On the menu today: Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin’s effort to make masking optional in schools scores a big win in the state senate; Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams admits that she made a mistake in going maskless at that elementary school; and your view on what the U.S. should do regarding Russia and Ukraine is likely connected to your ability to find Ukraine on a map. As someone — no one is entirely sure who — once said, “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”
Glenn Youngkin’s Big Win
Very, very rarely do you see the leadership of a major state political party so badly miscalculate where it stands, both in overall public opinion and amongst its own rank-and-file legislators. Three weeks ago, Virginia Democratic Party chair Susan Swecker declared that, “Masks are essential to keeping students safe and schools open, but Glenn [Youngkin] would rather use our children as political cover to appease the extreme, far-right fringes of his own party.”
Got that? Wanting parents to decide whether or not their kids wear masks to school is a position of the “extreme, far-right fringes.” So Virginia Democrats prepared themselves for an epic showdown over masking in schools.
And then they lost, badly. On Tuesday, almost half the Democrats in the Virginia State Senate said, “Nah, we’re fine with having parents decide”:
The Virginia Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved a bill that would prevent local school boards from levying mask mandates and from punishing students whose parents opt to send their child to school without a mask.
Sen. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax City, filed the provision Tuesday as an amendment to a bill about in-person learning introduced by Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant, R-Henrico. Democrats have 21 votes in the Senate to Republicans’ 19. Ten Democrats voted for the amendment, nine voted against it, and two abstained.
The bill is expected to clear the GOP-controlled House.
Youngkin hailed the Senate vote as a “victory for parents and children.” His administration plans to fast-track the bill to becoming law once it reaches his desk, meaning that it could be the law in less than two weeks.
The recent decisions of Connecticut governor Ned Lamont, Delaware governor John Carney, and New Jersey governor Phil Murphy further undermined Virginia Democrats’ argument that a desire to see masks become optional in schools was some sort of fringe, far-right position. The remaining pro-mask Democrats were left flailing, insisting that this was an interruption of local control of schools — never mind that the previous mask mandate was also an interruption of local control of schools! And some Democrats contended that it was simply a matter of timing:
House Minority Leader Eileen Filler-Corn, D-Fairfax, also criticized efforts by Youngkin to remove the power over mask mandates from localities. She also noted that while other Democrat-led states are doing away with statewide mask mandates, their decisions come as the omicron variant recedes. She notes Youngkin’s executive order on masks came while cases were still surging.
Eh, not quite. Youngkin’s executive order was issued on January 15 and was scheduled to go into effect January 24. In the state of Virginia, cases peaked around the 15th. The seven-day daily average of new cases is now about a third of what it was in mid January; those Omicron curves go up really fast, and then they come down really fast.
How did Virginia Democratic Party leaders so spectacularly misjudge the views of their own Senate caucus? In part, blame the “read the room” lady who yelled at Youngkin in that supermarket in Alexandria. The northern Virginia mandatory-masking enthusiasts are utterly convinced that they’re a supermajority — or at least they were convinced up until yesterday afternoon. A recent letter to the editor in the Washington Post summarized the view succinctly: “Sadly, not all parents are good parents. People move to Virginia because our schools are among the finest in the nation. We trust our teachers to always have our children’s welfare at hearts,” this Fairfax resident wrote, after the public schools remained closed for a bit more than a year. “The decent people of Virginia did not elect Mr. Youngkin so that he could amuse himself as he tears down all that is good about our state. What will it take to stop his rampage?
Got that? Northern Virginia progressives see allowing parents to decide whether or not their kids wear masks as tearing “down all that is good about our state”!
The Virginia Democratic Party picked their hill to die on . . . and then they died on it. Unfortunately, they didn’t listen to other northern Virginia voice like the one who wrote this newsletter, back on January 25: “Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin is going to win his fight with seven local school boards on whether masks should be optional. The only questions are when and how.”
Oh, and here was the headline over on MSNBC on Monday: “Glenn Youngkin’s rough start in Virginia gets a little rougher.”
Everybody Loves Local Control When They Agree with the Locals
Yesterday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki also retreated to the argument of “local control,” but worded her answer in a way that made it sound as if states were banning students from wearing masks, which is not what any of them are doing:
Q: Do you believe then that the Democratic-led states who are breaking with the CDC on this guidance, that they’re not — that they’re throwing science away and that the CDC is — has access to different science somehow?
PSAKI: We don’t look at it through that prism. These states, I think it’s important to note, they still allow for decisions to be made by local school districts.
Where we come up with concern — where we have great concern is if a kid or a parent chooses to wear a mask or a school district decides they should keep mask guidance in place and there are leaders who are preventing them from doing that. That is the [case] in some other states.
What’s changed to trigger this massive shift among Virginia state senators and northeastern Democratic governors? As I mentioned on yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch podcast, two important things came down: first, the rate of new cases declined, and second, Stacey Abrams sat on that elementary-school auditorium floor without a mask while surrounded by masked young children. Even if Abrams was oblivious to the absurdity she was displaying, other Democrats saw that photo and felt the need to put as much distance between themselves and the masks-for-thee-but-not-for-me philosophy.
It only took five days for Abrams to realize that her “It is shameful that our opponents are using a Black History Month reading event for Georgia children as the impetus for a false political attack” spin was untenable.
“And then the excitement after I finished because it was so much fun working with those kids, I took a picture and that was a mistake,” she told CNN’s Erin Burnett. “Protocols matter and protecting our kids is the most important thing and anything that can be perceived as undermining that is a mistake and I apologize.”
An apology on the fifth day, after four days of insisting that she did nothing wrong and that her critics were in fact wrong, does much less to control the damage than an apology on the first or second day would have.
ADDENDUM: Morning Consult polling finds that:
When asked to find Ukraine on a blank map of Europe, only about 1 in 3 voters correctly located the country, slightly more than the 28 percent who were able to identify Iran on a map roughly two years ago in the wake of a U.S. strike on the Islamic Republic’s most powerful commander. Nearly 3 in 4 voters were able to find Russia on the map. . . . 50 percent of those who could locate Ukraine said the U.S. should send arms to Kyiv while negotiating with Russia, compared to 37 percent among those who could not, and 58 percent of voters who could find Ukraine said they’d support the most strenuous sanctions package if Moscow invades the country, compared to 41 percent of voters who could not.
Cut Americans some slack: Thanks to Vladimir Putin’s aggression, Ukraine is a little smaller than it used to be.