Why Did Cory Fail?

In the past week, I've posted two videos. One was of the mayor of Newark reacting with rational alarm at his city's horrific budget situation. The other was an interview with a homeless man who lives in San Francisco. The mayor shows the trend - bankrupt cities - and the homeless fellow shows the results - no change in the social pathologies.

Newark's mayor is a Democrat and from what I've inferred from reading stories about the city, the city council is predominantly Democrat as well. Dittos for San Francisco. They've not faced significant political opposition in enacting their programs.

These aren't stupid people. Their accumulated experience running city government and providing social services is substantial. For example, here a tidbit from Newark Mayor Cory Booker's bio on Wikipedia.

After Stanford, Booker won a Rhodes Scholarship and studied at The Queen's College, Oxford, where he was awarded an honors degree in modern history in 1994...

Booker obtained a J.D. in 1997 from Yale Law School where he started and operated free legal clinics for low-income residents of New Haven. He was also a Big Brother*, and was active in the Black Law Students Association. Booker lived in Newark during his final year at Yale and following graduation served as Staff Attorney for the Urban Justice Center in New York and Program Coordinator of the Newark Youth Project.

Despite a resume that would make anyone proud, Cory is a failure at his job. The Newark city council is a failure. The city of San Francisco is a failure. The social pathologies that Cory and his brethren have dedicated their lives to fighting are still going strong. Meanwhile, Cory and his comrades are facing up to the fact that in fighting these ills, they haven't just spent all of their money, they've spent all of their children's money as well. Last year was the high water mark for massively funded social programs. From here on out there will be only budget cuts in social services.

The game is over and they have lost.

Whenever I see intelligent and educated people with lots of financial backing fail, it indicates not that they were stupid or evil or corrupt, but that their underlying worldview was wrong. It can't be otherwise. If their worldview was correct, then with all of their money and effort, their solutions should have had a substantial impact in the problems they faced.

Why did Cory fail?

* - From this it is fair to infer that Cory cares. He really cares about helping others. Whatever his results, we need to assume that his motives have been pure as have the motives of his colleagues.