The Tribe reeled off six consecutive wins after two dismal losses to start the new baseball season and found themselves atop the American League Central division. The run included a three-game sweep of the hated Boston Red Sox, so of course the faithful are disbelieving.
The readers’ comments appended to any of the columns of the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Terry Pluto –America’s finest and longest suffering sports writer– reflect the deep skepticism of three generations of Indians faithful.
It has been since 1948, after all, since a World Series ended well for the team on Lake Erie. Twined with the futility of a Browns fan who has been waiting since 1964 or a Cavs fan who did not take their talents to Miami, and the expectation of futility despite occasional bright days is ingrained.
Which may explain why we Cleveland people understand the furrowed brows among the conservative activists and Tea Party faithful studying the still-emerging details of Friday’s big deal between President Obama and his congressional allies and House Speaker John Boehner. Long used to reversals of fortune and the sudden collapses of apparently strong fronts, the followers of Cleveland franchises have a thick gloom attached to every season.
As do Republicans used to lost opportunities and forfeited mandates. The high-water mark of GOP political influence, which came in January of 2005 with a re-elected president and solid majorities in both houses of Congress, was quickly lost in the blowback from the controversy surrounding Terry Schiavo, the push for Social Security reform, the Gang of 14 collapse and, of course, Katrina’s fury and the MSM’s branding of President Bush as indifferent and incompetent.
From then until the summer and fall of 2010 it was one long pratfall, a series of retreats and defeats that left an inexperienced but hard-left ideologue in the Oval Office and the Congress under the control of a team of ultra-liberal operators for whom budgets had no meaning and for which deficits reaching the sky had no downside.
Now the hangover, but not one to be quietly endured but rather one that is wrapped around an urgent fiscal crisis. The Congress has to take control of a spiraling debt, and it has fallen to Boehner to lead that effort and in his own ranks are a score of big spenders who have waited their entire legislative lives to be the folks in charge of the federal faucet.
This is the backdrop for the deal, and all the explanation of any distrust one finds among conservatives of a deal not yet fully unveiled and which certainly did not end the outrageous transfers of vast sums to abortion providers, lefty radio broadcasters and cap-and-trade schemers.
But real money was cuts. Real savings assured. Not big money, or direction-changing shifts in priorities, but, like a six-game winning streak in April, nothing to be scorned either, and much better than the alternative.
Now comes the battle over the debt ceiling and then the individual appropriations bills that are supposed to embody House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s bold vision. The Indians fans expect a June swoon, and the GOP base knows it would be silly to think that real change is ahead.
But a fan can hope. Even when he knows that it would take a real miracle….
