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The Significance of the Vote in Virginia


I had high hopes for Glenn Youngkin as long ago as ... well, his victory in the primary election against the other (more Trumpian) Republicans in the field.

He, like Mitt Romney before him, comes from the world of private equity, and the masterminds of that world are much-maligned, their work does have a disruptive effect that draws enmity. But they do much more good than harm -- amidst those disruptions there is a lot of productive innovation and the displacement of settled inefficiencies.

Like Romney's Bain, Youngkin's Carlyle is the object of lurid stories about how it throws people out of work. There is some truth to it. And I feel sympathy, drawn from personal experience, for anyone who has been laid off.

During the 2012 campaign, Romney made himself seem utterly unsympathetic toward those experiencing the downside of Bain-stoked disruption. He notoriously said "I like being able to fire people." He was trying to make a point about healthcare policy but this, coming from the former head of a PE firm, played into the stereotypes about such firms.

But I digress. The point I was trying to make was that Youngkin has behaved in this campaign in a way that has dashed my hopes. I have been pulling in recent days for McAuliffe simply because what the world does not need, what the world needs least, is another aspiring butt-buddy of the Orange Dynast occupying a seat of political power.

I would love to have said, "Back to Carlyle with you, Youngkin."

Alas: he won. 

My thought on the significance of the win, especially coming only one year after (a factoid endlessly repeated in all the coverage of this election) Joseph Biden beat Donald Trump in the state by ten percentage points?

The fall of Kabul this August -- even among those Virginians who may have acknowledged that in general the U.S. pull-out had to happen -- looked extraordinarily ugly. It surely awakened memories of the different but equal ugliness of the fall of Saigon 46 years ago. This IMHO turned Biden from an asset to McAuliffe into a liability.




 

 


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