Tuesday night in Arizona, instead of debating Republican Kari Lake in her campaign for governor, Democrat Katie Hobbs instead conducted a sit-down interview with KAET-TV host Ted Simons. The issue of her ducking the debate was brought up by Simons, who asked her point blank if she was afraid of debating Lake. Hobbs, appearing on PBS alone in order to avoid having to have her clock cleaned by her Republican opponent, naturally claimed, “I’m not afraid to face Kari Lake.” Except she obviously is.
Hobbs, of all the high-profile Democrats candidates for governor or Senate this cycle, may be the worst overall candidate, and that’s saying something.
Don’t get me wrong — there’s stiff, robust competition for the most inept Democratic campaign of 2022. Competing for the gold medal are …
- Stacey Abrams still fighting whether she won or not in 2018 in Georgia
- Charlie Crist in Florida trying to pretend he’s a serious candidate against a vastly more competent Ron DeSantis
- John Fetterman essentially allowing his illegal migrant wife to claim she’ll basically be the brains behind the would-be Pennsylvania Senator’s voting decisions
- Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin insisting on emptying the prisons in order to make the streets safer in Milwaukee
- Robert Francis O’Rourke in Texas, where Beto apparently is Spanish for blowout, thinks hanging out with the Chicks in concert will get him that missing 10% of the votes he needs to make up
Katie Hobbs took her position atop the medal stand, however, when she was asked about Arizona’s backpack school voucher measure passed by the Arizona legislature and signed into law by Doug Ducey. Here’s what she had to say.
“There are always going to be kids who are stuck in these schools” may be what the teachers’ union wants her say, but it’s myopically bad politics with a little over two weeks to go. The voucher law has survived every challenge thrown at it by the left, including an effort to recall the law via state initiative. That drive to collect enough signatures to put it on the ballot failed, and failed pretty dramatically. Petitioners needed to gather a little over 141,000 registered Arizona voters in order to qualify it for the ballot, and only turned in somewhere around 88,000.
In short, there wasn’t enough interest amongst the electorate to sign the petition. It certainly wasn’t about union money not being available to deploy signature gatherers. And even though polling in Arizona is limited on the subject of educational choice, which I believe is one reason why the pollsters are missing how deep and wide the coming red wave will be, there is some data that doesn’t take too much extrapolation to indicate that she’s wildly out of step with the majority of Arizonans.
During the COVID lockdown, parents all over the country got a glimpse of the woke agenda that had already infiltrated public school curricula, and when they saw it, most didn’t like it one bit. Virginia’s gubernatorial win by Glenn Youngkin was largely won on votes by suburban moms, regardless of party, deciding that enough was enough. When you start messing with their kids behind their backs, you’re no longer qualified to be in office. Incumbent school board members, in additional to Congressional and Senate Democrats, are facing the fight of their political lives as voters in these districts have a ‘throw the bums out’ fever, and not even more cowbell will calm it.
A year ago, the Goldwater Institute in Arizona alerted us to a Data Orbital survey that studied what Arizonans were thinking coming out of the pandemic, and by a three-to-one margin, 72-19%, voters wanted legislation requiring schools to post all aspects of their curriculum on their website so that parents would have a clear look at what their kids are getting fed in class. Educational transparency is a huge thing in Arizona, and the backpack law that allows the taxpayer money assigned to educate each child in the Grand Canyon State to follow that child to whatever educational institution the parent chooses, naturally flows out of that requirement of transparency. If a school refuses to make woke or radical ideological curricula public, parents get to pull that child and use that state funding to get them educated somewhere that’s a better fit.
Just on the popularity of the school choice issue, and the lack of support to put a blocking initiative on the ballot, that should have given Hobbs pause on whether she really wanted to go down that rabbit hole on PBS Tuesday night. But it’s the tone deafness and indifference to how she views students floundering in failing schools that gets me. By saying dismissively that we’re always going to have kids stuck in these kinds of schools, that’s a two-fer in the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Who says we have to always have kids stuck in failing schools? Who are these kids? What percent of them are minority students? Why can’t parents be proactive and have the resources to shop for a school – public, private, charter, whatever, and specifically not condemn their child to a poor education?
And as for the schools, why is it that Katie Hobbs seems content with underperforming schools as just the way it is? Who says it has to remain that way? If a bad school has a mass exodus due to this new backpack law and doesn’t have enough students registered to stay solvent, then that district is going to have to either change the personnel, both teachers and administration, or close that failing school down. Hobbs would much rather accept the status quo of failing schools, a willingness Arizonans have demonstrated already in polling and with their votes that they do not share.
The current polling average at Real Clear Politics shows Kari Lake with a 1.2% lead over Hobbs. I expect that to spread over the next couple of weeks, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see Lake win on Election Day outside of the margin of error. Why? Because for Katie Hobbs, cowardice, ignorance, and especially apathy for Arizona’s children is not exactly a winning combination.
