The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Why Terry McAuliffe Is Losing

Posted on | October 22, 2021 | Comments Off on Why Terry McAuliffe Is Losing

Wednesday night, longtime Democrat strategist James Carville appeared on MSNBC to declare himself “scared to death” that Republican Glenn Youngkin could defeat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia:

“It’s close,” Carville said. “Cook has it [as] a toss-up. If Cook has the race toss up — and Terry, by the way, has been blunt that we are in a very tight, race and Democrats need to be activated.” . . .
“It’s close. There’s no doubt about it, and I’m scared to death. And other Democrats should be. And the solution to that, if you know people in Virginia, call them and ask them to vote. If you are in Virginia, call and ask other people to vote. But the only thing that I can tell you, it’s a close race,” Carville said.
McAuliffe faced backlash for admitting during a debate that he doesn’t believe parents should tell schools how to teach their kids. He has since attempted to walk back his comments and explain his position. Williams acknowledged that is a hard sell.
“James, the rule of thumb in your line of work is that if you’re explaining, you’re losing,” [MSNBC’s Brian] Williams said.

First, let’s be honest — Carville isn’t “scared to death” because the race is “close,” but because he knows McAuliffe is losing.

If you live in the DC metro TV market, you can turn on any channel and see the evidence of panic among Democrats, who are absolutely saturating the airwaves with commercials accusing Youngkin of being some kind of dangerous extremist Trump clone. They wouldn’t be pouring tens of millions of dollars into this negative advertising blitz if they thought McAuliffe was merely in a “close race” with Youngkin.

A big factor in this panic is, of course, the collapsing approval for Joe Biden, a net loss of 8 points in the RCP average since August.

If you study this closely, you realize that Biden suffered two separate downward trends. The first was in August, as a result of the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, after which the numbers stabilized and then improved slightly in September before a second decline in early October. What caused that? Almost certainly, it was a result of the supply-chain crisis, which is causing shortages and spiking prices.

The downward pressure from Biden’s collapse is, however, only half the story of why McAuliffe is losing in Virginia. The other half of the story is that McAuliffe’s alliance with the teachers union in Virginia has put him on the wrong side of a parents’ rights controversy:

What seems to be the central issue in the campaign surfaced when the moderator [of the final Sept. 28 debate between McAuliffe and Youngkin] asked the candidates whether “protections for transgender students” should be determined at the state level or in each school district. Youngkin raised the issue of school districts not listening to parents when they objected to portions of the curricula, citing sexually explicit classroom content in Fairfax County. He clearly stated his position that parents are in charge of the education of their children.
McAuliffe shot back, “I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions. I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Needless to say, his statement is at the heart of a debate that is taking place in school board meetings nationwide after parents got a view into their children’s curricula thanks to distance learning during COVID-19. Many parents were horrified.
McAuliffe doubled down on the sentiment in subsequent interviews, and his poll numbers started to slide. Shortly after, Daily Wire broke a story out of Loudoun County, Virginia, setting the record straight about a viral video of law enforcement officers dragging a parent from a school board meeting. Activists used the video as fodder to support Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to direct the FBI and U.S. Attorneys’ offices to meet with local schools boards to assess terrorist threats.

As longtime readers know, my wife homeschooled our children for several years before we sent them to private Christian schools. This reflected an informed judgment based on direct experience. Most people (obviously including Terry McAuliffe) do not realize that it is the best educated and most conscientious parents who are offended by the arrogant claims of “expertise” made by public-school officials. Anyone who researches the subject will discover that, on average, as a group, education majors have the lowest SAT scores of any college graduates. If you have a degree in business management or engineering or whatever, you are certainly competent to judge the quality of curriculum and pedagogy in your child’s classroom and, as research about homeschooling shows, good parents are at least as capable of educating a child as most government-certified teachers. That’s from a strictly academic perspective; from a moral perspective, no credential can qualify any “expert” to tell a parent what their child’s beliefs should be.

Transgenderism is immoral because it is dishonest — a deception, an attempt to substitute make-believe for biological reality. One can speculate about the psychological causes of a desire to “be” (or rather, pretend to be) the opposite sex, but in practice, transgenderism is a sort of fraud, perpetrated for selfish reasons. In a free country, adults may do as they please in private matters, but the transgender cult seeks to force the public to cooperate with this deception; when taxpayer-supported public schools joined this effort, bad results could easily be foreseen.

In Loudon County, Virginia, where many parents were already up in arms about the teaching of Marxist “critical race theory,” school officials attempted to cover-up an incident in which a 14-year-old girl was raped in a school restroom by a transgender student — “a boy in a skirt,” to quote the victim’s father. A new $1 million TV ad campaign in Virginia references this increasingly notorious case:

 

We don’t know how the election will turn out in Virginia. There is abundant evidence that McAuliffe is losing, and that Youngkin is poised for an upset victory that will have nationwide impact, but it will be up to voters in Virginia to do the right thing. Pray for them.




 

Category: Education, Election, Virginia

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