midterm elections

"In historical events, great men -- so-called -- are but the labels that serve to give a home to an event, and like labels, they have the least possible connection with the event itself.

"Every action of theirs that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity."

-- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi, War and Peace, IX, 1.