I call it the “bullwhether” effect. Specifically, is it bull whether an off-year election result dictates the outcome of national elections a year later? We’ve been inundated with the term “bellwether” a lot, thanks to a couple of off-year elections. The term originally referred to the lead sheep of a domesticated pack, the one that wears a bell. It’s composed of the words “bell,” which is self-explanatory, and “wether,” meaning a male sheep that has been castrated.
The major networks and cable news organizations have been tossing around the term “bellwether” a lot recently, in wake of the election results in Virginia and New Jersey. You can’t escape it. For example, Spectrum 1 News in Syracuse refers to a pair of New York counties as “suburban bellwethers.” The Center for American Progress interviewed a Democratic strategist who discussed the “bellwether elections” in Virginia and New Jersey. A Pennsylvania television station asked if those elections were a “bellwether” for national elections in 2022. The New York Times said the Virginia’s governor race was “widely viewed as a bellwether” for next year’s midterms. Even The Times of India referred to the “bellwether Virginia’s governor race.”
Bullwhether! They’re trying to pull the wool over our eyes.
Think about it. When talking heads tell us an election will have a “bellwether” effect, they’re predicting that voters will act like a herd of sheep blindly following a castrated leader with a noisemaker. (Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like Trump followers.)
While some election outcomes historically forecast subsequent election results, it’s illogical to automatically assume some kind of talismanic significance. That’s not analysis; it’s magical thinking. The fact that a Republican was elected in Virginia does not automatically mean that his party will sweep the House and Senate next year. Nor does the fact that the first mid-term following a presidential election almost always benefits the opposition mean that the President’s party will get shellacked every time. It happens that way until it doesn’t.
Maybe I’m being a black sheep, but I think it’s important to abandon the fatalism that comes with slavish devotion to past election results. That can lead to complacency or panic, neither of which serves a political campaign. I don’t propose ignoring the results entirely. It’s certainly important to mine the electorate to figure out why voters cast ballots the way they do. That’s common sense. But it can be done without magical thinking.
Most of the commentators who bleat about the “bellwether” effect also declare that we are living through a unique time in history. They’ll use the words “bellwether” and “unprecedented” in the same paragraph without regard for the mid-brain collision they cause. That’s not analysis; it’s incoherence. If we live in unprecedented times, what good are bellwethers?
Too much is new.
Facebook impacts election results but has only been around since 2004. Donald Trump became relevant politically when he embraced birtherism, a movement that began in 2008. The American public has only recently begun to realize the dangers of global climate change and the need to address it with public policy. Voters finally realize that economic policies spawned by Republican administrations unleashed a concentration of wealth among the richest that is destabilizing. Facebook, Trump, climate change and economic disparity are the Four Horses of the modern political apocalypse – and they’ve been issues for less than a generation.
Those who tame and ride those horses will inherit the future. Virginia and New Jersey notwithstanding, the donkey has a much better chance of riding them than the elephant. Democrats need to lead the charge against Facebook: limit Its legal immunity, split off Instagram and What’s App, and ban algorithms (with a possible exception for marketing, the only arguably good reason for them). Democrats need to laser-focus on economic inequality and point out that it’s not the result of liberal professors, entitled movie stars, or coastal elites. Place the blame where it belongs: with Republican economic policies beginning with Reagan and continuing through Trump. On climate change, Democrats can label the GOP as a “pro-disaster” party.
Then there is the last horse: Trump and Trumpism. Remember that scene in Ghostbusters when Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) said, “I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, ‘bad'”? Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) replied, “Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.” American political discourse is infected with “both-sides-ism.” It makes us fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. We need less Venkman and more Spengler. Trumpism will stop life as we know it and democracy will explode at the speed of light. It’s no time for understatement.
This is a time for demonizing, denouncing and demagoguing, while singing our fight song:
Wooly-bully
Wooly-bully
Wooly-bully
© 2021 by Mike Tully
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The Ex-President’s Johnson
Behold: A Pale, Bespectacled Moses
Mike Johnson, who could be the reincarnation of the Wally Cox TV character, “Mr. Peeples,” inexplicitly became the 56th Speaker of the House of Representatives a week before Halloween. Johnson is a pale, bespectacled back-bencher from Louisiana in his fourth term. He stumbled into the Speaker’s role after Kevin McCarthy was tossed overboard by House Republicans. When the House GOP rejected several wannabes, they turned to Johnson in an act of exhausted resignation – charmed, I’m sure, by his mousy inoffensiveness.
Johnson doesn’t see it that way. He thinks he was chosen by God. It has been said that “God works in mysterious ways.” So does a drunk. God might have a problem.
So might Johnson. He actually told a Christian gathering on December 5th that he was in active contact with God while the Speaker drama was playing out. As Rolling Stone reported, “Johnson then revealed that — in the lead up to the ‘tumult’ of Kevin McCarthy losing his gavel and the chaotic GOP process of selecting a new Speaker — he had been speaking directly to God.” He said he told God, “You’re gonna allow me to be Aaron to Moses.”
But God wasn’t having it, according to Johnson. “Ultimately 13 people ran for the post,” Johnson said. “And the Lord kept telling me to, ‘Wait, wait, wait,’” Johnson recalled. “So I waited, I waited. And then at the end … the Lord said, ‘Now step forward.’” Johnson said he was surprised to be cast as Moses. “Me?” Johnson said. “I’m supposed to be Aaron.” But that was not the message, Johnson insisted, recalling: “‘No,’ the Lord said, ‘Step forward.’”
Then the Lord snapped his backside with a towel and sent him on his way.
Johnson may be an example of a metastasizing ego. Many people become so enthralled with their magnificence they convince themselves their inner voice is really the Voice of God. They get stoned on their own vapors.
Or they are mentally ill. “For many people religion is one way that we understand the world and give meaning to our lives and certainly religion and spirituality play an important part in many people’s experiences of schizophrenia,” states the website Living with Schizophrenia.” “For some sufferers religious delusions or intense religiously-based irrational thinking may be a component of their symptoms, for instance they may believe that they have been sent by God to become a great prophet.”
As the title of a 2015 dissertation puts it, “If You Talk to God, You Are Praying; If God Talks to You, You Have Schizophrenia.”
Look at a picture of Johnson. Do you see Moses? The Old Testament said Moses was from the tribe of Levi in ancient Israel, which suggests a tough desert-dweller with a swarthy complexion. The unassuming, bespectacled Johnson is so pale he’s at risk of moonburn. A burning bush would turn him into a s’more.
What does Moses-lite see as his mission? According to Rolling Stone, he told the same gathering his mission involves “exposing the ungodly effort to undermine our culture by Leftists.” He said God wants to ban abortion and restore “traditional marriage between one man and one woman.”
In other words, he thinks God is an American culture warrior. God – if he, she, or it exists in some form – might be a tad busy running the Universe. Why care about a small planet infested by a species with an aptitude for self-destruction when there are supernovas to deal with?
God told Moses Mike to step forward and he has. The same day he declared himself the next Moses, Johnson announced that he was releasing thousands of hours of security video taken at the Capitol on January 6th as a “critical and important exercise” done in the name of “transparency.” The Speaker has a unique definition of transparency.
“We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day” he told reporters, “because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ and to have other concerns and problems.” Right. The Justice Department has a nasty habit of “retaliating” against felons. That’s called law enforcement. The Speaker would prosecute sexuality and health care, but give traitors a pass. How does that make sense?
Here’s how: There is a second “God” in Johnson’s pantheon. Moses Mike is also MAGA Mike. If God whispers in his right ear, Donald Trump screams in the left. That’s why Johnson blurs the faces of January 6th criminals: Trump wants him to. Johnson led a futile legal challenge to the 2020 election on Trump’s behalf. He might not be Aaron to Moses, but he’s definitely Charlie McCarthy to Trump’s Edgar Bergen. It’s hard to be a man of God when you’re in league with the devil.
MAGA Mike is not the right hand of God. He’s the ex-President’s Johnson. Long may he wave.
© 2023 by Mike Tully
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