Stacey Abrams’s Epic Face (Mask) Plant

By Kyle Smith

Monday, February 07, 2022

 

Usually when social-media scamps accuse one another of an “epic fail,” they’re referring to some minor infraction, some small blind spot or light mangling of facts. This was not the case with Stacey Abrams’s historic blunder at Glennwood Elementary in Decatur, Ga. Such was the epic scope of Abrams’s miscalculation that it’s in Ben-Hur/The Ten Commandments territory. When it comes to political debacle, Abrams is the new Charlton Heston.

 

What a photo! Abrams, the only person at serious risk in the room, is the only one not wearing a mask. Surrounding her are kids who are at more risk of dying in a car crash than from Covid-19, and yet they’re all wearing masks. Why? Because she’s more powerful and important than they are. It was as if Marie Antoinette showed up for a “listening tour” meeting with the shop stewards of Starving Peasantry, Inc., and proceeded to stuff her face with gâteaux aux cérises et mascarpone as the rest of them listened to the sound of their rumbling bellies.

 

Abrams’s photo was not merely hypocritical, it was one for the Hypocrisy Hall of Fame: masks for the wee, not for me. But most politicians — most people — are hypocrites. Hypocrisy is a routine human flaw. The hypocrisy, in Abrams’s case, put into picture form one of America’s great divides. On the one side is the party of adults who support past, present, and ongoing performative mass-punishment of children via a draconian masking regime that they themselves don’t take seriously; on the other are those who understand that science indicates no sound reasoning behind masking children.

 

Abrams doesn’t look like merely a hypocrite in the picture; she looks like a crocodile surrounded by a group of shipwrecked sailors with stumps where their legs used to be. Worse even than Gavin Newsom partying in French Laundry when he had ordered everyone else in the state to stay home with a Lean Cuisine, the Abrams photo combines thoughtlessness with cruelty. Abrams is the new face of Democratic Party child abuse.

 

The cute kids around Abrams represent millions of stunned victims of a sustained, nationwide, Democrat-led campaign of organized and unnecessary cruelty to kids enacted in contravention of evidence, international norms, and World Health Organization guidance. The psychic, developmental, and emotional damage that Democrats have pounded into kids over the last two years may never be overcome, although it will surely be punished by parents at the ballot box in November.

 

All of this is contained in the Abrams picture. It could not have been more disastrous messaging for her if it had been designed by the Republican Party. Indeed, the picture is so shocking, so hilarious, so absolutely on-target in undermining Abrams, that I at first assumed it had to be a fake. Yet it was sent out over social media by her own team, which then compounded its error by deleting the photo from Twitter, in effect announcing to the public that it had something juicy to hide.

 

Among political self-owns, the Abrams picture has few peers. It’s even better than the shots of 1988 presidential candidate Mike Dukakis driving a tank, which were meant to make him look like a capable military leader but instead made him look like Radar O’Reilly (and broke a cardinal rule of campaigning: Don’t wear someone else’s headgear). It easily beats the photos of Swiss-boarding-school aristocrat John Kerry windsurfing while trying to brand himself as Joe Sixpack instead of Jacques de Suisse, or populist Ted Cruz jetting off to Cancun to sun himself while Texas froze — neither of these blunders had any policy implications.

 

The Abrams photo is such a career-toppling act of auto-damnation that it’s more like the picture of a leering Al Franken reaching out to grope the breasts of a sleeping woman who later noted that Franken, using the pretext of a USO performance, “aggressively stuck his tongue in my mouth.” Or the tableau of Governor Chris Christie sunning himself on the Jersey Shore, which his government had closed to ordinary folks, then claiming, “I didn’t get any sun today.” (His spokesman later clarified, “He did not get any sun. He had a baseball hat on.”) But those revelations came in gotcha photos issued by the politician’s enemies. Imagine Franken issuing the grope photo himself, under the caption, “Senator Franken is reaching out to America’s women . . . ”

 

Sure, Newsom survived his French Laundry escapade, then brazenly performed an encore at the NFC Championship game in Los Angeles, where he was photographed maskless indoors among celebrities. But Georgia is not California. Maybe Abrams should move there and start over.