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The Lifer path was established during the period between 1880 and World War II, when the raw, capitalist energy of the U.S. had to be harnessed through the creation of large organizations such as government bureaucracies and business corporations. Lifers join these organizations when they're just starting their careers and then try to rise through the ranks. The civil service, labor-union officialdom, the career military and General Motors are all Lifer strongholds. People on the Talent path have their fate decided when they come to market to sell themselves; the key moments for them are election days, championship games, initial stock offerings. Lifer careers, on the other hand, are all about getting promotions. Lifers tend to be invisible outside their organizations unless they get to the very top job; the only famous Lifers are people like corporate CEOS and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The Mandarin path is the newest of the three. It was built during and after World War II, through the introduction of mass mental testing and the expansion of higher education. People become Mandarins by performing well in school; educational credentials, the more elite the better, are the coin of their realm. Theoretically, Mandarins are free to do whatever they want, including pursue the Talent or Lifer path. But the default activity for them is to go into limited-access fields where their degrees confer the maximum benefit, mainly the professions of law, medicine, academia and the Wall Street side of business. Mandarins aspire to get tenure in their 30s and thus be more protected from risk than the people on the other paths.
Practically speaking, what the Mandarins have done is take over a chunk of territory that was previously controlled by an inbred group of self-styled gentlemen called the Episcopacy. Their domains: Ivy League universities, the big foundations, Wall Street, major research hospitals and corporate law firms. Mandarins therefore congregate in big metropolises and on the two coasts. Although successful Mandarins have plenty of money and don't suffer from cripplingly low self-esteem, life has been mildly unfair to them. Often they find themselves serving merely as high-level advisers to Talents and Lifers--the Mandarin is usually the management consultant, not the chief executive--and they're the most disliked of the three groups. They tend to think they've earned their place in open competition ("meritocracy" is the Mandarins' name for their path), but outsiders think of them as privileged, conceited teacher's pets who are prone to concocting corrupt arrangements behind closed doors.
By definition all politicians are at least part Talent. They're willing to run for office, which is profoundly not a Lifer or Mandarin thing to do. This point was demonstrated most forcefully lately when Colin Powell, the ultimate Lifer, found that he just couldn't bring himself to run for President. The "passion and commitment" that he found lacking in himself are precisely the qualities that are required to get on the Talent path. Still, although some politicians are pure Talents (Ronald Reagan comes to mind), many belong spiritually to more than one path at the same time, and they connect strongly to voters' feeling about the paths.