Failed Expectations

A policy platform that relies on the hope for change will more than likely result in a failed expectation. The Obama administration has not failed the probability.

Throughout his campaign President Obama did, however, qualify the hopeful rhetoric with practical policy alternatives that were described as socialist by the opposition. Now that those alternatives have, for the most part, not been executed, the hope is lost, the expectation failed. It is a simple analytic. It has nothing to do with the failure of policy. It was not executed. Policy was conserved, which now defines the independents that voted for him as the opposition.

The evidence suggests a neo-conservative gaming strategy perpetrated by the Democratic leadership.

Since a populist Republican party, renewed with a "compassionate conservatism," is something only the most credulous could possibly believe, it is incumbant on the opposition to provide that credibility. The Republican party is now poised to take up the populist mantle (having gone full circle, from tragedy to farce).

The strategy, gaming the Republican opposition into isolation, cleverly gives a cooperatively conservative program an adversarial appearance, also giving what the voters voted for a false empirical confirmation. It is, at this point, a failed confidence game that is not confirmed by the evidence of an improved economy or any change of the factors that are identifiably causal. That element of the scheme is not very clever and is now in damage control. The result is to force the president into applying the gamma risk, suggesting the timing of the recovery.

The stakes are only marginally at risk at this point with the failure being mainly a failed strategy in a game of strategy between ideological opponents with the same primary goal in mind--accumulating power and keeping it. Obama's middle class task force will likely reduce the gamma enough to keep the risk contained within a safe proportion. A distribution on the accumulation must occur in the short term to maintain the proportion of accumulated power to consent.

Analyses of why the Obama administration has nominally "failed" is a dizzying maelstrom of endless possibility that mirrors the strangely inverted image of its real success.

A useful reduction to the fundament is in order.

While Obama clearly identifies reducing the rising cost of healthcare being critical to economic welfare and a sustainable recovery, independents do not consider rendering a mandatory policy a reliable means of controlling costs. If costs keep rising even when the demand has been falling throughout the Great Recession, what happens when it is mandatory?

Dispense with all the noise and the political gaming and get down to the realpolitique of increasing the "discretionary" spending that control costs in a free-market fashion instead of commanding (mandating) costs in an auhtoritarian fashion. Supporting what is too big to fail over the discretion of the populace is an indiscretion that is not difficult to calculate either politically or economically.

The Hamiltonian model is in a serious challenge here. Obama's approach has a clearly Federalist aspect that supports the conservative element rather than resists it.

It will be interesting to see how the logic of independents collectively acts to control public policy in a more Jeffersonian fashion, rendering political gaming a function of popular expression rather than an emblem of ruling class power with the risk of failed expectaton practically assured to an endless sea of debate.