Politics is a great spectator sport. To sit and watch the passing parade that is partisan politics has been for me at one and the same time a hobby and a way to make a few dollars. I have been watching it for decades. It is rich with strange characters, lessons learned, political movements, strategies and assorted other factors. Those factors lead to a politician either being elected to power, kept in power, or turfed out from power.
Now this isn’t from a political science textbook but my own observations on survivability in politics involve the idea of voters sometimes just growing tired. The phrase I would use is “beat out” but in my old neighbourhood in St. John’s the phrase was “bet out” as in ‘I just walked home from downtown and I’m “bet out”.
That is a helpful turn of phrase for describing what happens sometimes to an electorate. It happened with Joe Smallwood. Through year after year and election after election Smallwood’s antics, despite being ‘the only living father of Confederation’, just built up in Newfoundland voters a feeling of tiredness. The energy of the voter was sapped. Those voters just got “bet out”. It wasn’t a single event that knocked Smallwood off his perch. It was time and an endless parade of issues from Valdmanis to Term 29, to the IWA dispute and on through the financing of the oil refinery, to a third paper mill, and assorted other issues. People just grew tired of Joe Smallwood. The one-time champion of what he called “the raggedy arsed artillery” had stayed too long at the fair and wore out the welcome from a good will pit that at one time had seemed to be without bottom.
That “bet out” theme held true for voters and their attraction to Canadian Prime Minister John George Diefenbaker also known as Dief the Chief. At one time he was a breath of fresh air on the Canadian political scene. The era of Louis St. Laurent had passed and the time for a war horse from the prairie provinces had arrived. It was hard to believe there was a Progressive Prime Minister but that is what Canadians wanted. Dief fought hard against the notion of “deux nations”. He was against special status for Quebec. Even in opposition his fight against the new Canadian flag cost him the support eventually of his own party. He wanted the Union Jack, and that flag is not the flag of all Canadians. People just got tired of Diefenbaker.
That bring us now to the recent political phenomenon in the United States and the rise and fall of Donald Trump. We are just a couple of months away from the election of a new president, but I have a hunch that is born out in recent polls that people have grown weary of Donald Trump and his antics. It might be his outrageous comments about veterans. It might be Stormy Daniels. It might be his odd relationship with Vladimir Putin and assorted other dictators. It might be his endless claims that the election where Joe Biden firmly kicked Trump out of office was fixed. It might be the claim that he ( Trump) had nothing to do with the January 6th assault on Capitol Hill. It might be his endless court dates on a whole raft of charges. Many of those charges have yet to be proven but what is easily determined is that people seem to be done with Donald Trump. They are tired of it all. They are becoming “bet out”.
I said a few weeks ago that a week in politics is a long time. That was true then and it is true now but as Bob Dylan observed in Subterranean Homesick Blues and the lyric “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”.
You can contact Jim Furlong at [email protected]