An ancient political science joke, and we are assuming that a foreign desk listener is the ideal audience for such tells of a zealous ideologue hearing of a successful policy and retorting.
So it works in practice, but does it work in theory?
If you laughed at this gag, you may be a centrist, one of those people who believes that politics should be a mechanism for getting things done rather than a means of keeping score in abstru disputes with one's ideological adversaries.
Centrism, at least as its advocates see it, is a creed which enables the picking of the best ideas from left and right to construct a program of governance which is collegiate, consensual and civilised.
Unsurprisingly, especially in a world polarised by social media purity contests, this makes a lot of people very angry, or perhaps just a small number of people very loud.
In British discourse, centrist dad has become a term of abuse, generally aimed at the kind of person who was probably pretty happy with how the UK's most recent general election turned out.
Inevitably, if not downright triumphantly, centrist dads have embraced the insult as a badge of honour.
The difficulty, Well, a difficulty with centrism is that it is often presented not in terms of what it is, but what it isn't.
It isn't dogmatic, it isn't deluded, it isn't divisive.
As centrist politicians often discover, however, it is a perilously fine line between pleasing everybody and pleasing nobody.
What actually is centrism?
How can it be practically applied?
And why does it often seem to inflame populism rather than extinguish it?
This is the foreign desk.
When things are looking up and it works, people like it.
But in an era of people getting their news from algorithms that are essentially feeding them what they already believe, politics has been transformed.
And this stridency of political discourse is not something that France has been able to escape.
I don't want centrism to be portrayed as afraid of taking a stand.
I mean, you can have a very centrist policy on the Russia, Ukraine that absolutely condemns and abhors and takes a strong stand against Vladimir Putin and his aggression.
If we can connect and offer a real sense of empathy with the fears that people feel and the grievances that people have, then we can come to them and say, we understand you, we feel what you're feeling.