OPINION:
There is desperation in the waning days of a doomed political campaign. And then there is this Terry McAuliffe train wreck.
From the very start of his quest to return to the Virginia governor’s mansion, Mr. McAuliffe has run a tiresome, entitled and uninspiring campaign. Even his supporters cannot help but notice that he seems old, frumpy and unwell. He gets snippy when challenged — as if the whole effort is beneath him.
But nothing prepared Virginia voters for the sordid spectacle they endured during the final weekend of the campaign.
In hopeless desperation, Mr. McAuliffe and Virginia Democrats conspired to concoct a “false flag” operation aimed at smearing Glenn Youngkin as some kind of racist. They got caught red-handed, and it all backfired in an unholy fashion that will come to define the entire McAuliffe campaign — and perhaps the whole Biden presidency.
From the very start, Mr. McAuliffe tried everything the media would allow to avoid running against Mr. Youngkin, a sunny outsider who embodies the best of the Trump agenda minus the “mean Tweets.” His campaign’s insistence on running against former President Donald Trump turned comical when President Biden appeared at a McAuliffe rally and invoked Mr. Trump’s name 28 times during a 15-minute tirade.
It was another sad example of Mr. Biden appearing to have no idea where he was or what he was talking about.
As the effort to paint Mr. Youngkin orange proved futile, Mr. McAuliffe got desperate. And when Democrats get desperate, they always play the race card.
They claimed that Mr. Youngkin is some kind of racist extremist, offering not a shred of evidence to support the crackpot theory.
“Extremism can come in many forms,” Mr. Biden bellowed on behalf of Mr. McAuliffe. “It can come in the rage of a mob driven to assault the Capitol. It can come in a smile and a fleece vest.” It was a bitter slap at Mr. Youngkin, who often wears a vest and is always smiling.
These are the most treacherous people, and they play the most rotten politics — especially when it comes to peddling racial hatred.
Remember, it was Mr. Biden who told Black voters in Virginia back in 2012 that Republicans would “put y’all back in chains” if they did not vote for him. Think about the degree of creepy, racist demagoguery required to make such an unhinged charge.
More recently, Mr. McAuliffe’s current running mate admitted to wearing blackface just days after calling on the state’s Democrat governor to resign over wearing blackface. Mr. McAuliffe called on both men to resign for wearing blackface — until he needed them to help him win his next election. These people are sickos.
Now come Virginia Democrats, the desperate McAuliffe campaign — and supposedly the exiled Republicans over at the Lincoln Project — cooking up this sleazy “false flag” scheme to dress people up as racists in white shirts and khakis carrying tiki torches to a Glenn Youngkin event. It all backfired, of course, when the political race actors were exposed as Virginia Democrat operatives working on behalf of the McAuliffe campaign.
The media, meanwhile, are desperately trying to pin the whole thing on Republicans after the Lincoln Project took credit for working with the McAuliffe campaign on the sicko operation. It is worth noting that the longtime political hacks inside the Lincoln Project were driven out of the party by Mr. Trump, which says so much about Mr. Trump’s good judgment and the deranged nature of the former Republicans in the Lincoln Project.
But all of it does raise some serious questions. Now that we know how much Virginia Democrats, Terry McAuliffe and the Lincoln Project love “false flag” operations, where were they the last time race mayhem struck Charlottesville back in 2017 when Mr. McAuliffe was last governor?
Where were they, for that matter, on Jan. 6th?
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at the Washington Times.
