votes, where the appearance of purity often matters more than the policy’s lifespan.
Contextually, coming from a Republican senator known more for institutionalism than celebrity, the line reads like an appeal to civic patience. It asks constituents to judge governance the way you’d judge engineering or medicine: not by fantasies of flawlessness, but by rigor, transparency, and a repeatable discipline that survives the next crisis.
The subtext is also protective. If perfection is the bar, politics becomes a perpetual failure machine: every bill has loopholes, every program has unintended consequences, every victory is partial. “Excellence,” framed as process, lets a lawmaker claim integrity even when the final product disappoints. It’s an argument for competence and craft: show up, negotiate seriously, do the unglamorous oversight, sweat implementation. That’s a subtle rebuke to the performance politics of viral outrage and “messaging” votes, where the appearance of purity often matters more than the policy’s lifespan.
Contextually, coming from a Republican senator known more for institutionalism than celebrity, the line reads like an appeal to civic patience. It asks constituents to judge governance the way you’d judge engineering or medicine: not by fantasies of flawlessness, but by rigor, transparency, and a repeatable discipline that survives the next crisis.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Improvement |
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