Who's the extremist anyway?

The U.S. Senate race between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, and Republican challenger Sharron Angle is among the highest profile political races going into this November’s mid-term elections.
Angle has an established track record from her years in the Nevada Assembly as an uncompromising hard-line fiscal and social conservative. For that, the Reid re-election campaign has labeled her an extremist.
She’s an extremist because she believes Social Security is a troubled program doomed to failure under current federal fiscal practices, and that it either needs to be phased out or fixed and padlocked so that politicians cannot touch the trust fund that our payroll deductions go to fund. She’s an extremist because she believes that younger workers should be given a privatized choice with regard to their retirement and how best to fund their future supplemental security income.
She’s an extremist because she believes that the federalizing of public education under the U.S. Department of Education has hurt the quality of classroom education, and that most decisions should be kept at the local level.
There’s no question that Angle is a hard-liner on many issues, and that makes her appear extreme to those on the political left.
But let’s talk about the extremism of Harry Reid for a moment, shall we?
This is a guy who agrees with President Obama’s fiscal strategy of arbitrarily raising income taxes on people earning $250,000 or more, regardless of whether that income is tied up in small businesses or not.
This is a guy who supported federal bailouts and stimulus spending under both Presidents Bush and Obama, favoring expenditures into the trillions of dollars that have done little to improve the economy or end the recession. The national jobless rate remains at or near 10 percent despite the last stimulus bill passed a year and a half ago. Unemployment in Reid’s own state, in fact, is currently above 14 percent in spite of all of Reid’s so-called “help” to his state. This figure is among the highest in the nation.
Reid is the same guy who at one point earlier this year rather recklessly stated that the number of people who lost their jobs was down to only 36,000 for a given month, and that this was good news.
Moreover, Reid’s home state of Nevada continues to lead the nation in real estate foreclosure and loan default rates, personal and business bankruptcies, and declining median home prices, among many other economic statistics.
Furthermore, Harry Reid supports the status quo in Washington, D.C. The concept of “change” that Reid wholeheartedly stood behind in 2008 has proven to be little more than the campaign slogan many of us thought it would be. Nothing has changed in the nation’s capital with regard to the way the government is run or how politics is played. It is the same game; just with different players.
Reid wants to keep the U.S. Department of Education as-is in spite of solid evidence that federal control over public education has contributed to its decline in quality. Drop-out rates nationwide are higher than they’ve ever been; and in Reid’s home state of Nevada, in particular, drop-out rates are among the highest in the entire country. Graduation rates in Nevada are among the lowest nationwide, too. The number of K-12 students requiring remedial education is at an all-time high. And the number of high school graduates requiring remedial education in college is also at an all-time high.
The deterioration of education quality has coincided with the establishment of the U.S. Department of Education under President Jimmy Carter, and has gotten progressively worse in the years since. Coincidence, or perhaps explanation?
Harry Reid is an extremist in my opinion because he thinks that money solves all of our socio-economic and political problems. He throws federal pork at anything and everything, just so he can claim that he did something about it. He isn’t willing to do the real hard work, because that would require him to take some rather unpopular stands with many of his constituents.
Harry Reid is also the same man who said, rather prematurely and ill-timed, in the last year or two of the Bush Administration that the Iraq War was lost. He said this during a time in which our forces were struggling against the guerilla tactics of al-Qaeda and other insurgents. He said this at a time when morale was already at its lowest point during the entire “War On Terror.”
He’s fortunate that our servicemen and women were not listening to him, and that they continued to do their jobs to the best of their abilities; because if they had taken what he had said to heart, then I doubt even the troop surge of 2008 would have made much difference at all.
But the reality is that the troop surge strategy did work. We took out a number of high-profile targets, and helped bring more control into the region. This is because our troops believed in the mission, and believed that a change in strategy would work. They didn’t listen to the defeatist rhetoric of Sen. Harry Reid, who could have single-handedly lost the conflict for our fighting men and women.
Sharron Angle is the extremist in this race? I beg to differ.
I think what it comes down to is the individual voter. What may seem extreme to one person may seem reasonable to another. Harry Reid appears reasonable to the political left; but his views, his policy support and his very own words and actions appear extremist to others.
If the Reid Campaign is going to base this election on painting its opponent as an extremist, then it would do well to take a good hard look in the mirror at its own candidate. What’s good for the goose is also good for the gander. Depending upon who you talk to, Harry Reid may just be more extreme than Sharron Angle.