There is a familiar, double-edged mindset in social psychology that is capable of first elating, then killing. It can be as lethal in politics as it is in business or personal relationships.
It's the mindset of rising expectations, which have the unfortunate tendency to incubate outside the boundaries of realistic expectations. Roughly formulated, given just the perception of improvement of a bad situation, the external improvement will be accompanied by an exponential growth in the perceiver's internal expectation that the improvement will continue on an unbroken, upward trajectory.
In politics, as Republican pols have learned all too well, public apathy and resignation are preferable to hope, which is to say, rising expectations, since no one infected with apathy really expects things to change for the better. This, whatever "this" is, the electorate thinks, is just about as good as it's going to get. You can't expect much of anything better from the folks in power. Let 'em be.
Convincingly introduce the prospect of some positive change, however, and public expectations of that change will soon outstrip its realistic possibilities. The bigger the problem that's tackled, the bigger the expectations; hence the steeper the fall and price to be paid when expectations fail to match results.
A textbook case in the works is Iraq. For too long the electorate tolerated an abysmal situation there, believing not much could be done other than what was being done. Then Democrats came along and introduced the idea that the situation -- an inherently impossible situation in which no good options are ever offered because, simply, there are no good options -- could be improved. They have pounded away at raising the public's expectations.
So now "a substantial majority of Americans expect Democrats to reduce or end American military involvement in Iraq if they win control of Congress next Tuesday ... according to the final New York Times/CBS News poll before the midterm election.
"Nearly 70 percent said Mr. Bush did not have a plan to end the war, and 80 percent said Mr. Bush’s latest effort to rally public support for the conflict amounted to a change in language but not policy.
"Forty-one percent of respondents said they expected that troop levels would decrease if Democrats won control, while 40 percent said the party would seek to remove all troops."
The problem, of course, is that Democrats in the majority will possess no realistic means to effect the change this "substantial majority" of the public now expects. Cut the war's funding? No political way. Hold hearings? Merely a political harrumph. Demand immediate withdrawal? A political loser. Effect actual withdrawal? They can't, and at any rate, that would pose an even greater political loser.
So as the same situation in Iraq drags on, the public will quickly turn disillusioned -- and angry -- at those who promised something better.
To anyone who follows politics and reads history, all of this seems excruciatingly obvious. But for the politically and historically aware, the miserably obvious outcome that awaited us in Iraq was as well. However the vast numbers who don't follow politics or read history did not anticipate the excruciatingly obvious when we entered Iraq; nor will they appreciate the rock-and-a-hard place predicament of in-power Democrats. The latter will have enabled expectations, and when they fail to satisfy, the enablers will pay.
I continue to suspect, speaking on political grounds only, that in this election cycle Democrats would have been better off with their own mindset of deferred gratification -- the politically uncharacteristic, temporarily discomforting tactic of what Freud called "impulse renunciation." Better to have laid low and let Republicans stew in their own majority juices for two more years, culminating in an election that would provide Democrats the executive, as well as legislative, power to effect real change and therefore at least have the unfettered means to satisfy expectations.