By Chris Satullo

Local school board elections typically register on the national political Richter scale somewhere just above the race for Register of Wills in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. But a school board recall referendum in San Francisco last Tuesday has had the punditocracy buzzing.

OK, so I’ll join the swarm.

First, some caveats. People are pouncing on these results to derive a national political message; the message each pundit trumpets usually amounts to exactly what they believed before.  Confirmation bias – it’s a potent drug. And it may be that Tip O’Neill’s famous adage that all politics is local is no longer true, if it ever was. Cable news and Twitter took care of that some time ago.

But it remains true that sometimes politics is both national and local. Skipping blithely past the pesky local context can lead one to overstate some of the national lessons – and to miss a few others.

ICYMI, here’s what happened: Voters in “The City” decided to oust three members of the school board, including its president. This was no squeaker; the recall vote against each individual topped 70 percent. (The other four members of the all-Democratic board were spared because they’d just been elected last November and were not subject to recall.)

The board president was a millennial Latina. The other two were Black and Pacific Islander, respectively. They’d been elected on a pledge to pursue racial equity in the school system. But they went at that task with a sledgehammer.

They proposed renaming 44 schools because, supposedly, the people being so honored had been guilty of racist deeds or other violations of woke gospel. This group included Paul Revere, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, poet James Lowell, environmentalist John Muir and the very much still alive U.S. Sen. Diane Feinstein. 

This type of renaming is a fraught – but sometimes necessary – endeavor. For example, I see no reason why any public building in this country should be named after a traitor who took up arms against it.

But those attempting such erasure should proceed with both rhetorical and historical care. This school board – responsible, remember, for the education of 57,000 students – botched its history test, including more than a few slap-your-forehead gaffes in its brief for why these names should be ripped from above the school door. One example: Paul Revere was accused of evil deeds against the Penobscot Indians that he actually played no role in. The poet James Lowell was cancelled for supposedly opposing the vote for freed slaves; he did the opposite.

Beyond that, the effort partook of the current progressive penchant for using an arithmetic of one, rather than a nuanced calculus, to take the measure of an historical figure’s long and complicated life. One violation is apparently enough to cancel the greatest president of American history. (Hint: he had a beard, not orange hair.)   

The board, hammered by critics from sea to sea, pulled back on its renaming quest. But the sideshow damaged its credibility as it struggled to cope with the challenges of educating children in a pandemic. The board was slow to re-open schools; some members said tone-deaf things dismissing the strain that education-at-home was putting on students and families.

The indictment became easy to frame: “My kid’s drowning and I’m exhausted and all you’ve got time for is going after Paul Revere for some B.S. reason?!!?”

Here’s where getting the local part right comes in: The step that may have done the most to fuel the recall drive was a bid, in the name of racial equity, to convert Lowell – the city’s elite, competitive admission high school – into open admission. This was perceived as an enraging attack by many Asian-American parents whose high-achieving children yearn for a spot at Lowell.

This is also where the specifically local ties into the national: The Supreme Court cases that might send affirmative action in college admissions into oblivion this year both involve Asian-Americans claiming that preferences for Black students discriminate against them.

So, the first national lesson out of all this: The phrase “people of color” – which I cop to using from time to time – is a lazy, sloppy formulation that can mislead as often as it informs.   Progressives like to proclaim: “I stand with all people of color.” OK, where you gonna stand when a group of angry Asian-Americans want to fire a Latina school board president and her Black colleague (who didn’t help, by the way, when she called Asian-Americans “house n……s” in a tweet)?

Our world is way more complicated than: all the white people over here, then all the people of other colors over here, arms linked, opposing the whites’ toxic supremacy. Cling to that notion and you’re set up to lose a lot of elections (not to mention friends).

That lesson was lost, of course, on many denizens of progressive Twitter who raced to their iPhones to declare this recall a victory for “segregationists, COVID deniers and privatizers funded by venture capitalists” and, wait for it, “white supremacy.” (The ousted school board president blamed “white supremacy” as well.)

These Twitter sages have something in common with the Stop the Stealers they hold in such contempt: Every time they lose an election they thought they’d win (which happens regularly), they cry foul. It was all because of dark money, or unfair rules, or some other sinister cabal – never because their ideas are nowhere near as popular as they imagine.

OK, left-coast tech moguls and charter school advocates (not exactly“privatizers”) did pour money into the recall. But do did thousands of other individuals throwing their $100 into a pot that grew so large it dwarfed the three board members’ chances of surviving.

Let’s review the facts, shall we? Again, the three all got skunked worse than 30 percent to 70 percent. This is in a deep blue city that is majority-minority (with Asian-Americans the biggest minority group by far) and that went for Joe Biden 85 percent to 13 percent.

White supremacy? Right-wing privatizers?

Ever occur to you, guys, that what really happened is that the mass of Democrats is getting tired of your penchant for symbolic virtue-signaling and dumb slogans like “defund the police”? (Which is not, despite thousands of pained, pretzel-logic explanations by liberals, not the same as “reimagine the police.”)

The Obama/Trump/Biden voters who decide big elections in this country make it clear in focus groups what they’d like to see: a competent, drama-free focus on the basics of governing, with practical solutions to urgent, kitchen-table issues such as taming COVID, addressing inflation, rebuilding bridges and curbing crime. (And, no, they are not against racial justice, if it comes in the practical form of, say, retraining police or funding schools – rather than renaming them.)

So, summing up, they want the opposite of what went on in San Francisco’s schools.

Now, let’s turn to the equally ridiculous takes from Fox and other fever swamps of the MAGA mediaverse. They go something like this: This recall shows that the American people have turned completely against the Democratic Party and Joe Biden’s anti-American socialist/racist agenda. The glorious return of our Orange God is nigh.

Really? Which Democratic party is that? The one whose chief office holder in San Francisco, a Black woman mayor, vociferously backed the recall? The one whose chief office holder in Chicago, a Black woman mayor, faced down her teachers union over its reluctance to return to school? Which Joe Biden? I believe, Foxies, you’re referring to the imaginary one you’ve invented out of whole cloth to frighten your bubbled viewers.

The real Biden is happy, when questioned, to whip off his aviators, look you in the eye and tell you he has absolutely no desire to defund the police, defrock Abraham Lincoln or favor defiant teachers over needy schoolchildren.

He’d love to tell you about his great first year in office, if anyone could hear him over the din of predictable partisan narratives, right and left. He got vaccines into 250 million arms – almost all the willing, eligible ones. He got passed two huge, vital spending packages, for COVID relief and infrastructure, which have begun to help real people with real challenges. He got that done even though, in his own party, he was buffeted by self-righteous mules to his right and left. On his watch, unemployment shrank to its lowest level since 1969. He ended a quagmire war. He got us back into the Paris Climate Accords and nominated a ton of good federal judges.

Yep, he had some missteps in the Afghan withdrawal. I wish his team could have reacted to Omicron more nimbly. Inflation is a dark cloud with no simple solution.

Still, it’s a damn good record. But the right-wing mediaverse will never admit that. It will continue to peddle lies and seek to distract with alarms about Bolsheviks at the gates.

That’s why it’s so maddening when people who call themselves progressives undermine a progressive and competent Democratic president with unforced errors of self-righteousness that Fox can’t wait to feast on.

Yes, Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk and OANN will be their toxic selves, no matter what. But why does the side I’m on keep feeding them rich fuel for their dark, satanic mills?

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia