Wallis shares in chapter 2 of God's Politics of how you can determine who a politician is - look for the person who is walking around with their finger high in the air trying to determine the direction of the wind. Where the wind blows so they go. He says that we will never see anything accomplished in Washington by replacing one person with a wet finger with another. To truly bring change he says... we need to change the wind.

Change the wind, transform the debate, recast the discussion, alter the context in which political decisions are being made, and you will change outcomes. Move the conversation around a crucial issue to a whole new place, and you will open up possibilities for change never dreamed of before. And you will be surprised at how the politicians adjust to the change in the wind, (pg. 22).

Wallis shares that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was just such a wind changer. Coming back from Oslo, Norway where he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, he stopped by Washington, D.C. to speak with President Lyndon Johnson. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was just passed, but King knew that they needed a voting rights act as well for things to really change for African-Americans. President Johnson said that he had spent all of his political capital on the civil rights act, that the voting rights act would be down the road, perhaps ten years down the road. King went to Selma, AL to continue to push for the wind to change. He rallied people, marched on Selma, drew attention to the continued problems that were going on and the voting rights act came five months later, not ten years. He changed the wind.

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