As Republicans consider who ought to be tasked with responding to President Biden’s State of the Union address on March 1, they have the luxury of an obvious, unobjectionable choice whose message speaks to the moment, and to their priorities in 2022: Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor, Winsome Sears.
The San Francisco school board recalls are just the latest sign that American voters are fed up with the state of things in almost every arena, but particularly when it comes to school closures, mask and vaccine mandates, and the racial politicization of education.
They are tired of a White House and Democratic leadership in Washington which has spent the past year squabbling with its own flanks, left and center, and pretending despite all evidence that it is intolerant intransigent insurgency-minded Republicans who are the problem — not inflation.
The White House’s massive miscalculations over the past year are obvious. Instead of taking the win with Operation Warp Speed’s vaccines and using their wide availability as a path to get life, schools, and government policy back to normal as soon as possible, they doubled down on performative emergencies as a justification for insane policy packages no one understood. They doubled down on the Sunday show musings of Anthony Fauci, the arbitrary guidance of Rochelle Walensky, and the whiplash recommendations of their supposed experts at an alphabet soup of agencies. They doubled down on bureaucratic mandates and pressure campaigns that ran into the harsh reality of the Constitution.
No one of prominence to this point has been fired, not Fauci, not Walensky, not even the political hack they have running the Department of Health and Human Services. Even as retirements mount and the internal polling indicates Democrats have dramatically undermined their hopes for November, the Ron Klain White House just keeps on chugging toward that iceberg. They can’t walk it back, you see — they’re too invested in the permanent pandemic now.
The thing about the political sunk cost fallacy is that eventually, it sinks.
And that’s exactly what is happening, most prominently in the Commonwealth of Virginia, where Glenn Youngkin, Winsome Sears, and Jason Miyares were swept into office as Terry McAuliffe danced onstage with Randi Weingarten. Republicans won on the basis of all of the above — but particularly, they won by prioritizing what the Democrats and their collaborators in teachers’ unions, school administrators, and corrupt media did and continue to do to America’s children as an issue. It was a multiethnic slate elected by a multiethnic electorate, with a particular outpouring of support from Asian and immigrant communities who reject the left’s woke agenda and want to get their kids learning again.
Sears is an exceptional voice on these issues. She also is a model for a movement, not just confined to Republican circles, that will stand up directly against false accusations of racism and bigotry in American life. Instead of cowering and begging forgiveness, we ought to reject the false premise of racism, and have the courage to stand up against it, even when it is relentlessly repeated by the likes of CNN, MSNBC, and The Washington Post.
(They’ll even do it with progressives in San Francisco — just look at those evil Asian immigrants who don’t care about racial injustice!)
In advancing this argument courageously, despite all the additional viciousness of the attacks one must face as a woman who is strongly conservative, Sears serves as a model of fortitude others should follow. Plus, she does it with style.
Responses to the State of the Union address are typically forgettable, and occasionally only remembered for infamous reasons. But one exception is that of Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell in 2010. He spoke to the chamber of the Virginia House of Delegates, benefitting from an active audience and a clear contrast to President Obama’s agenda, representing a precursor to the Tea Party wave that came to Washington in 2010.
There’s one more reason that this year’s response should be Sears: it would serve as an implicit acknowledgment that Republicans aren’t going to take their eye off the ball for the 2022 midterms by getting sucked into 2024 too early. Much as Ron DeSantis is the belle of the ball at the moment, there are more of State of the Unions (probably from Joe Biden) that he’ll have the opportunity to respond to in due course.
The Democrat-complicit media acknowledges his existence, and works on a daily basis to tear him down. But when it comes to Winsome Sears? They’d rather pretend she, and Americans like her, don’t exist at all.
Don’t let them.
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