Schroedinger explained a central paradox of quantum mechanics with an analogy of a cat inside a box and a situation that boils down to the idea that anything you do to detect whether the cat is alive or dead, kills it.  So you can’t ever know whether it is alive or dead because any attempt to find out, makes it dead.

Business school students and entrepreneurs find a similar paradox in business.  Profits are a result of a well run business.  If you focus on running your business better, increased profits usually follow.  If you focus on increasing your profits, they disappear.  This is why, contrary to what every business student thinks as a child, business plan’s don’t start out with the objective of “make money”.

Our political class has not figured this out yet.  When things happen there is a reality of what happened.  At the end of the day there is going to be a public perception of this reality.  The idea of “spin” is born of a desire to manage the public perception of this reality.

The political class has gotten so focused now on spinning the public perception of reality that they have completely lost sight of the actual reality in the first place.  They now make all of their decisions on the basis of the impact it will have on the public perception of reality and, like the physicist who has to see whether the cat is alive or dead, or the business leader who is willing to do anything under the sun to increase profits, they are ending up doing exactly the things that they shouldn’t be doing and they end up damaging public perception instead of managing it.

The Sherrod case at the USDA puts this into stark relief.  When Fox News started pushing the made up story that the White House was incompetent because they harbored a racist, the White House immediately became incompetent by demanding, with no due diligence, with no investigation, with no questions, that this person resign.  They were so desperate to manage the perception of their competence that they actually had her pull her car off the road she was driving on so she could text message them her resignation.

Our entire system of governmental checks and balances exists to protect balance the rights of individuals with the demands of mobs.  But there was no balance at all here.  The mob said they would be considered incompetent if they didn’t fire this woman so they fired her immediately!  Immediately!  This was an incompetent thing to do, and as the incompetence became clear just as immediately when the mob’s information turned out to be patently false.

Now how do they look?  They look incompetent, which is exactly what they did not want to look!  But had they actually been competent, they would have come out of this situation looking competent, because they would have been competent!

This is by no means a unique situation for this administration.  This same dynamic has plagued the Obama administration since the campaign.  They have consistently and persistently reacted to charges of incompetence by becoming incompetent instead of ignoring the charges and focusing on actually being competent!

It isn’t even unique to this administration.  Both Hillary Clinton’s and John McCain’s entire presidential campaigns were so focused on how the public perceived them that they abandoned all reality of what they were… and ended up being perceived as people who would abandon all reality of who they were to manipulate public perception!

And this isn’t unique… to any of them at this point.  This problem has completely swamped the entire Republican party, and great huge portions of the Democratic party are infected too.

Politicians desperately need to learn that the only way to appear competent is to be competent!