Last night it looked for a while as if there were variations of the word Joy had the chance of a puncher to increase the number of references to Freedom on the third day of the Democratic National Convention, which was marked by relentless message discipline.
When the party’s one-time shooting star, Senator Cory Booker (Democrat, New Jersey), told us about a third of the way through the event that “tonight is about joy” and “achieving the impossible, which should bring us joy” and that “our candidates Kamala Harris and Tim Walz bring joy,” the (unofficial) result between joy and freedom stood at a respectable 21 to 32.
But then-Pennsylvania governor, vice presidential runner-up, and professional Barack Obama impersonator Josh Shapiro dished out freedom in stronger doses than a 1980s direct-response TV commercial.
“We are the party of real freedom,” Shapiro (or as former President Donald Trump calls him, “the vastly overrated Jewish governor”) assured Democrats. “Exactly, the kind of real freedom you get when your kid goes to a great public school with a great teacher because we believe in their future. Real freedom, real freedom you get when we invest in the police and in the community so that your kid can walk to school and walk home and get home to her mommy safely. Real freedom, real freedom you get when she can join a union, marry who she loves, raise a family on her own terms, breathe clean air, drink pure water, worship however she wants, and live a life of meaning where she is respected for who she is. Real freedom. Real freedom comes when she can look at the Madam President and know that this is a nation where anything and everything is possible. The is true freedom, and that is what we fight for.”
When Pastor (and Chicago City Councilor) William Hall prayed in his blessing, “God, we are ready to fight for freedoms,” the Democrats’ new favorite F-word had won the competition with a devastating score of 94:35.
One of the reasons Shapiro proved an attractive vice president rather than last night’s keynote speaker, Tim Walz, was that, unlike Minnesota’s governor, he was not in office during the critical, life-or-death era of pandemic politics from 2020 to 2022. So all his talk about freedom is less deserving of a canned laugh. Or a vuvuzela.
During his 18-minute speech, Walz wisely avoided addressing his controversial record on Covid-19: the school closures, the mask mandates indoors (and sometimes outdoors), the scientifically unfounded bans on outdoor dining, the jailing of bar owners who defiantly opened their doors, the 474-day state of emergency, the wasted relief funds, the government hotline that ratted out Minnesotans for gathering in too large numbers at a lake.
“You never learn anything about someone in good times,” Maryland Governor Wes Moore said last night. “In hard times and when the temperatures rise, you learn everything you need to know about someone.”
Judging by Moore’s standards, we have learned that Walz will drop this “freedom” pose like a lump of hot coal when push comes to shove. In November 2020, months after Republican governors like Ron DeSantis of Florida lifted most restrictions and opened all K-12 schools, Walz took what even the pro-restriction New York Times characterized as “the extraordinary step of banning people from different households from meeting indoors or outdoors, even though the evidence has consistently shown that being outdoors is relatively safe.”
“This ban includes indoor and outdoor gatherings, planned and spontaneous gatherings, and public and private gatherings,” Walz said at the time, extending the order to groups of any size, “even if social distancing can be maintained.”
With such a dystopian record on one’s resume, it takes a reservoir of shamelessness the size of Lake Minnetonka to proclaim, as Walz did last night, “When we Democrats talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people you love, the freedom to make your own health care decisions… (and) the freedom to live the life you want to live.”
Making your own decision about whether to meet with the people you love outdoors for health reasons is a freedom that is more fundamental than any other. And Walz has made it a criminal offense.
When they are not keeping quiet about those bad old days, the Democrats have gone on the offensive this week and have been shamelessly campaigning for the Virtues their COVID-19 record.
President Joe Biden, Bill Clinton almighty claimed last night, “healed our sick and got the rest of us back to work.” On opening night, Democratic Rep. Lauren Underwood of Illinois claimed simply, “Donald Trump let us down, but Joe Biden and Kamala Harris got things under control.” (Trump certainly behaved erratically, especially in the first three months of the pandemic when information was scarce, but he did kickstart Operation Warp Speed, which produced vaccines much faster than Biden had thought possible.)
“Thanks to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” said Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) on Monday, in a phrase echoed by many, “we have reopened our schools, restarted our businesses, and restored our faith in American urgency.”
This is ridiculous revisionism. In Republican-governed states, schools were largely open by the time Biden took office; in Democratic states (especially in metropolitan districts dominated by teachers’ unions), schools were largely closed. Biden’s contribution to the reopening process was to slow it down by inviting union officials to unscientifically influence the much-vaunted new pandemic school guidelines unveiled by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in February 2021, condemning CDC-compliant schools to even more scientifically and socially disastrous distance learning.
That policy was revised five weeks later after loud protests from academics, coincidentally just days after public schools received a generational $122 billion boost from the federal government, which normally spends about $40 billion a year on K-12 education. But Democratic-dominated school districts continued to hesitate.
When Democrats launched a new round of revisionism on school reopenings a year ago, I emphasized:
One can understand why Joe Biden would falsely portray himself as a champion of reopening, just as one can understand why Randi Weingarten of all people would do so: Prolonged school closures, long after polling data and global experience convincingly argued against them, represented one of the most egregious policy failures in modern American history, the aftermath of which is still massively reshaping American children, families, education systems, and cities. They are rightly unpopular, and few people, other than opinion journalist trolls, are trying to defend them anymore.
Biden’s solution was not to reopen schools, but to transfer gigantic amounts of federal tax money to local school districts at the very moment when their students were screaming and walking out of school, especially in the cities and states where schools were most frequently closed.
Don’t believe the fickle libertarians? Let us consult The New York Times. In March of this year, 16 months after Walz blasted a reporter who dared to question the learning loss Minnesotans were experiencing under his watch, the newspaper published a brutal analysis.
“Today, there is broad agreement among many public health and education experts that prolonged school closures have not significantly halted the spread of Covid, while the educational harm to children has been extensive and long-lasting,” the Just reported. “As experts prepare for the next public health emergency, whatever it may be, a growing body of research shows that pandemic-related school closures have had a high cost to students.”
A presidential campaign, Clinton said last night, is an extended job interview. Who has the judgment and temperament to coolly hold the reins of power during the next state of emergency? The Democrats, and Walz in particular, have shown during the Covid-19 pandemic that they not only lack sound judgment when it comes to public health, but that when the going gets tough they will sacrifice the very basic American virtue they set out to defend this week: your freedom.
