Political Success and Governmental Failure

"In his first debate with Stephen Douglas in 1858, Abraham Lincoln said, "In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed."

Seven score and 13 years after those debates we are now engaged in a great political contest over whether the welfare state established by the New Deal and built up continuously since 1932 can long endure. Its growth over the past eight decades and the financial crisis confronting it today suggest the need to qualify Lincoln’s rule: Public sentiment may ensure political success for a policy, but it does not rule out governmental failure.  Indeed, a policy can be a governmental failure precisely because it is a political success."
[Letters From An Ohio Farmer]