The orthopedic annoyances of growing older are well documented, and are the thing that people who live past their forties tend to complain about the most. I'm not gonna lie — it is weird waking up with two or three aches just from sleeping. What I love about my lack of spring chicken-ness, however, is the perspective that decades of experience give one; the kind of perspective that is especially useful when dealing with politics.
Trust me, I'm going somewhere with this.
Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) died this past Thursday, succumbing to the cancer that he had been belatedly diagnosed with last year (my Townhall colleague Rebecca Downs covered that here). He was my congressman and a radical leftist. I'm not here to vent, however. That's because Grijalva also taught me one of the greatest lessons I've learned in forty-plus years of political activism. (Side note: if I ever do write about him again, it will be to absolutely go off on his politics.)
I was in high school in the late 1970s (I know, I look great for my age) when I first became aware of Raúl Grijalva. He had been elected to the Tucson Unified School District board before I moved back to Tucson to go to high school, and would eventually become the board's president. He had a gift for getting in front of news cameras even then, and this was back when even teenagers saw the local news several times a week, so I knew who he was even though I was attending a Catholic high school.
Grijalva was still on the TUSD board when I first began dabbling in political activism. In 1989, he was elected to the Pima County Board of Supervisors, where he would ply his extremist progressive trade until 2002, when he was elected to the United States House of Representatives. I had already lived in Los Angeles for a while at that point, so I obviously hadn't been paying much attention to Tucson politics. When I read that he had been elected to Congress, it was like a ghost from the past was haunting me.
It was then that I began paying attention to the way that the Democratic Party made use of school boards. While it's true that some Republicans have served on local school boards, the Democrats use them like their farm system, especially in blue states and cities. The biggest benefit to the Dems being on school boards is the propping up of the public school leftist indoctrination mills, of course, but there are bonuses for those on a political career trajectory.
School board elections teach aspiring politicians how to raise money, run a campaign, and give stump speeches. Even if the school board is in a large city, this is all done far from a national, or even state, spotlight. Throughout the years, the GOP has been given to taking political newbies and throwing them into the fire. Every so often, they hit a home run or two, President Trump and Vice President Vance are the preeminent examples of that.
More often than not, you end up with candidates who trip themselves up with unforced errors because the campaign trail is fraught with potential for that.
If a Democrat has one or two school board elections under his or her belt, he or she is better prepared for the next level.
In the summer of 2012, I was doing a speaking tour of Virginia for Americans for Prosperity. After one midday speech, our hosts gave us a tour of the office where their operation was set up. I hadn't talked to them much until we got inside. The place was buzzing with young, enthusiastic volunteers. As we were being introduced, I asked exactly what they were working on. One of the young'uns said, "We're trying to get Republicans elected to school boards and city councils." I said, "You're doing the 'God's work' of politics," and went around shaking their hands.
Unfortunately, there was precious little of that work being done by Republican groups at the time.
Back to the Grijalva family and the Democrats' school board farm system. When I moved back to Tucson after more than two decades in Los Angeles, Raúl Grijalva's daughter Adelita was the president of — you guessed it — the Tucson Unified School District Board. Not long after, she was elected to the Pima County Board of Supervisors. She served on both boards concurrently for almost four years, becoming the poster girl for a consolidated abuse of power here in my hometown.
If you have been paying close attention to this column, it should come as no surprise that Adelita Grijalva is the name that has been popping up the most since Thursday when the local press and politicos are discussing who should replace her father.
The bad news is that she'll probably end up in Congress, if not now, then soon. The good news is that the GOP finally began to wake up regarding school boards during the pandemic. The impetus for that was to wrest control from tyrannical progressives and introduce a little sanity to local curricula. That's a great start, to be sure.
The next step is hoping that the GOP figures out the "farm system" approach that the Dems have. As I have written on several occasions, the new Trump version of the Grand Old Party is more focused on fighting and winning than previous 21st century iterations. That means there's a better chance that it will pluck helpful ideas from the playbook of the once-formidable Democratic political machine.
Baby steps are better than no steps at all.
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