Daily Archives: 15 July 2026

Statesmanship

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The estimable editors of The Wall Street Journal spent an entire column dunking on Vice President JD Vance (R) and his foreign policy miscues. Buried in the text, though, were a couple of nuggets.

…hedge-fund magnate Ken Griffin, a major Republican donor, said he’d favor Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a matchup between the two for the 2028 GOP presidential nomination.

Unmentioned by the editors is that Rubio has already said he won’t run for the party’s nomination for President if Vance does, the plain subtext of which is he won’t risk dividing the party with such a contest. This is an assurance Vance has so far chosen not to offer.

And these, regarding the cease fire deal he thought he’d negotiated with the civilians in the Tehran branch of Iran’s government (the other branch being the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps):

I think that they see there’s a real opportunity here to turn over a new leaf so long as they do the right thing[.]
…
They want to have a much brighter future….

As the editors noted, though, the regime’s vision of a brighter future entails nuclear weapons that allow it to control the region, not prosperity for its people.

Vance’s misunderstanding of whose view of “right thing” actually was in play, along with his miss regarding whose vision was operating, are not just statesmanship misses, they’re failures of political acumen.

A Truism, and a Solution

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A letter-writer in Monday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section wrote this while commenting on Alexis de Tocqueville’s praise for our nation’s then-penchant for solving problems locally rather than crying to Mama Government:

A statute can’t manufacture civic energy or entrepreneurial zeal. That has to come from citizens who are politically engaged or not hindered in their efforts to continue the American dream.

That is plainly true. And, pedantically, it echoes Aristotle’s and Plato’s remarks about politics and citizens’ role in it.

The solution is just as plain, and it’s made so by the failing, and increasing depth of the failure, of our public school systems to properly educate our children. We need the competition of school choice, the freely done setup of voucher and charter schools and of homeschooling, whether individually or parents setting up homeschool pods. That competition even improves the performance of local examples of public schools.

That last, though, requires the reduction, if not elimination, of teachers unions, organizations whose management teams care not a farthing about our children, nor even of their teacher members, but only about their own political power.