They say an advertisement is successful if you can recall the name of the product long after you’ve seen the ad.

If that’s true, the 2013 Staples Back-To-School spot has to be one of the greats. I thought it was hilarious when I saw it eight years ago and I think of it every year around this time.

See for yourself:

The delighted dad. The morose kids. The Christmas music.

Advertising gold. 

Unfortunately, after yesterday’s edict by Gov. Ralph Northam, there will be lots of long faces on students in the coming weeks - although we won’t be able to see them - as Virginia’s school children trudge back to class wearing face masks.

Again.

This is NOT what the governor promised just a few weeks ago when he pledged that decisions about masks and other measures would be left up to the local school boards.

By this week, several cities and counties - including Chesapeake - had already voted to make masks optional.

Clearly, once Northam got a taste of one-man rule it was hard to let it go. He was not happy that some school divisions were prepared to let parents decide if their offspring should wear masks. 

So he pretended that SB1303, a new law that was intended to get schools open five days a week, gave him no choice but to issue a sweeping mask mandate for all kids, grades K-12. 

The authors of the bipartisan bill were furious.

A scathing joint statement by the law’s co-patrons, Democratic State Sen. Chap Petersen and Republican State Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant, a physician , was published in The Richmond Times-Dispatch and clarified the intent of their law:

State Sens. Siobhan Dunnavant, R-Henrico, and Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax City, issued a statement taking issue with the "characterization" of Senate Bill 1303, which they co-sponsored, as a mask mandate. 

"His unpredictable and erratic decrees have created conflict and anxiety where school boards had mostly worked out the best approach for their communities," Dunnavant stated, referring to Northam. 

"CDC guidance changes frequently and parents and schools are perfectly capable of following and adapting without threats and reversals by the Governor.”

"The entire purpose of the bill was to give local School Boards flexibility in adopting mitigation strategies," Petersen added.  "This simply compounds the culture of Executive overreach which dates back to March 2020, when the Governor ordered the schools to close in violation of the State Constitution.”

Take that, Northam. From a fellow Dem.

The most galling part of Northam’s statewide mandate is that many teens and their teachers are vaccinated. Masks make no sense for them.

Those teenagers who dutifully ran out and got vaccinated, hoping for some semblance of a normal school year, just got played.

On the upside, they learned a valuable lesson: Never trust a politician. Especially a Democrat.