WASHINGTON’S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET: NO ONE IS RUNNING THE SHOW.

In other words, people have the power to try stuff in the same way generals have the authority to send troops into battle, but as General James Mattis likes to say, “The enemy gets a vote.” And in politics and public policy, the enemy isn’t merely the opposing party or hostile voters, but life — that vast realm of existence governed as much by Murphy’s Law as by Washington’s laws. Facts are stubborn things. The world is complicated.

After Barack Obama got his stimulus passed on the promise that there were millions of “shovel-ready jobs,” the stimulation never quite materialized as planned, and the shovels tended to stay in the shed. Obama later insisted that the theory behind the stimulus was right, but “the problem is that spending it out takes a long time, because there’s really nothing — there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.”

This is a hard lesson for people who put immense faith in government to do big, important things.

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