Aaron Burr was more a man of deeds than a man of letters. He had no overarching political theory by which his political views were organized; one of the reasons he and Thomas Jefferson clashed when Burr was vice president of the United States was that Burr treated politics as a game of strategy, whereas Jefferson regarded politics as among the most serious concerns of human life. Thus, when Burr wrote, he rarely discussed his views about the experiment of American democracy or about serious issues of national survival. He rarely thought far ahead, preferring to focus on immediate activities. He proved himself a brilliant political organizer when focusing on an election to occur in the near future, but he rarely contemplated organizing for the distant future. It was for his ability to direct such basic tasks as getting out the vote for his political party that he was chosen by the Democratic-Republicans to be Jefferson’s vice president.