My wife is always asking me hypothetical questions.  Specifically, hypothetical questions about my interest in purchasing expensive pocket books for her.  Most men would probably enter into a promise for such a bag assuming the conditions of the hypothetical (new job, more money etc.) would never be met, but given my middling professional status, and persistent spouse, I refuse to open the door.  Luckily for me, however, my wife’s hypotheticals are not limited to consumer products of debatable importance and often relate to whether, if in a situation where I could only choose among bad outcomes, I would rather freeze to death or be buried alive.  Some people might be concerned if their wife was so caught up in what they might do if they existed in some alternate universe or where they got to choose between crappy options, or had a better job, but I’m just psyched she finds the exercise so entertaining.

Hypotheticals were the earliest form of harmless entertainment in an era where people mostly passed free time by getting leprosy or throwing rocks at undesireables.  The way they started out was that some guys were sitting around in Jerusalem about 3,000 years ago, and had crappy jobs as a shepherd and a guy who tries to start fires by rubbing two sticks together.  These guys got very bored, so one guy said something to his colleague about how great it would be to have sneakers instead of sandals.  At first, the second guy got really uncomfortable and told him he’d never heard of sneakers and then told him to shut up before someone heard them and stoned them to death, but on one occasion, the second guy responded to his buddy that sneakers would be awesome, and then asked the shepherd what he would do if someone offered to watch his sheep for four days.  At first, he wasn’t really sure because the only other thing he knew about was rubbing sticks together and that looked even worse than chasing sheep around in the desert but eventually he told his friend that he would probably try to find a place to go swimming, and thus, the tradition was born.

Political campaigns are the World’s Fair of hypotheticals.  In fact, the very purpose of the campaign is to discuss what one would do to fix certain problems or address certain issues if one were to end up holding high office.  As anyone who follows politics knows, this has the potential to create a situation where a politician could, for example, suggest privatizing social security (see: Bush, George W.)   The trick, of course, for politicians is that this game of hypotheticals becomes much less entertaining when one is already in office, in which case it becomes a one-sided game in which one person is willing to end all current wars and the other has a 40% approval rating while vowing to send 100,000 additional teenagers to Crap Hole Iraq for security threats which are so dire they cannot be explained.

A few weeks back, Barack Obama and a band of marginal congressional leaders pulled off something of a health care coup d'état.  It would have been more of an actual coup if it hadn’t taken so fing long, or if it contained any meaningful changes, or if Joe Lieberman and other miserable bozos hadn’t gone to the mats for health care companies instead of the taxpayers but as Vice President Biden said, its passage was still a big fing deal.  After this historic feat, republicans were predictably screaming about socialism and the end of America, but what shocked me most was the way my friends and neighbors, many of whom have Obama stickers on their BMWs, referred to his steps on healthcare as “misguided”. 

After hearing about a thousand Obama supporters tell me they felt he’d “lost his way” with the health care bill, I decided to consult the readily available history of his candidacy to understand this sentiment. What I found, consistent with my memory, was that Obama played the hypothetical game virtually the same way every time, and that in every campaign appearance for nearly two years, his first theoretical changes would be made to health care, which he regarded as the central focus on his theoretical presidency.  

The fact that so many who supported him think his changes to health care are “dangerous” or “troubling” can either be attributed to the fact that Americans have short memories, or that as many on the right suggested, Obama’s election was more a popularity contest than a political one.  The third option, I suppose, is that most Americans aren’t married to my wife, and don’t appreciate the value of a promise, even if it’s conditional.