Nobody can successfully manage anyone's internal desires, goals and expectations. It just can't be done unless that person tells you what they are and what they want and what they expect based on a situation. Even then, it can be a difficult thing because sometimes people have unreasonable expectations. However, if you tell someone something, it is very important to make sure that what you say comes to fruition or you better have excuses and reasons and a work history that shows that the reason what you said didn't come to pass is due to situations outside your control so you have to settle for a partial victory and readjust your goals.
If people were completely truthful, this would be great. But people lie. If situations start going South, people make all kinds of excuses to cover their own missteps and this brings me the the topic of this post: Managing Expectations.
We are used to politicians making extravagant claims and promises they have no possibility of achieving. This is especially true with presidential candidates. If one were to look at what presidents have claimed they would do and what actually happened, the shock might be horrific. When I went to school, I was told how FDR saved our country from the ravages of President Hoover. We were inundated almost daily with how FDR saved us from the horrible, inhuman/inhumane, anti-poor, rich-groveling, enemy of the people and friend of the greedy: Herbert Hoover. (Lest you think I'm a Hoover apologist, you would be wrong. When the veterans known as the Bonus Marchers descended on Washington D.C. peacefully demanding promised bonuses for service, Hoover sent three stalwart military officers to root them out and destroy the veteran built "tent" cities. These officers were Pershing, MacArthur and Eisenhower. MacArthur and Eisernhower were not yet generals but they followed orders and routed and burned out the encamped veterans some of whom had families with them.)
But how wrong my teachers turned out to be. Oh, FDR substituted pump-priming for trickle down but it turns out that trickle down works where pump-priming doesn't. He nationalized industries in a way, promoted unionization and worked to get us into war. Why war? Because the problem with unlimited government spending is that no structure is built that can be used to repay the debt. Even war has limitations in that regard. At some point, the economy must start creating things that people want. Technology must change and advance and products must be created out of that effort. Those products replace older, less efficient ones and add to the quality of life as well as the quantity. Without that financial rebirth the society is doomed.
With FDRs programs, the sustaining force turned out to be the military industrial complex. But that behemoth is a tricky monster. Yes we need defense but the whole industry is more like a work-fare program than true capitalism. So it is difficult to say that the extension of the military industrial complex really aided to a free market recovery after the depression, double-dip recession and war. But it really didn't matter because people believed that FDR was solving economic problems. In a very real way, we was establishing expectations and managing to give the impression of meeting those expectations. It persisted all the way through the 1960s and is even prevalent today. FDR basically sold free market Americans that government control was better than the free market. Sadly, such is not the case but perception is difficult to change and a lifetime of education is impossible to change.
So presidential candidates lie and presidents lie and set up expectations that are never met. If the economy is sound and unemployment low, nobody holds the politicians' feet to the fire so to speak. But if things start heading south, people start caring and a politician's promises once met with cheers hang like lead weights around his neck. All presidents have been in the same situation but some like Clinton are lucky and others like Carter are unlucky. But all suffer the same fate if they do not manage expectations based on promises. Obama is having an especially difficult time in part because his campaign was so full of hype and hyperbole along with outright lies and people were so dissatisfied with W., that his candidacy was an easy sell. When people feel their president has let them down, they react and Obama is a reaction to Bush falling off of his conservative slant in an attempt to become popular. Ever since the contested election with Gore, Bush had never felt he had the full support of the American people and the Democrats didn't even support him after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In addition, they grudgingly supported him in his efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice or death. But W. set up expectations that he failed to deliver on and when tragedies like Katrina occurred, he was given absolutely no wiggle room to make errors.
But Obama is a different case. Because the press gave him such overwhelming support, they failed to listen with any skepticism as he rattled off promises and made statements that, as it turns out, are working out completely opposite from his promised outcomes. In a very real sense, Obama cast himself as a healer, unifier, financial wizard, commander in chief, diplomat, peacemaker, defender and world leader when, in fact, it was all lies. People can point to his success with "health care reform" but it is costing every American who buys insurance more money in a time when the value of that money is less because of spending initiated by Obama. Unemployment is much higher than he promised and there is every indication that the figures his administration give out for the unemployed are too low by at least two to three points. This means that real unemployment is closer to twelve to thirteen percent. Why isn't anyone other than his arch rivals pointing this out?
He came to office with the outstanding credentials of being a constitutional scholar. However, he has ruled by fiat and the case could be made that the only reason he studied the constitution was to find ways to get around it. His administration is marked by failure after failure and makes the Carter administration look incredibly successful when it was one of the worse in modern times. There is a price for using hyperbole and extravagant claims to sell one's self when those claims fail to materialize or are put into place at a cost that is unsustainable at any time. And yet we have a large portion of the supposedly critical media supporting him as if he is Christ risen. The ultimate sadness of this whole process is that no one but American people will pay anything for being lied to. We are lied to, forced to pay and nary an iota of representation. Obama will possibly lose some power in congress but he has done his best to make congress meaningless. He may not get reelected in 2012 but he will never be made to pay for the destruction he and his crew have done to America's stature in the world, our ability to defend ourselves and our ability to wield power in a world where power and influence are the only currency.
Obama has not only misled us, he has damaged us. He has supported our enemies over our friends and basically worked to bring America down. The fundamental transformation he so touted has proven to be the transformation of American leadership and solidarity in an unstable world into something a little better than a rogue African nation. He has set up a fantasy of expectations and he has failed to manage them in any meaningful way. Yet, yet, media groups that support him and anything that isn't W. report on his actions with a fervor of Orwellian proportions. The crash from this fantasy high will be horrific.
FB
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