Ghost Story

This has nothing to do with Halloween. It's about the ghost of Donald J. Trump, a specter that seems to be haunting the minds and souls of Democrats everywhere. They can't get this pesky poltergeist out of their heads. Everything is attributable to Trump. All roads lead to Trump. If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, Trump knocked it over. If a bear craps in the woods, Trump's climate policies are to blame, and the methane gases will snuff out life as we know it by 2025. Kids no longer blame their siblings: "Twump did it."

It'll take a while to get back to the "ghost of Trump" theme, but I need to provide some background first.

In case you missed it, Tuesday, November 2 was Election Day. There was no Presidential election, no Congressional mid-terms. Just state and local races, which are still important. But the biggest race of all, the one that garnered the most national attention, was the Virginia gubernatorial race.

The Democrat, Terry McAuliffe - who can't dance to save his arse, by the way - had served a term as governor before. (Why do Democrat politicians insist on trying to dance, anyway? Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren ... they all suck miserably at it. Okay, AOC had some pretty salty moves back in her college days, but that's it.) He had also been Hillary Clinton's campaign manager in 2008, and before that he was the DNC Chair. The Republican, Glenn Youngkin, was a businessman, a private-equity executive with no political experience. We don't know if he can dance, but he can play basketball; he attended Rice University on a hoops scholly before earning his MBA from Harvard Business School.

McAuliffe was widely expected to win, in spite of his questionable dancing skills. VA doesn't always go Democrat in gubernatorial elections, but the incumbent, Ralph Northam - he of the blackface scandal - is a Democrat, and not even that scandal could unseat him. And Joe Biden won VA by a wide margin in the Presidential election less than a year ago. (Of course, Biden's popularity since then has fallen harder than the Kansas City Chiefs' Super Bowl odds.) In fact, VA hasn't voted red in a Presidential election since 2004. Indeed, McAuliffe was the early front-runner.

Then, in a debate, McAuliffe uttered a gaffe that would prove his undoing, and would provide a focal point for this campaign - and perhaps for the distinction between Democrats and Republicans in general, at least in regard to one key policy issue: education.

Education has been a hot button in VA. In Loudoun County, just west of the Beltway, parents have shown up at school board meetings to protest the teaching of critical race theory (yes, CNN, it exists), among other things. Loudoun County became a flashpoint when the National School Boards Association wrote a letter - seemingly aided by the White House - basically calling parents "domestic terrorists." The Department of Justice jumped on that, issuing its own directive that seemed to indicate support for the letter, though it stopped short of repeating that language; still, it seemed to suggest that the DOJ would use its not insignificant powers to prosecute parents who spoke out at school board meetings as such.

The NSBA later walked back its letter, even apologizing for the language it used, but the White House did not disavow its role in helping the NSBA craft the letter. Nor did AG Merrick Garland back off from the DOJ's position, which earned him a savage roasting by Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, with Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas telling him to his face that he should resign in disgrace. It was a beautiful moment.

But things really boiled over in Loudoun County when one father understandably went ballistic at a school board meeting because his daughter had been sexually assaulted in a school bathroom by a male student dressed as a female, ostensibly exercising his gender identity.

How did school board officials deal with the situation? They had the father arrested, incredibly. The rapist was sent to a different school. Where he did the same thing to another girl.

The assailant was finally arrested and charged, but was later released from juvenile detention pending further evidence. The Superintendent claimed no knowledge of the original assault, but later it was learned that he did know of the attack at the time, and covered it up. To date, it does not appear that he has been fired.

Against this backdrop, education was understandably a key issue in the VA gubernatorial race - in particular, parental involvement and parents' say in their kids' education. In a debate, McAuliffe and Youngkin were going back and forth about another hot topic with VA parents, sexually explicit content in school libraries school curricula. McAuliffe proudly noted that he had vetoed legislation that would have alerted parents when there was sexually explicit content in instructional materials. Then he dropped this gem, which provided Youngkin with a campaign ad, and turned the tide of the election:

"I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach."

The issue was actually a microcosm of the culture war that is gripping America. The people began to speak in Virginia, and that was seen as a bellwether for the 2022 mid-terms and the 2024 Presidential race - especially with Biden's popularity tanking. (Even among his own party: a recent poll of Democrats asked whether they rather see Biden or "someone else" on their party's ticket in 2024. A significant majority chose "someone else" - in other words, anybody but Biden.)

Don't believe me? Think I'm overstating it? None other than Kamala Harris said the VA race was a harbinger of things to come in 2022 and 2024. Now, Kamala is a non-existent VP, a terrible campaigner, and a woeful candidate, but she's a calculating politician. She can read the tea leaves. And she was called in to stump for McAuliffe's flagging campaign (which may not be a winning strategy, given her track record). So was Joe Biden. And so was the Messiah of the Democrat Party, Mr. Hope and Change himself, Barack Obama.

All of them preached the same message, and this finally gets us to the topic of this post: a vote for Glenn Youngkin is a vote for Donald Trump. They said nothing about Terry McAuliffe's accomplishments, or his plans. Nothing about what was wrong with Youngkin's plans. Just that Youngkin = Trump, and Trump = Bad. (Okay, Biden did say something along the lines of, "You know what Terry McAuliffe will do, because you know what he did before." Brilliant, Joe. Very specific. Like most of what you say, except when you're answering what flavor ice cream you're eating.)

McAuliffe first attempted to distance himself from his gaffe, saying it was taken out of context, but the damage was already done. So he joined the Youngkin = Trump bandwagon. He may or may not have been involved in getting a group of Lincoln Project protestors to pose as Youngkin supporters pretending to be white supremacists, attempting to conjure up images of the painful and divisive (and often mis-reported) Charlottesville protests - a curious charade indeed, since one of the actors was black.

Toward the end of the campaign, McAuliffe waffled, and seemed to abandon the efforts at making the Trump connection, but at the very end, unable to resist the temptation that grips the Left, he embraced it once again, mentioning Trump 13 times in a 15-minute speech, and even fabricating a joint Trump-Youngkin campaign event that never took place, a lie that was repeated by at least one mainstream media outlet even after the election was over.

Who did Youngkin bring in to help him campaign, and what names did he invoke to compare his opponent to?

No one, and no one. He campaigned alone, an outsider with no political experience. He had no track record to stand on, so he stood on his positions, his values, and his plans. He campaigned to parents, as a parent. He compared and contrasted his plans and vision with those of his opponent. He didn't tie McAuliffe to Joe Biden - he didn't need to, as the memory of Afghanistan was still fresh, and the failure of the infrastructure bill and the massive tax-and-spend initiative was going on in real time. McAuliffe made his own connection to the Brandon Administration, much to his peril.

When the dust settled on Election Night, Youngkin had pulled off the upset. Counties that had gone for Biden by significant margins went for Youngkin by even wider margins. Even the blue counties that McAuliffe carried were closer than they should have been. And Youngkin outperformed Trump in the solid red counties, proving that he wasn't just riding Trump's coattails.

Just for fun, I spent some time watching Election Night coverage on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC. The latter two provided high theater in terms of entertainment value, and I'm sure that I and other conservatives engaged in similar sport boosted their ratings considerably, at least for that one night. And here's what I gained in terms of insight.

If I drank a shot every time Trump's name was mentioned on CNN and MSNBC, I'd have passed out long before I found out who won. Both networks attributed Youngkin's win solely to the Bad Orange Man, and they - like McAuliffe, Obama, Biden and Harris - equated Youngkin to Trump. Apparently any Republican who has the audacity to defeat a Democrat in any election is now the reincarnation of Donald J. Trump.

On Fox, however, they only mentioned Trump in noting how Youngkin didn't rely on Trump; while he didn't denounce Trump, he didn't embrace him - in other words, he didn't even mention Trump. He made Trump a non-event in his campaign. He ran as his own man. He didn't try to tie policy or rhetoric to Trump. In other words -

He had moved on from Donald Trump. And -

So had his voters.

This is a key lesson for Democrats and Republicans going forward, only Democrats aren't going to pay attention to it. The lesson is this:

Democrats think that the only thing that Republicans want, the only thing they're going to vote for, is Donald Trump, or a Donald Trump clone. Someone bombastic, someone who issues mean tweets and is self-aggrandizing and egomaniacal. Because they think that's what attracted Republican voters to Trump. Why? Because it's what repelled them from him - it's what made them hate him, and they need to hate Republicans, so it gives them a basis for their hatred.

What they fail to realize is that those same things repelled many Republicans, but they were willing to overlook them because what matters to them is policy - above all else, policy. So Republicans are going to look past the man - or the woman - and vote for the candidate that offers the best policy prescriptions. Many Independent voters feel the same way.

So a lot of voters who were so turned off by Trump's bombast that they decided Biden couldn't be that bad are going to get a wake-up call - or, as it were, a woke-up call - and come back to the realization that, to paraphrase James Carville, "It's the policy, stupid." (Even Carville is saying that now, and has become highly critical of what's become of his own failed party.) Because those voters now realize that, yes, when it comes to policy, Biden can be that bad. Worse than imagined, in fact. Far, far worse.

Even after the VA election, the denial continues on CNN and MSNBC: Youngkin didn't win because he was the better candidate, or because McAuliffe was a lousy one; he won because he's a white supremacist like Trump. (Hilariously, they even apply that to the down-ticket Republican victories - I say hilariously, because the Lt. Gov.-elect is a black woman, and an immigrant to boot.)

For Democrats, Trump is like that girlfriend who you had the dysfunctional relationship with back in college. Yeah, you broke up with her, not vice-versa. Yeah, you're now happily married, and you have a great job and a McMansion in the 'burbs with two well-adjusted kids, and you drive a new Tesla you paid cash for. But you just can't quit her, and you find yourself creeping on her Facebook profile, and driving by her house at night, and fantasizing about her. She lives in your head.

So let the Dems - including their propaganda outlets - keep focusing on Trump. And let the Republicans and Independents stay focused on policy. We don't care if the candidate is bombastic or genteel, egotistical or humble, so long as the policies are sound. If the last ten months haven't demonstrated the importance of that, I don't know what has. And come 2022 and 2024, hopefully we'll see a lot of other Glenn Youngkins emerge victorious.

In the meantime - let's go, Brandon!