Driving home from a dental appointment this week, I was switching between stations when I caught one of them in mid announcement. “. . .Bunny will headline the Super Bowl halftime show.” I thought for a moment he was talking about Lady Bunny before it became clear he was talking about Bad Bunny. Well, at least I know who Lady Bunny is, I thought to myself, as I found out that Bad Bunny is one of the most-streamed artists on Spotify. Well, Spotify or Sirius, I still don’t know who she is.
Getting home, I immediately asked Karl if he knew who Bad Bunny is. To my great disappointment, he did. He is much more au courant than I am, even if he didn’t know who Charlie Kirk was not so long ago. Maybe I’m just a different kind of courant than KarL
Changing from my Craig Goes to the Dentist outfit to my Craig is Home for the Evening kaftan, I turned on the television in our bedroom, and there was Bad Bunny. I felt a little like Lesley Ann Warren in Victor/Victoria finding out he’s a man, but then I found out he is the Puerto Rican artist who declined to take his world tour into the United States in protest of Trump’s immigration policies and the whole ICE thing. That part I remembered along with the MAGA backlash, even if I didn’t know who did it. Suddenly, I’m thinking, “This is getting good.”
Predictably, there’s talk of ICE at the Super Bowl, and I’m like “Ice Ice Baby,” while wondering whatever happened to that Vanilla guy.
We’ve seen only too recently what happens when politics collide with business. The NFL, like Disney, is a business, and when it comes to the Super Bowl and expanding football (American-style) globally, it’s big business. While Americans like to assert our love of democracy above all else, one need only cast an eye at any dictionary to see that business comes before both democracy and government.
Speaking of government, right now it’s shut down. Again. The Democrats are blaming the Republicans, and the Republicans are blaming the Democrats, and I think I’ll have a ham sandwich when I finish writing this column. You see, when you look at the political fallout in the next national election following a shutdown, it is far from clear who the voters are likely to blame or even if such blame results in a power shift.
There were four short shutdowns during the Reagan years, and the first three didn’t shift power at all in the next election. The fourth one was less than a month before the midterms in 1986, and the Democrats took the Senate away from the Republicans. The first Bush and Clinton shutdowns didn’t change anything.
The Senate did flip to the Republicans in 2014 following the shutdown when Obama was president. Arguably, this loss for Democrats was more likely the result of increasing Republican muscle throughout Obama’s term than a year-old shutdown.
Then we get to the two Trump shutdowns. The one in 2018 preceded the Democrats taking over the House of Representatives that November, and the very long one that stretched from 2018 into 2019 was over almost two years before the election of 2020, which saw the Democrats taking control of a “unified” government for the first couple of years of the Biden term.
So, is there an effect on electoral outcomes based on who voters blame for government shutdowns? Not consistently, for sure, and it’s something of a strain to argue for a causal relationship with those outcomes when a power shift did occur.
However, there is a pattern that has Republicans playing defense. Every president since Bill Clinton has lost one or both chambers in the midterms. Even Bush, who held the Republican majority together in his first time at bat, lost both the second time around. That’s what’s behind all the gerrymandering and redistricting. This shutdown is just a play in the second quarter that is unlikely to predict neither how the game will play out nor who will ultimately win it next year. Good news for Democrats, since Schumer and Jeffries seem less than up to the challenge.
Now, Karl and I are going to California in a couple of days, so I’m off next week. Try not to let the house burn down while we’re gone.
