Government works on the mythology that people actually know what they are doing.

The world runs on the same theory and in his seminal essay Why Americans hate foreign policy humorist P J O'Rourke pointed out the flaw in this thinking.

"The night before I left to cover the Iraq war, I got drunk with another friend, who works in TV news. We were talking about how - as an approach to national security - invading Iraq was... different.

"I'd moved my family from Washington to New Hampshire. My friend was considering getting his family out of New York. 'Don't you hope,' my friend said, 'that all this has been thought through by someone who is smarter than we are?'

"It is, however, a universal tenet of democracy that no-one is."

That tenet echoed loudly when I read the Prime Minister had apparently decided that picking a fight with the miners would be just the tonic to battle the impression that he is weak.

That sort of thinking, if it's true of the PM, is of a piece with those who didn't think beyond what happens after a short sharp invasion of Iraq. It's cut from the same cloth as the decision to gamble the 60-year-old relationship with Japan on the slim hope that an international court will stop whaling. And it's certainly in the same league as making that decision public just before you quietly announce a huge back flip on political advertising, leaving you open to the charge that foreign policy is being used for domestic political ends.

Since April, the notion that the people making decisions at the core of the Rudd Government are all too human has been pounding like a drum.

What this Government wins on the swings of daily tactical battles it loses on the strategic roundabout. The short term has utterly swamped the long term and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that this is because there is chaos at its core and that is something that has been evident in this administration since its earliest days.

Don't forget that the reason the Prime Minister needs to show strength is because some saw it as weak to shelve the emissions trading scheme. So now, apparently, millions are to be expended; jobs, national reputation and share value are to be risked to help heal a self-inflicted wound.

Let's hope all this is fanciful because to the eye untutored in the mysterious genius of government it looks a lot like one daft idea is being wallpapered over another.

The last two months have been so untidy that some in Labor's own ranks believe the only thing holding it up is that the alternative is unelectable. They might be right but pause for a moment and ponder the cost of being wrong, again.

Imagine being the first Prime Minister to lose office after a single term since Jim Scullin in 1931. On the upside it would excite historians because Scullin beat Stanley Bruce in 1929 and he was the first and, until John Howard in 2007, the only Prime Minister to lose his seat in a general election.

But that amusing footnote in history would be the only upside because the rest of what the historians would write would trash the reputation of Kevin Rudd.

He inherited a country with no net debt and the best set of accounts since Federation. He arrived with approval ratings as high as any seen and was handed power to hire and fire in Cabinet beyond anything previously enjoyed by a Labor prime minister. For the first two years he looked like a busy reformist and his reputation was enhanced by the Government's response to the global financial crisis.

But while things looked good on the surface, there was trouble below deck. His changes to the way government does business removed important bureaucratic checks and balances. The criticism that was levelled against Mr Howard - that he centralised control in his office - is even truer of Mr Rudd. Cabinet has been largely sidelined in favour of the gang of four in the Strategic Priorities and Budget Committee and almost everything of consequence has to be cleared by the Prime Minister's Office.

The massive pipeline of government work all flows into the PMO: things have backed up and pressure has been building. And then, all of a sudden, in an election year, the lid blew off. After two years of dutifully ticking off every piddling election promise the Government abandoned core commitments in the space of a month as it cleared the deck for a poll. It's been very messy and the end result is that the Prime Minister's reputation has been shredded. On both sides of the political divide, internal polling reveals a deep disappointment in him. He is now just another politician.

And because the back flips and back downs have been so spectacular it has masked all the good work that has been done by this Government. His ministers and his caucus do not thank him for that and he has never been loved by his own. He is now on very dangerous ground and the only salvation is a good election win. A modest victory means he will face internal trouble from early in his second term.

This week the Prime Minister said he would win the election and win it well.

Billy McMahon said that. He was wrong. History remembers him as our worst post-war prime minister. He was reviled by his colleagues and one, Paul Hasluck, wrote a withering assessment of him in his book The Chance of Politics.

"I confess to a dislike of McMahon. The longer one is associated with him the deeper the contempt for him grows and I find it hard to allow him any merit. Disloyal, devious, dishonest, untrustworthy, petty, cowardly - all these adjectives have been weighed by me and I could not in truth modify or reduce any one of them in its application to him."

This time, Mr Rudd had best be right.

Chris Uhlmann is the Political Editor for ABC News 24.