In our most recent Washington Post column, Paul Goldman and I take another look at the huge investment a group founded and partially funded by former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg is making in the 10th district Senate race. We hadn’t intended to make a second pass, but events offline encouraged us to do so:
Last week, Everytown for Gun Safety, the group funding more than $2 million worth of ads in two Virginia Senate races, indicated unhappiness with our last column. The group said we had misconstrued former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s intrusion into Virginia politics. We disagree. Our column was the first to pointedly question the motive behind the group’s unprecedented incursion into the Richmond-area 10th District state Senate race. Bloomberg helped form the group and pledged to give it $50 million.
The small change Everytown requested actually seemed to bolster our column’s conclusion.
And on we go…taking a look at the other ad the Everytown group is paying for in the Sturtevant-Gecker contest. What we find is a mess:
This ad mostly attacks Sturtevant on non-gun issues. It uses allegations from a lawsuit and employs racial code words whose meanings are well-known in Richmond politics.
The ad’s narrator says Sturtevant is being “sued” because he allegedly held secret meetings to help create a school zoning plan that allegedly benefited Richmond’s “wealthy” [white] students at the expense of the “others” [African American] in a school population that is more than 90 percent non-white.
But the onscreen citation supporting this assertion references a suit against the Richmond School Board, not Sturtevant. He is one of two white members and was elected from the city’s wealthiest, mostly white district. Seven board members are African American. The board split 5-4 on the hotly debated plan. Two African American board members (including the son of the mayor, who is black) voted to enact the plan.
The board’s attorneys moved to dismiss the suit, filed in 2013 by one parent, saying the plaintiff has “admitted that the School Board did not act out of racial bias.”
We don’t know what goes on in Bloomberg’s New York, but in Virginia, some of us stand up to far stronger political forces to break the cycle of racial politics.
And this angle on the story has legs.
Richmond School Board member Kim Gray, a Democrat, fired off a letter to Mr. Gecker:
“Your recent television attack ads target not only your opponent, my School Board colleague Glen Sturtevant, but it also attacks two fellow Democrats, the school board members who supported school closures, and the larger community that supported this action,” wrote Gray, who represents the Fan-anchored 2nd District. “Most disappointing is that you relied on the questionable plaintiff’s filing in a lawsuit disputing a unanimous decision to rezone schools by the Richmond School Board.”
Gecker sticks by his guns (so to speak) and says the Everytown-funded ad is all about Glen, so nothing to see here (and never mind the code words).
