Spanberger Speaks Truth to Power

Abigail Spanberger speaking at a meeting sponsored by the Problem Solvers Caucus and the Common Sense Coalition. Photo credit: Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket

by James A. Bacon

As Democrats come to terms with their butt-whooping in Virginia and their near-death experience in New Jersey, they’ve been asking themselves what went wrong. Predictably, pundits from the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato to MSNBC’s Joy Reid have interpreted the shellacking as a racist White backlash. This delusional bubble-think is a recipe for continued Democratic electoral failure. Luckily for Democrats, they have Rep. Abigail Spanberger, representing my home congressional district, to set them straight.

The New York Times quoted Spanberger in its election wrap-up yesterday.

“We were so willing to take seriously a global pandemic, but we’re not willing to say, ‘Yeah, inflation is a problem, and supply chain is a problem, and we don’t have enough workers in our work force,’” said Representative Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia Democrat facing a bruising re-election. “We gloss over that and only like to admit to problems in spaces we dominate.”

More pointedly, Ms. Spanberger said Mr. Biden must not forget that, for many voters, his mandate was quite limited: to remove former President Donald J. Trump from their television screens and to make American life ordinary again.

“Nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos,” she said, alluding to the sweeping agenda the president is seeking to enact with the thinnest of legislative majorities.

Spanberger nailed it. The centrist Democrat is rooted in political reality — and constituents in her Republican-leaning district will like what she has to say. Now, let’s see if she can, in the words of Spike Lee, “do the right thing” by voting against the fiscally reckless, pork-laden tax-and-spend monstrosities grinding their way through Congress.