Divorced From Reality

Over at The Plum Line, Greg Sargent argues that the Obama administration has gotten itself in trouble by being pushed off the ground where it's strongest--making the case that government is a powerful force for good--and instead has become mired in the weak argument that government won't do bad things to citizens. What's entertaining about this is that there hasn't been any sort of assessment or look at how things are actually running under the Obama administration; there's no replacement for PART in place, no red-yellow-and-green stoplight system, we're still a ways away from some major management checkpoints. In other words, the question of whether government is "good" or "bad" has finally reached the point where it operates on two vastly different levels, a political one and an operational one. And the political one appears not to remotely need the operational one as a reference point.