A short video with my thoughts on the Jay Jones issue. Yes, I think his texts (not to mention the reckless driving) disqualifies him from the office of Attorney General. But Jason Miyares is a Trump sycophant and a probably fascist who would support Trump’s destruction of the Constitution, which makes him even less qualified, as well as dangerous to the Commonwealth.
Virginia Politics
Podcast Episode 8: Campaign Update
In Episode 8, Scott and I circle back to discuss his campaign for the House of Delegates in the 59th and how things are going so far.
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Value Pack 27
I got some fundraising texts this week from congressional candidates that got me thinking.
Raising money is normal candidate stuff. The problem is that we have statewide elections and House of Delegate elections in Virginia this year, and congressional races are a year away. So, two things.
First of all, I think these national candidates – whose elections are more than a year away, should pay attention to supporting the local candidates in their districts this year and help make sure Virginia elects Democrats at the state level and in the House of delegates districts rather than focus on raising money this month. At least one of these candidates is doing that. When I spoke with Salam Bhatti a few weeks ago and mentioned this to him he took it to heart – and went straight out and created an ActBlue page that would take donations for all of the House of delegates candidates in the first Congressional District.
I think the Shannon Taylors of the world ought to do the same thing.
Many of the candidates running for House of Delegate seats whose districts touch CD1 have difficult races in red parts of the Commonwealth. These are districts that the party doesn’t think a Democrat can win, so they don’t think it makes sense to support their campaigns.
I disagree because these guys are out there on the ground in a statewide election year. They’re knocking on doors, they’re on social media, they’re putting up signs. They’re talking to people. They’re going to meet and greets, talking to voters. They’re working to get out the vote. Voters they turn out for their campaigns will probably also support the statewide candidates on the blue side, which means they’re doing a lot of groundwork for the statewide candidates. So, if you support Abigail Spanberger, you should want to support these guys.
The Democratic Party, and the elected officials in Virginia who already hold General Assembly seats, could provide critical financial support to these efforts. Democratic Party Senators, who don’t have to stand for election until 2027, could donate to these campaigns. Candidates in House races who have no Republican opponent could give critical financial support to these fellow Democrats.
It’s difficult to overstate the epic disaster we would have in this commonwealth if Winsome Sears is governor and somehow managed to get control of the legislature. If you think it’s bad at the national level, wait until you see that at the Commonwealth level.
So this is what we need to do. Sixteen candidates for the House of Delegates in Virginia have no opponent. They they’re sitting on money, some of them with more than a million dollars, some of them with more than half a million. Nine or ten have more than $50,000. They don’t need this money for their own races.
It makes no sense at all for them not to be supporting these candidates in other races, even those they don’t believe can win. They should also be supporting these red district candidates – we’re not going to grow the majority unless we start winning elections in these districts that look like they’re too red to win.
My good friend Fergie Reid, who is a civil rights icon in Virginia, has done a lot of work trying to make sure we have a candidate on the ballot in every district. This year he succeeded, despite Democratic Party apathy.
Twenty-seven of these candidates run in these red districts that nobody thinks we can win, so they get no Party support. So his good friend Charles Gaba set up what he calls the Value Pack 27 ActBlue Page similar to Salaam’s List. Donations made on this page will be split among the 27 Democrats who are running in these hard races.
My ask is that if you know a Virginia legislator who is sitting on a campaign chest but doesn’t have an opponent, reach out to them. Ask them why they’re withholding important support Democratic Party candidates who need help in red districts.
I’m talking about Don Scott and a lot of these Northern Virginia candidates. The Senate candidates that don’t have an election until 2027. They have two and a half years before they face reelection. They can donate to these candidates who may not win but work hard to turn out the vote in these districts.
Go write a check yourself. We need to support these Democrats. I ran for office twice in Virginia in very red districts so I know this from personal experience that it doesn’t take a lot of money to mount a little bit of a campaign and make a difference. When I ran for the House of delegates in 2021, a statewide year, I pulled 12,000 votes in a very red district – 12,000 votes that probably went to Terry McAuliffe in his losing effort.
If we can get these guys a little bit of money for more signs, more direct mail, more postcards, more meet and greets, then we can help get out the vote not only for them, but for the state party, as well. That means Abigail Spanberger has a better chance to win. Ghazala Hashmi has a better chance to win.
Jay Jones has a better chance to win. If Jay Jones is attorney general, he’ll push back on the Trump administration by filing lawsuits when they do things that violate the Constitution. Jason Miyares won’t do that. If Abigail Spanberger is governor, she will sign bills that make Virginia a better place to live. Winsome Sears will not.
We need to do everything we can. The Democratic Party needs to put the pedal to the metal. The national candidates running for Congress next year need to put the pedal to the metal. We all need to do everything we can to get these folks elected and protect democracy. In Virginia, we can protect it this year in the Commonwealth even if our chance to protect it nationally doesn’t come until next year.
The Past, the Future, and Critical Race Theory
It’s unlikely that Winston Churchill actually said these words in just this way, but this particular Tea Party sign correctly notes that we must understand our past if we want a prosperous future. This isn’t easy – understanding America’s past requires a critical examination of ancestors’ sins against the ideals they claimed as their core national promise: an indivisible nation of liberty and justice for all. Part of my project as an activist and candidate is to make room for a discussion of America’s past with those who would turn back time.
Last Thursday I had the pleasure of attending the Hanover Chapter of the NAACP forum on Critical Race Theory (CRT). Thanks to professors Faye Belgrave and Paul Perrin of VCU for taking the time to help our community understand this very important approach to understanding race and racism in America.
CRT is a framework for understanding racism, individual and institutional, in America. We cannot create a just society without an examining the legal regime that protects discrimination, whether de facto or de jure. So I was also very happy to see quite a few Hanover County conservative activists in the room, and hoped they would see that CRT isn’t about blaming or shaming anyone for what happened in the past – it’s about informing a just American future.
Continue readingCircular Firing Squad?
The inner workings and various factions that make up Virginia’s Republican Party fascinate me, and I’ve been attending Tea Party meetings and following the debate between these factions pretty much since I moved to Hanover County in 2008. The short non-academic version is that a very active and motivated base has worked to take over the Virginia GOP for more than a decade. This base very much wants to enforce a kind of ideological purity that focuses far more on cultural issues than policy.
This intra-Party insurgency initially manifested itself in the capture of local Virginia GOP units by Tea Party activists after Barack Obama won the Presidency. Ideologically, this group is to the right of what I call “Chamber of Commerce” Republicans (defined as conservatives who want small government but want it to actually work). Think of this as the “conservatives lose elections because they’re not conservative enough” crowd.
They successfully won the 7th District Congressional nomination for Dave Brat over House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in 2014 because the very conservative Cantor was not conservative enough to suit them – these activists ousted a very powerful Congressman for ideological reasons. Brat went on to win the seat and served two terms before Abigail Spanberger won the seat in 2018. She held it in 2020, but narrowly.
Continue readingMore on the Scandals in Virginia Politics
A few weeks have passed since scandals shook up Virginia politics, starting with the news that Governor Ralph Northam’s Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) year book page included a photo of two men at a party. One of the men in the photo wore a KKK costume, the other blackface. Governor Northam could not, in the moment, definitively say he was not one of those people. So Northam admitted he may have been in the photo, then retracted that admission the next day.
Democrats in Virginia, myself included, lined upto ask the Governor to resign. It got worse after his “Moon Walk” press conference, and speculation started about who Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax would appoint to take his place as LG after he took Northam’s place. But then the second scandal popped: accusations of sexual harassment against Fairfax. This shifted discussions to succession in Virginia, and scenarios that would put House of Delegates Speaker Kirk Cox in the Governor’s mansion. Soon enough a third shoe dropped: Attorney General Mark Herring volunteered that he had once appeared in blackface himself.
Continue readingRalph Northam Should Resign – Updated
UPDATE: Governor Northam held a press conference this afternoon and walked back his admission last night that he was in the picture:
“I believe now and then that I am not either of the people in this photo. This was not me in that picture. That was not Ralph Northam.”
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/02/politics/northam-racist-yearbook-photo/index.html
Northam went on to say that he gave photos to the yearbook staff, did not participate in assembling his page, did not purchase a copy, and hadn’t seen it in thirty years. Publication blindsided him.
Maybe the yearbook staff placed the photo in question on Northam’s page by mistake and he genuinely did not know about this until yesterday. Which of course begs the question: why admit to being one of the people in the picture unless you remember wearing blackface or a KKK costume but cannot remember a specific? Someone out there might have photos of me that I’d prefer never became public, but I know one thing with 100% certainty: no picture of me in blackface or a KKK outfit exists. I’ve never worn either. Ever.
Northam’s admission that he wore blackface for a dancing contest, which he won with a Michael Jackson impersonation, doesn’t help. Dressing up like Jackson was common enough at the time – Jackson was on the Jackson’s Victory Tour and at the height of his fame. But he could have performed without the shoe polish makeup, and his claim that he “only used a little because it’s hard to get off” means he was familiar with the blackface concept (and likely knows photos of this exist that he wanted to get out in front of).
Perhaps we shouldn’t hold Governor Northam responsible for the photo appearing on his page – this kind of mistake happens. And I very much hope that Governor Northam was not in the photo. But I’m not sure it matters any more, even if this turns out to be a right wing hit job using a doctored photo or yearbook. That he couldn’t vehemently deny this based on his own memory says quite a lot. Northam’s denial this afternoon muddies the waters. But resignation remains the right course.
Original Post:
Learning that Governor Ralph Northam apparently attended a party in either blackface or a KKK costume during his time in medical school flabbergasted and disappointed me.
Like everyone, Northam is at least in part a product of the time and place of his upbringing, and his Eastern Shore youth and Virginia Military Institute college career apparently included problematic attitudes on race. Whatever his thinking on racial equality today, the Governor clearly had no problem joking about terrorizing or making fun of people of color in 1984. I would hope that Northam’s time in the US Army and as a pediatrician lead to some personal introspection and change.
But if he has truly adjusted his attitudes about human beings not like him he could have owned his past and used it as a way to help Virginia confront its own problematic history of slavery and resistance to desegregation. He could have turned it into a teaching point about ways to move America to racial equality. Instead, Ralph Northam either hoped no one would discover this disgusting photograph or forgot it altogether – which is problematic in itself.
It matters because racial discrimination is America’s original sin. Colonization of North America by Western Europeans depended on the labor of chattel slaves, most of them Africans. America’s founding generations constructed our version of Capitalism on slavery and included clauses in our founding governing document specifically designed to protect slavery in some states. The Electoral College, equal state representation in the Senate, and the Second Amendment all have roots in the need to protect slavery in order to secure ratification of the Constitution by slave states.
We still pay for this sin – or at least people of color still pay. Even after the end of de jure slavery, de facto slavery in the form of Jim Crow laws, redlining and housing discrimination, voter suppression, and depression of education opportunities through segregated schools has kept families of color from building wealth and participating fully in American society. Efforts by white elites to socialize poor whites to fear poor blacks after the Civil War shows its effects through American attitudes about social safety nets and immigration still today. I don’t mean to suggest that the United States has not been a force for liberty and justice in the world. But America becomes more exceptional as such a force when we live by example for others, and we cannot do this without confronting this very real and very problematic history.
None of us has a perfect past, free of troubling actions, decisions, or attitudes. We all change as we grow, and I seriously doubt that Ralph Northam still holds views on race that would allow him to attend a party dressed in blackface or a KKK costume. He almost certainly has changed his attitudes about racial equality. As he became a prominent pediatrician and then politician, he had a unique opportunity to help Virginians have a discussion about its racial history and how people like him could overcome their past and help us move forward together. This may not have won him the Governorship, but it would have helped make Virginia a better place to live. Sadly, he forgot his past or chose to bury it instead.
This morning, Governor Northam will hold a press conference and will likely resign. He should.
Predictions from The Bull Elephant – and a Few of My Own
Contributors and staff at The Bull Elephant have predicted the outcome of today’s elections and they deliver about what you’d expect from true believers. Most think the GOP will hold the House and some think Republicans will pick up 3 or more seats in the Senate, with one suggesting a 60-seat majority. Many argue that Corey Stewart will outperform polls and one thinks he could have won with more help from the Republican national and state parties. Almost all think Barbara Comstock will lose, but few think any other Democrats will win Virginia House seats they aren’t heavily favored to win (e.g., Don McEachin [D-4]). Continue reading
An Observation on the State of the Democratic Party
Isaac Chotiner has a podcast at Slate called “I Have to Ask,” and this week he interviewed Michelle Goldberg, now a New York Times columnist. They cover lots of topics, including Omarosa and the Russia investigation. But this bit caught my eye:
“Whenever I’m in New York, I can work myself into this state of really bleak despair, and then I go out and travel and meet … it’s not even necessarily Democratic Party activists as much as Indivisible activists or Democratic Socialists of America chapters or these sort of grass-roots groups that have sprung up since the election and are just doing so much work. And it always makes me feel so much more hopeful about the future.
You hear the same story over and over again of these kind of middle-aged women who, they voted, but they didn’t necessarily pay super close attention to primaries, maybe they had to look up what congressional district they were in, and who woke up the day after the election and were so shattered and looked around for somewhere they could go and found either an offshoot of Pantsuit Nation or a local Indivisible meeting.
And you meet these women, and they go to meetings now four or five nights a week. They have all new friends. They are just astonishing organizers, and they’re kind of using this intense local knowledge that they have. You can’t replicate that when it comes to canvassing, somebody who just knows everyone on the block. So you see that being deployed everywhere, and that I think is why you’re seeing these numbers in some of the special elections, these swings that are even bigger than the swings you see on the generic ballot.”
I can tell you that I saw the same thing all over Virginia’s First Congressional District during the primary campaign this spring, and these folks don’t seem to be tiring. So I’m more optimistic than some of my fellow Progressives that we’re really about to see a Blue Wave in November.
Go listen to the podcast or read the transcript. Lots of good stuff.
What to Watch For: Corey Stewart and Virginia Republicans
Last week, Corey Stewart won the Republican nomination to run against Senator Tim Kaine for US Senate this November. This means that the de facto leader of the Virginia Republican Party is a white supremacist from Minnesota. We know he’s a white supremacist because he thinks monuments to men who committed treason against the United States in defense of slavery belong in the public square. The guy made his bones harassing people of color and trying to cleanse Prince William County of immigrants.
Corey Stewart likes to pal around with people like Paul Nehlen and Jason Kessler. Nehlen is an anti-Semite who jokes on Twitter about killing political opponents. Kessler organized the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville last August. A rally attendee and Kessler supporter killed Heather Heyerwith his car. Two Virginia State Troopers, Lieutenant H. Jay Cullen, 48, of Midlothian, Virginia, and Trooper-Pilot Berke M. M. Bates, 40, of Quinton, Virginia, died when their observation helicopter crashed on their way to assist authorities on the ground. Kessler plans a sequel, by the way. Wonder if Stewart will attend. Continue reading