The Post-Election Autopsy

McAuliffe

Republicans in Virginia early Wednesday morning woke – pun intended – to find their state awash in red. The New York Times called the race before the birds began singing: “Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, defeated former Gov. Terry McAuliffe after largely steering clear of Donald J. Trump.” It was never a good sign that the McAuliffe camp had been preparing, at least five days before the first vote had been cast, to contest the election, according to a Fox News report.

“Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe's campaign raised eyebrows by spending nearly $60,000 to hire a high-profile attorney known for masterminding election-related legal challenges,” Fox reported. “When Fox News sent the campaign a request for comment, the McAuliffe campaign scrambled to "kill" the story, according to emails mistakenly sent to Fox News.

“Less than a month before Election Day, McAuliffe's campaign spent $53,680 on the services of the Elias Law Group, a firm that Marc Elias started earlier this year, Fox News previously reported.”

The astonished reader will have read that posting right. The McAuliffe campaign MISTAKINGLY sent to a Fox News reporter a message – “Can we kill this story? – intended for internal consumption.

Clearly, the folk toiling in the McAuliffe campaign – among them President Joe “Lunch Pail” Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Barack Obama, and other top-gun Democrats who had joined McAuliffe on the campaign stump – were not watching the boiling pot; nor was McAuliffe, who blundered fatally when he said that that OF COURSE parents should not be telling Boards of Education in Virginia and elsewhere what not to teach their children.

Parents for months had been attacking Board of Education Bastilles for poisoning their children’s minds with racist Critical Race Theory (CRT) -- notions never taught in public schools, so they were assured by Democrats and many news accounts. The new elitists were attempting to convince increasingly hostile parents that (CRT) had no practical pedagogical consequences.

The parents weren’t buying it. Some became raucous and were accused – by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, no less – of fomenting terror, when in fact they were reacting to the arrogance of politicians such as McAuliffe, who were brazen enough to tell them they were not competent to oversee the education of their children.

The Gubernatorial race in New Jersey turned out to be a nail bitter too close to call. 

Naturally there will be takeaways. High priced Democrat consultants are even now busy sifting the ashes, soothing bruised egos and pocketing paychecks.

Hours after polls closed in Connecticut, CTExaminer, a Hearst holding, provided an accurate rundown of wins and losses. “I’m feeling great,” said Republican Party Chairman Ben Proto. “We’re flipping towns all over the state of Connecticut. Right now, we’ve flipped close to 20 towns, to I think four or five that they’ve flipped. Eastern Connecticut is going to be bright, bright red. Bristol is a huge flip for us. Windsor Locks hasn’t had a Republican leadership in over 20 years. We flipped East Granby, which hasn’t had Republican leadership in years, and Brookfield was a huge win. We won Greenwich, Darien, and Stratford, and pretty much everything [in the] Naugatuck valley.”

Much of Connecticut’s media seemed anxious to write off vigorous objections to Critical Race Theory in public education as a nationwide political hoax. “Gilford Republicans who ran against ‘race theory’ defeated” a headline boasted in a front page, below the fold story in a Hartford paper. The quote marks imprisoning “race theory” are intended to finger a fiction, and the swallow in Gilford does not a summer make.

“Critical Race Theory,” the paper instructed, is “a term that literally refers to an arcane legal and academic framework but that has become shorthand for all discussion of systemic racism.”

In point of fact, Critical Race Theory (CRT) is not an arcane framework limited to metaphysical “how many angels can fit on the head of a pin” discussions in law offices and teacher education schools. The CRT frame contains a distorted picture, slowly coming into focus, and the reaction to CRT of some people quite literally NOT motivated by political concerns will remain a flashpoint in law, academia and school systems for some time to come.

Yogi Berra memorably once said, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” In a similar fashion, systemic racism ain’t what it used to be when courageous African American journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett almost single handedly put an end to systemic racist lynching in the Jim Crow South by inveighing persistently against it.

The sometimes bitter reaction against CRT may be motivated by a preference in vision rather than an “inexpungible” sin of persistent racism. The vision of Martin Luther King, of a nation at rest under the eyes of a benevolent but righteous God, should not be lost because theorists presume that racism is encoded in the nation’s political DNA.