Stacey Abrams could one day be governor of Georgia, if she could just manage to get out of her own way, politically-speaking. Yet she often seems to be the gift that keeps on giving to the fractured (and fractious) Republicans in Georgia.
The latest example, of course, is her maskless appearance at an elementary school, made all the worse because the students around her were all masked up to within an inch of their life.
[What’s that you say, ghost of Allen Ludden? “The password is ‘hypocrisy’, indeed!]
But with no logical defense to her illogical behavior, the Abrams team went on the offensive, not so much defending the candidate but declaring that anyone who mentioned the incident must somehow be racist.
Swing and a miss, and a rather insulting swing and a miss to real victims of racism out there, to boot. But I guess they had to come up with something. No politician these days, Republican or Democrat, seems capable of saying, “I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”
Anyhoo, that governor’s race is a puzzle for the people of Georgia to sort out, not the rest of us. But if Abrams can’t be more sure-footed on the stump, and if her go-to response to all criticism is to make it about race, she’s going to be about as successful in her 2022 bid as she was convincing Virginia voters to support Terry McAuliffe in 2021. In other words: Not much.
WHEN PROTESTS WERE ABOUT SUDS — ER, SUBSTANCE: We have a local-history item from this week back in 1980, saying that Fairfax County students were planning to walk out of class and protest.
What were they upset about? Something near and dear to their hearts: The fact that the General Assembly was planning to up the age for the purchase of beer from the current 18 to as much as 21.
— Scott McCaffrey