The latest deadline for Obamacare expires tomorrow, and the administration is quietly frantic in its efforts to get more people to sign up. Specifically; they’re desperately trying to get as many young people as possible to sign up, largely because without those young people to shoulder the costs of the older ones the entire thing collapses into a heap. Mind you, said ‘frantic efforts’ and ‘desperate attempts’ mostly involve flying to various states on the taxpayers’ dime and doing television interviews, but that’s Dizzy City for you. Getting on television always counts towards your final score, whether or not doing so ever actually works.

Will the administration succeed? Depends on your definition.  They’re not going to get Obamacare to work, of course. Obamacare doesn’t even know how to work – it’s like what Frankenstein’s Monster would have been in the real world. Which is to say: it’s a rotting corpse that will never lurch to its feet and incongruously spout philosophy at you, and no amount of direct current is ever going to change that.  The crucial problem for the administration, as has been noted before, is that trying to convince a young person to buy insurance that might cost them four or five figures or more a year by threatening him or her with a $695 fine (seriously, that’s the number that the Obama administration is using in the new radio ads) is an uphill battle. People actually can do math in this country.  At least, when it comes to money; and if they don’t know the math, they will learn it.  With blazing speed.

So, that’s the real-world definition of ‘success’ taken care about.  What about Dizzy City’s? …Sure, they can succeed.  It’s all a matter of redefining one’s terms and victory conditions.  You start off by junking all the stupid promises that the stupid Democratic politicians (including that real genius in the White House) made to get elected.  Trivial, really: Washington DC does that all the time anyway.  Then you come up with some nice, vague generalities that can be distorted and warped at need, and make those your new victory conditions.  Issue a lot of vague generalities, warp and distort your new objectives when it turns out that you can’t even match those, low-ball every estimate, and hey presto! – whatever happens, declare victory and never admit weakness.

You must understand that this tactic does in fact work… for the Executive Branch of government.  It is admittedly pure political death for any poor schlub in the legislatures who has to face the wrath of the voters in the next election, but then Executive Branch politicians and bureaucrats have always been indifferent to Legislative Branch politicians’ suffering. To be fair, there’s usually no love lost between the two factions in either direction; the last seven years have been a bit of a historical aberration.

…Yeah. I could insert that sentence into a lot of political conversations and have it make sense.