Martin DyckmanOur texts today are not Biblical, but they are definitely topical.
A wise man changes his mind often, a fool never -Spanish proverb.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines –Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In every political campaign since the Stone Age, it has been an “Aha!” moment for a candidate to catch an opponent changing a position.
It’s the cue to denounce the opponent for sacrificing principle to ambition.
Sometimes this is true.
But it can also be nonsense.
As times change, so do circumstances.
George H. W. Bush sincerely meant what he said when he declared to the 1988 Republican convention, “Read my lips: No new taxes.”
After he won the presidency and its burdens, he realized that he had spoken imprudently. He compromised with congressional Democrats on a $500-billion deficit reduction plan including taxes.
It cost him his re-election. It won him a John F. Kennedy Profiles in Courage Award.
American politicians probably don’t change their minds often enough.
And they shouldn’t make irresponsible promises — such as Grover Norquist’s no-tax pledge –in the first place.
In the current Florida campaign, Nan Rich and Rick Scott point to a pattern of reversals over the course of Charlie Crist’s career.
Crist does seem to change positions according to how the political winds blow.
But the incumbent governor can be nimble too.
Whether Scott is for or against high-speed passenger rail seems to depend on whether his chief of staff had a piece of the action.
Scott was against Medicaid expansion before he was for it, and then he didn’t attempt to persuade the Legislature, implying that he opposed it once again. Trying to have it both ways doesn’t work.
Four years ago, when Scott was financing his own campaign because the lobbies didn’t think he could win, he blasted Bill McCollum for taking money from U.S. Sugar. Now Scott takes the money, and hunting junkets too.
Sometimes it is wrong to take a stand and right to renege on it.
Fuller Warren won the 1948 Florida governor’s race on a promise to veto any sales tax. In the face of fiscal disaster, Warren urged the 1949 Legislature to enact the tax and he signed it. Any other governor would have had to do the same. His sin was in how he won the election, not in breaking the promise. Otherwise, he was a poor governor.
Florida’s two greatest governors also changed their positions on enormously significant issues.
Running for governor in 1954, LeRoy Collins promised to maintain racial segregation, “our custom and our law,” by all lawful means.
But he eventually came to see that it was wrong and renounced it.
President Lyndon Johnson, who had filibustered against civil rights when he was in the Senate, appointed Collins in 1964 to head the Community Relations Service newly established by the Civil Rights Act.
Sen. Strom Thurmond, the remorseless South Carolina segregationist, opposed Collins bitterly.
“So you have grown since you have been on the national scene?” he sneered at Collins during a confirmation hearing.
“I hope I have grown since I left my mother’s knee and I hope I continue to grow,” Collins replied. “And I hope as long as the good Lord lets me live on this earth, I will continue to grow and to recognize changes and to meet the new responsibility as changes require.”
As a state senator, Reubin Askew opposed a corporate profits tax. As a gubernatorial candidate, he agreed to listen to two youngsters who had facts to show how the corporate lobbies had been misinforming the Legislature and paying too little while Mom and Pop Sixpack were paying too much.
His promise to enact the tax won him the election. He kept it and applied much of the proceeds to repealing sales taxes on household utilities and residential rentals. That was in 1971; there hasn’t been any tax reform since.
Collins and Askew had the wisdom and courage to change when change was called for.
The voters held it against Collins when he ran for senator in 1968, but when he died in 1991, the Florida House of Representatives unanimously proclaimed him “Floridian of the century.”
Askew left office as popular as when he went in.
The question is not whether a politician has changed, and not even so much why, but whether he or she has come at last to the right side of an issue.
That’s for the voters to say.
Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times. He lives near Waynesville, North Carolina. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
