Engineers learned in the days of Pharoahs that optimsm was insufficient to ensure a building's integrity. Only experience, in the form of previous failures, was reliable. Engineers never trust a new design until they've succeed in breaking it, and know its limits.

"Social engineering" as derogatory phrase implies actions without understanding. It used to be a fair criticism, but no more. We have learned much about the mechanisms of human interaction, and the possibility of reliable social engineering grows with experience and study.

Here's a hint in deciding between two optimists---the one that embraces new knowledge (experience) is the one that will temper optimism with caution. The one that extols tradition is the one at risk of ignoring warnings of impending failure.

Beware the optimist that announces we have always known what we need. Especially be wary of the optimist that is absolute in his positions.

BTW, it is precisely the human interest in what is going wrong that drives "bleeding ledes" in media.

Positive thinking, positive message:

Most Democratic Party politicians do not realize it yet, but there is an economic agenda they could offer to the American people that would enable them to promise---with a straight face---greater wealth, happiness, and economic security. The proposal: Optimize the production [and consumption] of Real Wealth in this country. It's something that the American people will never experience while being governed by Republican politicians. It's also something that the Democratic Party would be able to deliver to the American people if they understood exactly what they were doing and why they were doing it.

The above quote is the introductory paragraph of an article I wrote entitled Make The American People Richer.

Read it, embrace it, dismiss it, make of it what you will...

There's a cynicism in the neocon view of Iraq that for me outweighs the description of it as optimism or idealism. It's that view that the world is a means to our ends,  and an object to which we then apply force. In that sense, they're closer to "realism" than one likes to think, just more power mad.  

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

I agree the major media picked/polled front-runners are optimistic; but I also think their optimistic stances are related to the economic/power prospects of the set who winds their motors and fuels their races. Talk, talk, talking happy talk about what has been policy, is now policy and what is intended future policy for and by the few is not going to feed the damned bulldog, too much has been washed away by water gone under the bridge. Straightforward talk and serious reform aimed at rebuilding this countries broad working and consuming middle classes is in order.

If these elitist fools now in charge keep on keeping on with their greedy self-centered Neo Conservative and Neo-Liberal (corrupted Liberalism and fraternal twin to Neo-Conservatism) policies there will be consequences they cannot control and nobody in their right mind wants. I know these soft-handed, heard-hearted egg headed elitists think otherwise but they are dead wrong. They had best learn to think like an FDR if they what to save their class/set.

Personally I don’t really care who or what set leads, someone has to and as that is natural the order of things. I only care that they promoted the general welfare of our republic…a thing that has not been happening since the early nineteen eighties.

The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.

Max DePree

As Jim Cramer points out the pessimists are the ones always credited with doing the serious work about the stock market and being the serious ones. They often tend to be the most wrong.

While some, remember Jimmy Carter's "malaise" speech and Reagan's wiping him out with "morning in America," may think optimism fails to meet the required seriousness a country that broke away from the greatest military power then existing and has been peopled by those leaving them homes for a new life probably are both wrong and live in the wrong country. However, the doers in this country have always been practical people like Edison and Ford.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

It's important to note that what Seligman means by optimism is not what most people think of when they hear the word "optimism."

According to Seligman, optimism is the person's beliefs or assumptions about the causes of good and bad events in the person's life. Specifically, optimism means that:

You view the causes of good events as being located throughout your world, rather than in tiny islands

You view the causes of good events as lasting very long in time, rather than being brief.

You view the causes of good events as coming from inside yourself, rather than from external factors.

And the reverse is true for the causes of bad events: the causes are isolated, rather than global; they are brief, rather than long-lasting, and they are internal, rather than external.

It gets more complicated from there.

His analysis of stump speeches is pretty accurate, but bear in mind that his definition of optimism isn't all happy-dappy, it's all sunshine and lollipops.

re: the incompetence.  I think I'd do a little happy dance in celebration of it.  On the other hand, it might end once and for all, the flirtation of the Hispanic community with the Republican Party if the resolution had succeeded. :-) 

aMike

The Bushies were right at first to dismiss the naysayers who talked about such things as Afghans defeating the Imperial British troops in the 19th century or the "brutal Afghan winter" that was supposedly going to renders us unable to defeat the Taliban. Two weeks into the Afghan campaign, some were talking about "quagmire".

The only people talking "quagmire" two weeks into the Afghan campaign were people who thought there wouldn't be one. The Bushies were not right to casually dismiss the difficulties Britain and the Soviets had in Afganistan. Hasn't time borne that out?

Hoosiertransplant, thanks for responding.

The only people talking "quagmire" two weeks into the Afghan campaign were people who thought there wouldn't be one.

You're dead wrong.  Here's an article on October 31, 2001, that appeared in the New York Times:

Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past, the ominous word ''quagmire'' has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad.

Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam? Is the United States facing another stalemate on the other side of the world? Premature the questions may be, three weeks after the fighting began. Unreasonable they are not, given the scars scoured into the national psyche by defeat in Southeast Asia.

For all the differences between the two conflicts, and there are many, echoes of Vietnam are unavoidable. Today, for example, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld disclosed for the first time that American military forces are operating in northern Afghanistan, providing liaison to ''a limited number of the various opposition elements.''

Their role sounds suspiciously like that of the advisers sent to Vietnam in the early 1960's, although Mr. Rumsfeld took pains to say of the anti-Taliban forces that ''you're not going to send a few people in and tell them they should turn right, turn left, go slower, go fast.'' The Vietnam advisers, of course, were initially described in much the same terms, and the government of the day vigorously denied that they were a prelude to American combat troops.

In the most famous such denial, Lyndon B. Johnson vowed that he would not send American boys in to fight the war for Vietnamese boys.

Despite the insistence of President Bush and members of his cabinet that all is well, the war in Afghanistan has gone less smoothly than many had hoped. Not that anyone expected a lightning campaign without setbacks; indeed, both Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld have often said the effort would be long and hard.

But signs of progress are sparse. A week ago, the Pentagon said the military capacity of Taliban leaders in Afghanistan had been ''eviscerated'' by allied bombing raids; now ranking officials describe those leaders as ''tough characters'' who remain full of fight. The sole known commando sortie into enemy territory produced minimal results and ample evidence that American intelligence about the Taliban is thin.

Now of course the Bushies went on to squander their victory over the Taliban and divert resources to Iraq.  No one can deny that the same hubris that infected the Iraq War management also infected the Afghan campaign.  But there is also no doubt that had the planners listened to the naysayers, the Taliban would never have been toppled in the first place.

God, we were attacked by the Taliban, too? When did that happen? All this time, I thought we were hunting for Bin Laden & Co. in Afghanistan, not the Taliban.

In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

I've posted numerous times on TPM Cafe my view that optimism is the characteristic that is the most attractive to general election voters in candidates for the presidency.

Each time, I have noted that George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan, our last three two-term presidents, share very few characteristics, but one prominent characteristic that all three shared was an unflagging optimism, especially in America's promise.

Good for Hillary and/or her people for recognizing and exploiting that fact, but I think the most natural campaigner who can truly inherit the American Optimistism mantle is clearly Obama.

Ideology is what sunk Hoover. It was Roosevelt who offered optimism that something would be found that would work. Whether in his Fireside Chats or his speechs more than his policies are what offered the nation hope.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

It's interesting, then, that the US Army's training doctrine, especially at the major centers such as Ft. Irwin and Ft. Polk, emphasize commanders and staff -- both the unit(s) in training and the Opposing Force -- go through a daily After-Action Review, which has definite elements of self-criticism. The key, of course, is that the reviews are presented in a positive and supportive way, and it is made very clear that there are no failures if one learns from them.

In general, the units in training are expected to lose several or all of their engagements. They deliberately are put into unfavorable situations. Admittedly, when units do win most or all of their engagements, that tends to be what they call "career enhancing".

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Seems to me you can put these things together if you simply redefine the "negative thinking"term as "problem-finding." Actually problem-finding is a very important skill. It is a frontal lobe function that allows one to notice something is missing or off kilter. This is not at all the opposite of "optimism," if you define optimism as trying to solve the problems you find. It would work sort of like a thermostat. You can heat or cool your house and you use the same thermostat for both operations. The thermostat finds the problems and fixes them.

As a people, at least in the ideal we uphold for ourselves and expect in our standard-bearers, we are the can-doers, the stop-at-nothings, the smiley-facers, the little engines that can.

It's the can-do part that's critical.  People who talk a lot about how bad everything is and how hard it's gonna be to fix, rather than about stuff being fixable, tend to be perceived as defeatist whiners, rather than problem solvers -- often rightfully so, it seems to me.  My guess would be that the optimism study's results have more to do with people's (imperfect) attempts to distinguish between problem solvers and whiners, than with optimism per se.

Well thank you, Mike. Not only was Lincoln possibly our greatest president, he was in my opinion, one of our greatest writers. No one at least in American politics has ever been able articulate the essence of Americanism than Lincoln.

I can hardly read his writings without weeping for what might have been.

So how do you explain Richard Nixon?

That's actually pretty deep stuff, Tom. Do expand.