Choosing Between Reid and Youngkin, I Choose Youngkin
by Steve Haner
The only thing wrong with the interaction between John Reid and Governor Glenn Youngkin, addressing valid questions about his viability as a candidate for lieutenant governor, is when it happened. It should have happened last year, while Reid was just a potential candidate, before he had quit his day job to run, and before he was nominated by default when the other guy had to drop out.
Whatever photos or text that appeared on social media attributed to Reid, correctly or incorrectly, have been posted for years. Nobody looked. Nobody asked until it was inevitably going to be perceived as a late hour “gotcha.” These are rookie mistakes on both sides, Reid’s and Youngkin’s.
Add to that leaking the contents of the conversation, or allowing them to be leaked, as a sign of poor judgment. That was intentional on somebody’s part.
The election is still six months away, but Reid’s rhetoric at a rally Wednesday night indicates he will continue to play the victim card and attack the “Richmond Swamp,” meaning his own governor. He is driving even deeper the wedge between himself and a governor who won an improbable victory in 2021, a lightning strike that needs to be repeated.
Forcing voters to choose between himself and Youngkin is another terrible rookie mistake. “Four More Years!” is the only political tack I see working this year.
On balance, Youngkin has had a very successful term. Every governor (or president for that matter) is disappointing on some front. Our blog host Jim Bacon remains upset that Youngkin hasn’t been a more aggressive warrior against wokeness at our universities. I remain disappointed that he warmly embraced the ill-advised wind project off Virginia Beach. Repealing the Virginia Clean Economy Act should have been a major goal from Day One, even if the votes were not there to kill it in the Less Numerous Body.
But on the policy side, Youngkin did get Virginia out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and the California Air Resources Board regulations and has openly supported expanding the use of natural gas for power generation. As his final session began, he finally condemned the VCEA.
What he has gotten passed on the tax front has all been positive, if some of his unsuccessful proposals have been doomed from the start. It should have been obvious to him they would fail, but for some reason it wasn’t. The reason is the same as the explanation for the damaging and ill-timed effort to persuade Reid to get off the ticket – inexperience.
One admission up front: I do not know this governor on a personal level, unlike every other governor going back to Mills Godwin, Linwood Holton and John Dalton, who was a neighbor of my aunt and uncle in Radford. Being a reporter, political hack and then lobbyist gave me a chance to meet, watch and work with (sometimes against) all of them. Some I knew better than others, and some I’d still like to count as friends.
A governor plays both a policy role and a management role. To be successful on the policy side, to borrow a line from The Music Man, you must know the territory. Youngkin had zero experience dealing with the General Assembly and the array of special interests that surround it, and it showed from the very beginning. His allies were often more baffled than his foes.
He also faced Democratic majorities determined to thwart him even when he was doing good, because their own crazies would not accept compromise outcomes or shared credit with him. Youngkin’s perceived national ambitions added kerosene to that fire, something else that the old hands around the Capitol could have told him would happen.
The Democrats did give him one victory on the policy side by sending him hundreds of bills he needed to veto. The best governor of my lifetime, Gerald Baliles, bragged he never had to veto a bill. That doesn’t mean Baliles didn’t kill them by the score, he just did it during the session, not after. Youngkin’s record on this is also to his credit.
But it is on the management side that he and his administration have been very successful. I believe this because, unlike the battles at the Assembly, the day-to-day operations of this multi-billion-dollar state government have been smooth, quiet and free from much contention. That too is a governor’s job, and there he has shone.
Several of his cabinet officers are also in their fourth year, some of whom had their own long-standing relationships with members of the General Assembly. People like Shep Miller at Transportation, Bryan Slater at Labor, and Matt Lohr at Agriculture are probably going to leave their departments and the services they provide better off than they found them. They won’t be the only ones.
The improvements in mental health services appear to be substantial, but that is not my bailiwick so don’t take my word. His economic development efforts have borne fruit. The effort to restore some teeth and credibility to the state’s educational accountability measures was very much the right path and probably has more bipartisan support than the Virginia Education Association wants to admit.
Virginia voters have picked Hilary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the past three presidential elections. No candidate has even emerged to face Mark Warner in the next U.S. Senate race, a sign the GOP in this state is near full cardiac arrest. A partisan, policy-based message will not produce a majority. Running on Youngkin’s record is all the Republicans have. That’s what makes this growing rift within their family especially fatal.
