His politics is what he does. What he says — his “line” — is merely how he gets his hand on someone’s wallet, or up someone’s skirt. Ideologues and intellectuals — left, right, centre, other — are often (actually not so) strangely boneheaded about this. They’ve invested so much in mastering specific verbal arguments, big technical shibboleth words and metrics, that they can’t bear to cede how very much easier they are to play as a result.
What’s the context of this? It seems like a quotation, and very reductive, and wrong. I doubt that nonintellectuals are better than intellectuals at understanding Mitt Romney (for instance).
The idea that people can be understood by us without our understanding how they understand themselves seems grievously wrong, even when the people we’re trying to understand are rich and venal.