OPINION:
As the clock ticked down to the final moments before voters in Virginia’s hotly contested Nov. 2 gubernatorial election took to the polls, Democratic hopeful Terry McAuliffe brought in the heavy artillery in hopes of reviving his sputtering campaign.
In a move straight out of his party’s playbook, Mr. McAuliffe asked Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, to deliver the closing argument at his final rally.
Suppose the polarizing union leader added any votes to the final tally, however. In that case, Mr. McAuliffe must have been trailing by a considerable margin before she opened her mouth, considering he lost to Republican Glenn Youngkin by 2.5 percentage points after being considered a shoo-in to reclaim his gubernatorial seat until the final weeks of the campaign.
The generally accepted explanation is that Mr. McAuliffe — like the vast majority of liberal candidates and ballot measures decided nationwide the same night — got rolled up by a wave of discontent in the first test of Joe Biden’s popularity after he unseated incumbent Donald Trump in last year’s presidential election.
And if the initial results are any indication, that buyers’ remorse could grow into a Republican tsunami by the time mid-term elections roll around next November.
In the wake of Tuesday’s electoral spanking, that prospect seems even more likely if Mr. Biden continues to hand organized labor blank checks written on the taxpayers’ account and tone-deaf Democrat candidates like Mr. McAuliffe insist on grossly misreading the voters’ support for their Big Government agenda.
But it’s more specific than mere Biden fatigue – and Mr. McAuliffe’s choice to have Ms. Weingarten close down his campaign is as ironic as it is baffling.
Mr. McAuliffe, Bill Clinton’s one-time political enforcer and campaign manager for Hillary’s 2008 presidential bid, inserted his foot squarely in his mouth and destroyed his comfortable lead over Mr. Youngkin when, during a Sept. 28 debate over the commonwealth’s education policies, he angrily proclaimed, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
For voters already outraged by a year of wrangling with unions over whether schools needed to be closed in response to the COVID-19 virus and, more recently, revelations that students in many parts of the country are being spoon-fed a heaping helping of hatred under the guise of so-called “Critical Race Theory,” Mr. McAuliffe’s jaw-dropping assertion that the state should control every component of their children’s education struck an already raw nerve.
But rather than walking back his gaffe, Mr. McAuliffe doubled down in subsequent interviews until it became clear that fed-up parents were turning their backs on him and taking a closer look at Mr. Youngkin.
Then Mr. McAuliffe really made people scratch their heads by calling on Ms. Weingarten, assuming her status as a union czar actually gave her credibility with the public in education matters.
In fact, just the opposite was true.
Ms. Weingarten’s union, lest we forget, took considerable flak this past summer when top Republicans on the House Judiciary and Oversight committees called for an investigation into the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after emails showed the AFT lobbied the agency on school reopening policies.
In April, Ms. Weingarten herself was roundly jeered when she dismissed Jewish critics of her union’s resistance to opening public schools as members of the “ownership class,” who should have no voice on the issue.
The AFT leader’s endorsement of Mr. McAuliffe was further undercut this summer when the nation’s other major teachers’ union, the National Education Association, urged its members to sign an NEA-written pledge to continue teaching the intentionally divisive Critical Race Theory curriculum even if they work in one of the two-dozen states currently developing legislation to ban it.
A month earlier, NEA leadership had voted to allocate $127,600 to “fight back against anti-CRT rhetoric,” as well as to “oppose attempts to ban Critical Race Theory and/or The 1619 Project.”
Not surprisingly, Ms. Weingarten’s selection was an unmitigated disaster. If you doubt it, try finding a text of the speech online or a video on YouTube. The fixers in Silicon Valley are trying to destroy the evidence again.
Like most leftists, Mr. McAuliffe long ago sold his soul to public-sector union leaders in return for the billions of someone else’s dues dollars they can lavish on a campaign. And with Mr. Biden’s ascension to the White House and subsequent sellout to organized labor, why wouldn’t someone living in the bubble of Northern Virginia’s deep-blue politics assume the rest of the world felt the same way about his union friends?
But Virginians aren’t stupid.
The American people eventually figure things out. In the case of Virginia voters, they had already figured out unions were pulling Mr. McAuliffe’s strings long before he trotted out Randi Weingarten, gasoline can in hand, to douse the flames of controversy his own words had ignited.
With predictable and well-justified results.
• Aaron Withe is the CEO of the Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit that specializes in exposing and battling abuses by government employee unions.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.