Obama is to a Colostomy like Hope is to a …?

Would you rather experience a bad situation forever or for just six months? Any sane person would choose the temporary situation. And yet, according to a study I published this week, if you chose the temporary situation, you’d be more likely to suffer over the next six months-so focused on the hope that your situation would soon improve that you’d have a hard time coping with your current fate.
Many people voted for Barack Obama in hopes that he’d extricate the country from a whole array of bad situations. Now they wait, with hope, for things to improve. In the meantime, however, they are having a hard time coping with the economy, the situation in Afghanistan, and even with the drawn out process of reforming our health care system. And so they criticize Obama for not making things better, faster.
Barack Obama is being bedeviled by the dark side of hope.
In our study, Dylan Smith, George Loewenstein and I measured the happiness of people who had just undergone a colostomy surgery. Because of disease in their colons, the people had had their bowels rerouted to exit in a pouch on the side of their abdomen. For about half of the people receiving this surgery, this colostomy was permanent. But for the remaining people, the lucky ones, their doctors were confident that over the next six months, they’d be able to get their bowels reconnected. Their colostomies, in other words, were temporary.
Over the next six months, it was this “lucky” group that suffered. The people with permanent colostomies, forced to reckon with the cards they were dealt, emotionally adapted to their situation. The people with temporary colostomies, by contrast, remained frustrated by their situation, waiting impatiently to trade their cards in, so to speak, for better ones. They suffered from the curse of high expectations.
Barack Obama’s popularity has dropped significantly in recent months. Part of this drop was expected, given the height of his popularity after the election. But Obama’s popularity is also sinking because his supporters are becoming impatient. They elected Obama so he’d fix the economy, and the health care system, and the Middle East. Now Obama’s supporters are like those people with temporary colostomies: they know that improvement will take time, but that doesn’t make it easier to cope with the country’s current troubles.
A prisoner sentenced to life without parole is in a worse situation than one with only six months remaining in his sentence. But it is this latter prisoner who is more likely to attempt to escape. The anticipation of freedom, of a better life, is so strong that he can no longer wait.
The strong emotions elicited by our President are not merely a measure of his performance to date; they don’t merely arise because he has failed to resolve all the crises he inherited.
They are also evidence that, for many Americans, Barack Obama still inspires hope.
Peter A. Ubel M.D. is author of Free Market Madness: Why Human Nature Is at Odds with Economics-and Why It Matters (Harvard Business Press, 2009). The study discussed in this essay appears in the November 2009 edition of Health Psychology.
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