Reversing Your Field

By William L. Garvin
“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.” Senator Barack H. Obama, March, 2006

In high school, superior running backs can reverse their field on the gridiron with spectacular results. In college, if you can reverse your field with a spectacular result, you may win the Heisman Trophy a la Reggie Bush. When you try to reverse your field at the professional level, the results are usually spectacular…in their losses! The same is true for the professionals in politics when they “flip flop” or reverse their field.
Senator Obama did his best to castigate President Bush as documented in the introductory quote but reversed his field and voted for every ceiling-busting budget thereafter. Subsequently, President Obama has spent money faster and raised the ceiling higher than any president in history. Then he reverses his field and becomes a deficit hawk and wants to freeze spending. This year alone, the federal spending will amass a $1.5 TRILLION deficit! You want to freeze federal spending at this level? A $14.5 trillion debt isn’t enough? That’s almost as ridiculous as pretending there is an important distinction between “spending” and “investing.”
Senator Obama wasn’t the only person on the Democrat side to oppose raising the debt ceiling four years ago. Listen to Nevada’s Harry Reid: “My Republican friends… should explain why they think more debt is good for the economy…Democrats won’t be making arguments to support this legislation, which will weaken our country.” After presiding over the worst four years of financial fiascos, outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi showed an incredible reversal capability by proclaiming: “Deficit reduction has been a high priority for us. It is our mantra, Pay-As-You-Go.” Two more spectacular reversals; two more spectacular losses.
The President would be well served to heed the following words: "Our true choice is not between tax reduction, on the one hand, and the avoidance of large Federal deficits on the other. It is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, so long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits... In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now." These sentiments could have been spoken by Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party or any leading Conservative voice. Since these words were in fact spoken by President John F. Kennedy, it is easy to see the reversal of field by the Democrat Party over the last fifty years and the reason for the spectacular losses they incurred last November.
This reversal of field has not only been economic but also philosophical. J.R. Dunn in the AMERICAN THINKER noted: “When liberalism mutated into an ideology in the wake of the New Deal, it also adapted the “enemies” mindset of its model ideologies, fascism and communism. No longer was politics the grand democratic game. Opponents of liberalism were enemies of progress, of justice, and of the people, deserving no consideration or mercy. The old rules of decorum and civility went out the window, replaced with any below-the-belt move that worked.”
The politics of personal and political destruction is most evident in the left’s unrelenting assault on the Tea Party, Sarah Palin and her family. Not a day goes by that a new nadir in civility is not breached by the left. This week saw the lyrics in The Mikado rewritten in the Missoula Community Theatre to call for the beheading of Sarah, “because no one would miss her.” Nice civil discourse there, Montana. Here’s your problem: she’s still standing; she’s still writing; she’s still speaking; and she’s still smiling. She won’t shut up and she won’t sit in the back of the bus with the rest of the “enemies.” She won’t retreat and she won’t reverse her field. She and the Tea Party are here to stay so get used to it.