While ‘looking forward’ and pushing ‘reset,’ politicians should also learn from the past

Too often lately our leaders seem to come from the Satchel Paige School of Political Thought: “Don’t look back, something may be gaining on you.”

The very act of looking back should supply some useful lessons. But if the view to the rear is ugly, or something they don’t want to talk about, too often the response from our political leaders is that they want to “look forward.”

One recent example of looking forward because the past was way too ugly to contemplate came from South Dakota Sen. John Thune. As majority leader of the U.S. Senate, it was only natural for him to be asked about his reaction to President Donald Trump’s mass pardon of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. Thune, displaying a lack of political courage that has become the standard in the Republican Party, briefly told reporters outside of a congressional committee room, “We’re not looking backwards, we’re looking forward.”

Thune did look backward long enough to blame Trump’s pardons on the pardons issued by Joe Biden. Like a boy caught fighting on the school yard, Thune’s response to the white-washing of that dark day is to claim, “He started it!”

There was a time when a Republican leader like Thune would have relished the opportunity to look back at the day when his house was invaded by a mob to praise the heroes who defended him, mourn the dead and injured and call for the full weight of justice to be brought to bear on the renegades that broke the law. In the age of Donald Trump however, Republicans must be careful about when and where they take their law-and-order stance. Illegal immigrants? Kick them out. Insurrectionists? Let them walk.

Thune’s penchant for steadfastly gazing into the future because the past is too messy to contemplate may be catching on as a political tactic for avoiding painful conversations. Whether he learned that tactic from Thune or made it up on his own, Gov. Larry Rhoden seems to have embraced looking into the future as a way to escape the discomfort that lives in the past.

The past that Rhoden doesn’t want to talk about is the more than $600,000 worth of charges rung up on state-issued credit cards by Kristi Noem during her six years as governor of South Dakota.

In a story published by The Dakota Scout, Rhoden refused to comment on Noem’s level of spending. Rhoden explained that when the check comes, he often forgets that he even has a state-issued credit card. Like Thune, Rhoden preferred to have his eye on the future: “I’m not looking back and I don’t know what happened in the past,” Rhoden said. “I just know where I am at and it’s not a problem.”

In the grand scheme of the state budget, $600,000 spent over six years is a drop in the bucket. That drop does come with a helping of hypocrisy. After all, are lavish meals and high-end hotel rooms really how South Dakota citizens expect their governor to spend their tax dollars? This is the same governor who, during breaks from talking with her travel agent, liked to remind legislators that they had a duty to be upright stewards of the state budget because, after all, they were spending taxpayer dollars.

Looking to the future is what we expect of our leaders. But we also expect them to have the courage to look at the past and call out the bad behavior that lingers there. Satchel Paige cautioned against looking back because something might be gaining on him. Our leaders aren’t looking back because something there might cause them to have to take a stand.