Heather Wilhelm:
On Tuesday, Kentucky voters stunned the chattering classes by electing conservative Republican businessman Matt Bevin to be their next governor. While most polls had Democrat Jack Conway pegged to win the race, reality begged to differ: Bevin earned 53 percent of the vote, leaving his opponent with a mere 44 percent. These days, a GOP governor in Kentucky is a relative rarity; Bevin will be just the second Republican to take office in last 40 years.
Appearing on MSNBC, Tom Brokaw wondered aloud if Bevin’s victory could spell “terror” for Democrats on a national level. He cited political analyst Charles Cook, who noted that a Bevin win could be “radioactive for the Democrats because it’s a rejection, again, of Obama and what the Democrats are standing for at this point.”
Kentucky’s Democratic House speaker, Greg Stumbo, had a different take. In a televised speech that Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway correctly labeled an “epic meltdown,” Stumbo tried to reconcile himself to the supposed madness of the Bevin win. Among other things, he helpfully reminded everyone that Jesus’s mother, Mary, “did not ride an elephant into Bethlehem”—how did I miss that point in Biblical Political Theocratic Science Class?—and finished his speech with a humdinger.
“I believe that there’s a horse out there,” Stumbo (pictured, at left) declared, because the man clearly loves animal analogies—and, of course, it’s Derby country. “It’s not American Pharoah. It’s an Arkansas Traveler. And that horse is bringing a lady jockey, and that horse and that jockey are going to come to Kentucky next year and help us rebuild this party. Thank you, and God bless every one of you.”
Yikes. When you start talking about savior politicians storming in on horses, you’re never in good shape. Also, I’m sorry, but every time I read the phrase “lady jockey,” I snort coffee out of my nose. It reminds me of that weird high school/college sports tradition where the male teams are called, say, the “Panthers,” and the women’s teams are called the “Lady Panthers,” which leads one to imagine a weird, sexy, lipstick-wearing panther when a regular old androgynous sports-playing panther would do.
Stumbo’s description, as weird as it may be, is perhaps apt: Hillary Clinton, after all, is our proverbial national Lady Panther. Her female designation—and her continued hyping of it—is really all she has. Trust me: She will never, not ever, let us forget that she is a Lady Panther, just as she will never let us forget that Bernie Sanders is clearly a sexist, oppressive, sinister tool of The Patriarchy, Wild-Eyed Nutty Professor Division™.
More importantly, Stumbo’s speech also shares qualities with the movie “Jurassic World.” If you haven’t seen it, “Jurassic World” is basically the same movie as “Jurassic Park,” but with hotter lead actors, some hokey man-dinosaur telepathy, and a bigger, scarier hybrid dinosaur villain.
In the film, the hubris-filled, money-hungry creators of the “new and improved” Jurassic World theme park have created high-tech, gliding transportation bubbles that usher gimlet-eyed guests through a dinosaur-packed jungle. These bubbles are, we are told, impenetrable; when the right nightmarish and industrious dinosaur comes along, of course, said bubbles are promptly smashed to smithereens.
Today, similar bubbles clamp around the heads of many in the hard-core American left. Matt Bevin, in this view, is a horrifying conservative troglodyte, to be sure, and a foil to an “enlightened” left, but just a fluke: Just wait a few short months, when Kentucky’s backwards Republican leadership transforms the state into a scene from Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic “The Road”—you know, like Texas, a state to which everyone is inexplicably moving—and THEN America will see!