Obama: Trapped in the happy talk bubble

Jim Geraghty points out that Barack Obama is probably not lying to us when he tells us that the Exchange From Hell will be fixed by Nov. 30 and that everything else will go right.  Instead that's probably what he's being told.  And never having the opportunity to develop managerial skills (and being temperamentally unsuited for them) he makes the Lawyer Managerial Mistake.

The  Lawyer Managerial Mistake goes like this:  the Lawyer (or Rookie) has subordinates who are supposed to deliver complex tasks/results.  He receives status updates from them that sound strangely overoptimistic but instead of investigating to get to the truth of the matter, he tells himself that the subordinate knows that if he lies about progress and then fails to deliver he'll be 'in trouble' and will suffer 'discipline'.  So he's constantly 'surprised' because he refuses to get involved until something goes officially 'wrong'.  It's the law enforcement approach to leadership - give people all the rope in the world and if they fail hang them.  It has some problems:

1. It turns all forms of failure into malfeasance.  Most subordinates fail not because they are bad guys doing bad things but because they are inexperienced, frightened, confused, ignorant.  Beating them for their ignorance doesn't reduce it.
2. It obscures the objective:  the objective of a project is to deliver its benefits, not to 'hold people accountable'.  The reason we punish people under the law (well the original reason) was to establish a moral standard and deter transgressions against that standard.  Punishing people for failure to deliver on objectives may feel good but it is still failure.
3. It absolves the leader of responsibility:  many projects fail because of unrealistic objectives/expectations.  In this case, the failure has little or nothing to do with the subordinate but instead implicates the leader.

Here's some Obama examples from George Will:

"He seems to think that his job as chief executive is not to be the executive but to be angry at his own administration when it doesn't perform well," said the syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor. "Fast and Furious, the IRS, Benghazi, NSA, investigation of our Mr. Rosen, there's just a list of things that surprise him."

And some more from Jim Geraghty:

But there are plenty of other times Obama's been surprised by the result of his own policies. He seemed to think that reaching out to the Iranians would lead to a change in the regime's behavior and attitudes. Then he thought they would appreciate him not calling them out on their atrocities; he later regretted his "muted" stance during the regime's bloody crackdown in 2009.

He was surprised to learn that shovel-ready projects were not, in fact, shovel-ready.

He was surprised to learn that large-scale investment in infrastructure and clean-energy projects wouldn't create enormous numbers of new jobs.

He was surprised that his past housing policies hadn't helped struggling homeowners as he had promised.

The "recession turned out to be a lot deeper than any of us realized."

When a woman says her semiconductor-engineer husband can't find a job, Obamasaid he was surprised to hear it, because "he often hears business leaders in that field talk of a scarcity of skilled workers."

This is clearly going on around PPACA:  Obama is trapped in bubble after nested bubble of happy talk that he is happily repeating.  And in honor of happy talk I give you Happy Talk the song.