Voters, they assumed, would focus only on the current economic malaise.

I am someone who has already spent a lot of time fighting the fight through offices.

When the Europeans stress tested their banks in 2010, for example, they blithely assumed that Ireland did not face imminent fiscal disaster.

And neither one could jump very well, but they got kept good position, and so they did well rebounding. They remembered that every shot that is taken, they assumed would be missed.

Now this didn't make any sense, and like any reasonable engineer or scientist, they assumed that the problem must be the technology itself, it must be the dish.

But they assumed that, over time, monetary unification would create momentum for national reforms, further economic integration, and some form of political unification.

This is good news for China s economy, but disappointing, perhaps, to those who assumed that the government would allow the bubble to grow bigger and bigger, eventually precipitating a crash.

In their view, Turkey had re oriented its foreign policy toward the Muslim Middle East and away from the West a shift supposedly reflected in the country s deteriorating relations with Israel and improving ties with Iran and Syria.

They assumed that Czech and Polish leaders who were strongly pro American would willingly agree to deployment, and that public opinion in both countries would go along with whatever the governments decided.

The oil sheikhs would likely be inclined to postpone extraction only if they could reasonably assume that the demand reductions of the signing countries and the comparative price reduction that this implies are stronger today than they will be in the future.

But it is one thing to take a calculated risk, as the Russians did in rightly assuming that the West would not go to war over Georgia it is another thing for Russia to jeopardize its colossal economic gains of recent years in an all out confrontation with the West.

They apparently assumed that the rest of Europe would overlook continuing high deficits, and that, as eurozone members, the market would consider their debt to be just like German bunds, though issued by friendly and welcoming people in an agreeable climate, and with a glass of ouzo on the side.