Jones’ Behavior: A Stunning Lack of Maturity
By Gordon C. Morse,
So, why was Democrat Jay Jones – he of the Quentin Tarantino imagination – sending highly partisan and politically suicidal text messages to a Republican member of the House of Delegates?
Del. Carrie Coyner, R-Chesterfield, the recipient of these merry notes, says she passed them on to their focus of interest, Republican Speaker Todd Gilbert. She let it go at that and Gilbert did nothing, said not a word. It’s curious. Maybe they concluded – at least, then – that Jones was having a hard day.
Or maybe they carefully placed the chrysalis near a window, as we did as kids, and waited for the butterfly to emerge?
John Le Carre once wrote, “The questions are not dangerous; only the answers are dangerous.”
There are lots of questions about Jay Jones’ behavior and his political judgment. The answers point to a stunning lack of maturity. That would explain the other thing, as well.
In Germany, on an autobahn, away from urban traffic, a BMW may pass you doing 116 mph. (Or even 150 mph.) Lord help you if you’re lounging in the left lane.
You just don’t want to try that in New Kent County, as Jay Jones did.
Too many notes. Too much speed. Too few mature, working brain cells. The story of Jay Jones, this year’s Democratic candidate for Virginia Attorney General.
And he could still get elected.
GOP voices, from the White House down, say that Jones must go. Resign.
That’s ritualistic. Here, Jay, welcome to the mouth of the volcano. Jump right in.
He won’t — and the election polls have already opened anyway. The voters get to have their say. That’s the way it works.
Should Jones get elected in spite of it all, will the GOP ease up on the calls for resignation?
Why would they? Nothing will change the material circumstances. You can credibly argue, based on what Jones has already admitted to doing, that he has no business in the Attorney General’s office. Republicans could easily beat that drum right through 2026.
Label this episode self-inflicted. This Jones did to Jones. It gets inexplicable fast – or, at least, inexplicable when held up against pre-existing standards of political behavior.
Did we once have standards for political behavior in Virginia? Memory fades, but I believe we did.
The focus of this fiasco has been on the violence Jones conjured up in his head and directed towards Gilbert. That alone is difficult enough to understand.
My brother went to school in Shenandoah Couty with Todd Gilbert. Central High School. There are lots of Gilbert-types in the Valley. They liked Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater before that. They preferred that political side of the street and drove pickups. In the fall, they would drape dead deer across the hoods of those pickups.
I have a reprint of an early 19th century travel guide that cautions against visiting Woodstock without a gun. Shenandoah County has never been Fairfax County. It was conservative.
But Woodstock and the surroundings could also produce Republicans such as Clinton Miller. He breathed the same political air as Gilbert and his forebearers and was Shenandoah County’s commonwealth attorney. He preceded Gilbert in the House of Delegates for a quarter century and then replaced my cousin, Preston C. Shannon, as a member of the State Corporation Commission.
Clinton could get along with anyone. He knew that was the great democratic game. He was bright, fast on his feet and sang. Seems I recall helping him in the margins when he sought the governor’s office in the mid-1990s. He wanted to close his speech to the convention with a tune and awkwardly ran out of time.
It didn’t matter a bit. He may have fallen short on becoming governor, but his overall service to the Commonwealth was brilliant.
There was a time in Virginia politics when everyone sort of knew each other and offered space to each other. Mutual respect, Jay. Party affiliation was noted and understood but was never determinative of one’s reputation. Character was.
That raises another question: To send the messages that Jay Jones sent — busily typing with his fingers — required what state of mind?
The quick answer is the same state of mind as all those New York golf fans screaming obscenities at Northern Irish golfer Rory McIlroy and his wife during the Ryder Cup. What goes? At what point did people conclude that this was acceptable or even remotely useful public behavior?
Which is another way of saying that the challenge of dealing with each other and resolving differences is larger than Jay Jones.
The consequences of Jones’ conduct on the other fall campaigns? Who knows? But if the Democrats sweep the three statewide elections and increase their numbers in the House of Delegates, they will immediately assume their mothers were right about them all along and emerge into the sunlight with all the wrong lessons.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin has stood between the Democrats and their assorted, wilder enthusiasms. Over nearly four years, Youngkin has held them down. Youngkin has not held Virginia down; he has held the Democrats down. There’s a big difference.
Accordingly, the Democrats have regularly and unfairly maligned his administration. Youngkin has been an effective and principled governor. He just hasn’t been the Democrats’ governor.
Could Youngkin have put more distance between himself and President Trump, thereby defining himself more effectively on his own terms? Yup. But try that these days in the GOP and see what it gets you from that guy in the White House. Ask Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican candidate for governor, about that one.
As for Earle-Sears, she should thank Jay Jones for the distraction. Otherwise, people would be asking why we’re into October and still waiting for her campaign to begin. There have been lackluster statewide campaigns before in Virginia. But this one takes ye olde cake.
What goes with the part-time job of presiding over the Virginia Senate and being Lieutenant Governor? That contest may well follow the results in the race for governor.
And, if it does, too bad. Republican John Reid possesses a real personality, works with political insight, knows how to laugh, rolls with the punches and genuinely appears to like Virginia.
Does state Sen. Ghazala Hashmi? I mean it, does she like Virginia? Within the General Assembly, there is a working caucus of progressive hostility to Virginia itself – whose members assume all things have been awful prior to their arrival – and you may put Hashmi, the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, front and center. Say “Virginia” and she figuratively spits.
The Lieutenant Governor’s race comes with a simple dynamic: Who do you see as reliable – reliable enough to be given a political advantage — in a 2029 bid for governor?
My two cents: Give it to Reid.
The term of Gov. Ralph Northam, combined with the legislative take-over by the Democrats in 2020, unleashed progressive politics in Virginia. It was unbound, unbowed and unrepentant. Moderation was forsaken; national political objectives were embraced in toto. It raced ahead of public opinion. The Democrats were unable to say no to themselves; discipline was out of the question.
That could have been Earle-Sears’ campaign, by the way. She might have clarified a few things. She could have been her own person, shut up about Trump and reminded everyone of what one-party state governance, in a highly ideological era, represents.
This has been an odd political year in Virginia.
Gordon C. Morse has been writing commentary and speeches in Virginia since 1983. This column his republished with permission from his Substack account Heart’s Desire and Bacon’s Rebellion.
