Terry McAuliffe is not a smart man. He may yet still be elected again as governor of Virginia, but he is not a smart man.

You see, a smart man would have found a way to keep himself from giving his opponent the ammunition for a very targeted series of campaign ads. Ever since Terry McAuliffe said this about parents and schools during a debate…

Terry McAuliffe: "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach." pic.twitter.com/7S15pTv1gY

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 28, 2021

… his political opponent, Republican Glenn Youngkin, has used it against him in a campaign ad that’s getting plenty of air time.

Why is Terry McAuliffe not a smart man? Only a complete dumbass would hit one of the hottest buttons in Virginia at the moment. If McAuliffe hasn’t noticed, parents are kind of worked up at the moment about the conditions under which their kids are in school, thanks to COVID, and after a year and a half of online school, they got a full view of what their kids were being taught – and they don’t like it.

So not only is Terry McAuliffe completely tone-deaf (way to pad your cred with the teachers’ unions instead of parents, there), but – brace yourselves – he is also a monster hyprocrite.

Yes, I know you’re shocked.

The McAuliffes, it turns out, sent their children to the private Potomac School in McLean, Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C., and the candidate’s wife Dorothy McAuliffe served as chair of the board of trustees for the school while their children were students.”

An annual report published by the Potomac School in 2008 and obtained by Townhall includes a letter from trustee board chair Dorothy McAuliffe and later lists the family as having students in second grade, seventh grade, and tenth grade.”

Current tuition at the Potomac School runs from $39,150 for kindergarten through third grade to $45,650 for ninth through twelfth grade. While there’s nothing wrong with a family pursuing the best possible education for their children, it does become problematic when a member of that family runs on a record of vetoing school choice bills and a platform of denying parents the right to influence the education given to their children. That’s exactly what Terry and Dorothy McAuliffe have done.”

And yes, Terry McAuliffe has a long history of being against school choice… while sending his own kids to private school.

McAuliffe’s defenders might contend that he was speaking narrowly about specific cases in which parents demand the right to ban individual books from school libraries. But McAuliffe’s actions during his last term as governor (2013-2017) would seem to suggest that his debate night declaration should be interpreted much more broadly.”

In 2016, McAuliffe vetoed three school choice bills: one bill would have let parents of students in poorly performing schools transfer, another provided parents of disabled children with the funds to send them to private school or defray other educational costs, and a third established a statewide virtual school that any parent could opt-in to. All three were rejected by McAuliffe, who argued that they would send the “wrong signal” about the state of the public education system in Virginia.”

All of this has surely contributed to the Virginia gubernatorial race now being considered a “toss up” by Cook Political Report, and was only one point ahead in the most recent poll by Emerson (well within the margin of error), in a state that Joe Biden won by TEN POINTS just last year. Virginia is red in the rural counties, but the big population centers have turned solidly blue. So if Biden can win the state by ten points less than a year ago, but McAuliffe’s race is considered a “toss up,” what does that say about Terry McAuliffe?

It says that Terry McAuliffe is a very stupid man, and that he poked a bear. The “bear” in this case are the angry parents who want some kind of local control and accountability back in their public schools, which are paid for with THEIR taxpayer dollars. As Josh Kraushaar in National Journal says, one party or the other is about to learn a hard lesson in Virginia. With as tight as the race is, it may be a harbinger of things to come for both parties. And if the Democrats lose with Terry McAuliffe, expect nothing less than full-throated panic on the part of the Democrats and the media. McAuliffe is now trying to distance himself from Joe Biden, in an attempt to save his political skin. That alone should be a sign that Biden is in no position nationally to help Democrats win their local and state races, which would mean 2022 could be the reddest wave we’ve seen since 1994.

Featured image: Terry McAuliffe by DonkeyHotey via Flickr, cropped, Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)