POLL: McAuliffe +3; The Politics of Family vs. Capital
McAuliffe maintains his slight edge over Youngkin as the campaigns begin to shift into the main stretch.
New poll from the Washington Post shows former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe (D) with a 3-point lead over Republican challenger Glenn Youngkin with registered voters giving McAuliffe a 6-point gap.
Who cares about registered voters when likely voters is the game, you ask? McAuliffe cares for this reason alone — the enthusiasm gap. Simply put, if McAuliffe can whip his base into a fever pitch? You get a replay of 2017.
If not? You get a replay of 2013 where the race was thisclose against former AG Ken Cuccinelli.
McAuliffe Campaigns With “Defund The Police” Candidates in Stafford
Yep — it’s happening as McAuliffe and Delegate Joshua Cole (D-Stafford) pal around the Fredericksburg area laughing about it.
If the Virginia gubernatorial campaign focuses on defunding the police, the summer riots, and keeping our communities safe?
That’s a good place to fight and win, folks.
Anything — and I mean anything — that forces the Democrats to defend the indefensible is a win. No reason in the world we should be backing down.
One Last Thing On The Pro-Life Question…
Consensus view at this rate is that Youngkin bungled the Texas question. What folks have to wonder is why it was bungled? I got an answer below…
Most Republicans have been quietly offering two things. First, that Youngkin flubbed the Texas question badly, but second that McAuliffe is that much worse. Which I entirely understand. After all, no one expects Youngkin to be Pope Benedict XVI on most questions — the man is running for governor not pope.
AND YET.
Allow me to share this snippet from former Delegate David Ramadan (R) who has unfortunately endorsed McAuliffe — mostly on matters surrounding the business community.
Predictably, where does McAuliffe slam Youngkin? Youngkin wants to restrict and eliminate abortion. All the nuance in the world won’t save Youngkin from the critique (and Republicans shouldn’t run away from it).
Let me leave you with two thoughts on this front, and then I will keep my peace on this for awhile:
The pro-aborts are going to hate us no matter what. Doesn’t matter how we temporize on the babies — 6 weeks, 14 weeks, 20 weeks, exceptions you can drive a truck through — the Democrats want abortion all the way up to the point of birth and beyond. No one is going to respect us for being “reasonable” on how many babies they can kill and how many women they will harm.
A 20-week position on life isn’t pro-life, it’s pro-abortion up to 20 weeks. To say that life begins at conception and then say one is in favor of harming those babies for 20 weeks strikes me as inconsistent.
Most of all, I am incredibly disappointed in Virginia’s so-called pro-life leadership for bargaining away the lives of other human beings. Politicians can demur on these questions; our leadership should never do so. Otherwise, why should politicians hold themselves to a higher standard than the movement itself?
Wanna know why we lose all the time? That’s why.
Incrementalist policies — whether it is on life, taxes, education or any of the other questions of human freedom — are just a game of prevent offense.
63,000,000 abortions is not a victory, and with pro-regulation legislation being wiped off the books time and time again by Democratic legislatures and governors, it’s clear that negotiating with the Leviathan only feeds the Leviathan.
I’ve seen prevent defense before, but I’ve never seen a prevent offense.
The Democrats don’t play prevent offense. So why do we? Why should we in the face of insensibility (CRT, transgenderism, abortion) and immoderation (Afghanistan, $3.5T in spending, economic shutdowns) continue to water down what is right in order to appear sensible and moderate to a lunatic left?
With National Review defending the Texas bill and Ted Cruz looking to “repeal and replace” it with a 20-week ban, it is clear now that taking positions by focus groups run by Axiom Strategies — Cruz’ campaign team — was more of an effort to see how Cruz might survive in Texas rather than how Youngkin might win Virginia.
Enough on that — but thanks for hearing me out.
Jack Kemp and the Politics Of Family Formation
I’ve long wondered at the alliance between corporations and socialists. Namely that corporations need socialists to rig the rules, while socialists require corporations to feed the government.
So what’s the tradeoff? Corporations really don’t care too terribly much about your moral or ethical values. You really need an iPhone; we can tie someone to a bench for 12 hours a day and six days a week making them for a pittance. Clothes get smaller and tighter. Sex sells. Consumption soars. Sure you can try to ignore all the commercials, but in the end the commercials become the event themselves. Drama is our television. Divorces, transgenderism, the celebration of the mediocre.
No small wonder why the family has suffered in the era of mass media.
Mississippi AG Lynn Finch and Michigan Commissioner Monica Sparks come from the Republican and Democratic Parties respectively. In The Hill, they write about the need for a new sort of politics that focuses on family formation with at least the emphasis have for capital formation:
Almost 22 million children under the age of 21 have a parent, usually a father, that does not live in their household. Just over 30 percent of them live in poverty. In only about half of these families does the custodial parent have a legal or informal child support agreement, and only 70 percent received some payment of support.
. . .
In the fifty years since Roe v Wade, we have raised whole generations to devalue the lives of those who cannot speak for themselves, those who are in the greatest need of our care and protection. This is the slow and steady unraveling of that rich American tapestry. If we do not stand up for the least among us, if we allow this undeserved violence against the most vulnerable, we risk losing our place as a beacon of hope.
The article quotes former Pennsylvania Governor and Catholic pro-lifer Bob Casey (D) who famously insisted that “family formation should be on par with capital formation.” One is instantly reminded of Jack Kemp and the empowerment movement of the 1980s and 1990s who focused on precisely the same things.
Such an emphasis strikes me as both singularly true and absolutely forgotten by both major parties today.
If you consider the Trump presidency, what was that movement if nothing more than a middle finger extended to the cubicle dwellers who simply knew better than the rest of us?
Those 20- and 30-somethings in gentrified downtown districts who want to tell the rest America and Virginia how to live, how many masks to wear, which restaurants to go eat, which statues were problematic (all of them it appears), which views on history were acceptable, which gender pronouns to use…
Most of us have had it with the cubicle dwellers, haven’t we?
Yet if you listen closely to the policy recommendations of most politicians today, what you hear are solutions that are good if not great for corporations — but not for families.
Take for instance the $15/hr minimum wage which far exceeds the living wage of $11/hr. Sounds great for individuals, right? Until you realize that the reason why corporations fall over themselves to pay these salaries is because it stomps out any small business competition. Worse still, those costs are immediately passed on to the consumer — so that inflationary pressures become more concrete every month. It is one thing to pay a living wage that makes the welfare state obsolete; something else to pay a $15/hr wage where you break out of the Laffer Curve.
Or the talk of boosting transportation spending. Sounds like I can get to my job easier, right? Until you realize that not only is it the state version of defense contracting to large firms, but that until Virginia actually fixes the relationship between local land use and development and state transportation funding? These roads are going to be obsolete the moment they are built.
My favorite? Government education spending. Sounds like I can drop my kids off and go to work, right? That is, until you realize that the whole game is to keep you — John and Jane Q. Taxpayer — productive and spending money into the economy for stuff you don’t want and things you don’t need. All so your kids can get the worst education in the G20.
It strikes me that the whole game here is the devolution of power and not the aggregation of power. Or as the lake Richard Obenshain used to say, expanding the sphere of human freedom. Or as George Allen used to say, standing strong for freedom and “our Jeffersonian conservative principles” — principles I still believe in and practice.
Now that doesn’t mean a slavish devotion to cutting taxes. After all, the true definition of public conservatism is to pay one’s bills, not cut your salary to a point where you cannot afford to do so.
But it ought to mean that we are focused like a laser on building strong families so that they can build strong communities.
School vouchers, income credits for children to lift them out of poverty, funding pregnancy resource centers (PRCs) so that they can give mothers formula and diapers and a fighting chance, giving free access to Virginia’s Community College System (VCCS) for workforce retraining and development, and a strong investment in microfinance opportunities for small business owners.
Deepening our investments in infrastructure around the Port of Virginia; promoting hybrid work schedules; linking land use to transportation funding through the planning district commissions; allowing localities to band together at the regional level for economic development; fixing and adjusting the LCI so that it becomes a maximum mandated threshold for local investment in schools rather than a minimum; ending unfunded mandates to localities…
This is not a hard list.
But it is a list that focuses on family formation rather than sheer capital formation with families — that basic building block of society — as an aftereffect.
GOOD NEWS: Laziness Doesn’t Exist
Perhaps you are like me and procrastinate as an art form? My favorite habits are cleaning or re-organizing my office, re-arranging a bookshelf, or taking a long walk to sort out my thoughts.
Turns out, I am not to blame for my own inaction according to Science (TM) and Dr. Devon Price of Loyola University:
People love to blame procrastinators for their behavior. Putting off work sure looks lazy, to an untrained eye. Even the people who are actively doing the procrastinating can mistake their behavior for laziness. You’re supposed to be doing something, and you’re not doing it — that’s a moral failure right? That means you’re weak-willed, unmotivated, and lazy, doesn’t it?
For decades, psychological research has been able to explain procrastination as a functioning problem, not a consequence of laziness. When a person fails to begin a project that they careabout, it’s typically due to either a) anxiety about their attempts not being “good enough” or b) confusion about what the first steps of the task are. Not laziness. In fact, procrastination is more likely when the task is meaningful and the individual cares about doing it well.
I choose to believe this because it fits within my preexisting biases and prejudices.
A mild warning? Price comes off as a little bit too enthusiastic and to put it politely, French. But if you can endure that? This is a very good essay for those of us who are indeed professional procrastinators.
Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard, former chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Fluvanna County, and a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia.