{"id":407,"date":"2019-02-22T18:15:25","date_gmt":"2019-02-22T22:15:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/?p=407"},"modified":"2019-02-22T18:15:33","modified_gmt":"2019-02-22T22:15:33","slug":"more-on-the-scandals-in-virginia-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/?p=407","title":{"rendered":"More on the Scandals in Virginia Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A few weeks have passed since scandals shook up Virginia politics, starting with the news that Governor Ralph Northam\u2019s\u00a0Eastern Virginia Medical School<\/a> (EVMS) year book page included a photo of two men at a party.\u00a0\u00a0One of the men in the photo wore a KKK costume, the other blackface<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0Governor Northam could not, in the moment, definitively say he was not one of those people.\u00a0\u00a0So Northam admitted he may have been in the photo, then retracted that admission the next day.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Democrats in Virginia,\u00a0myself included<\/a>,\u00a0lined up<\/a>to\u00a0ask the Governor to resign<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0It got worse after his\u00a0\u201cMoon Walk\u201d press conference<\/a>, and speculation started about who\u00a0Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax<\/a> would\u00a0appoint to take his place as LG<\/a> after he took Northam\u2019s place.\u00a0\u00a0But then the second scandal popped:\u00a0accusations of sexual harassment against Fairfax<\/a>.\u00a0This shifted discussions to\u00a0succession in Virginia<\/a>, and scenarios that would put\u00a0House of Delegates Speaker Kirk Cox<\/a> in the Governor\u2019s mansion.\u00a0\u00a0Soon enough a third shoe dropped:\u00a0\u00a0Attorney General Mark Herring<\/a> volunteered that\u00a0he had once appeared in blackface<\/a> himself.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Few asked Herring to step down.\u00a0\u00a0He\u2019d volunteered himself as insensitive on race in his youth, and the Republican-controlled House of Delegates would choose his replacement.\u00a0\u00a0Herring also has a very good record on race that demonstrates personal growth on the issue.\u00a0\u00a0And few Democrats have any desire to see a GOP Attorney General.\u00a0\u00a0Subsequent revelations that Senate Majority Leader\u00a0Tommy Norment<\/a>also had a blackface past<\/a> didn\u2019t hurt Herring\u2019s case.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Governor Northam also seems to have survived his scandal<\/a>.  Black Caucus groups have shown support, and polls show little interest among Virginians to push him out.  He\u2019s kept his political coalition together, almost certainly with cover from Donald Trump.  Anyone demanding Northam\u2019s resignation loses moral authority unless they demand the same from Mr. \u201cGood people on both sides.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fairfax is another matter. One accusation muddies his reputation, but two suggests a pattern, and one accuser told others contemporaneously \u2013 using the word \u201crape.\u201d<\/a> He could face no-kidding criminal exposure.  Still, Fairfax claims the accusations against him are \u201cdemonstrably false.\u201d  What\u2019s left of his political career depends on his hole card trumping his accusers\u2019 hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It does not make sense for me to rescind my call for Governor Northam to resign.\u00a0\u00a0I still believe he wasted an opportunity during his earlier career to use his experience to have a discussion about race in Virginia we still need to have.\u00a0\u00a0He knew about the racial climate at\u00a0Virginia Military Institute<\/a> (VMI) and EVMS during his academic career and he knew he had participated in insensitive behavior among students at both universities.\u00a0\u00a0He could have and should have used his own personal story to call it out and help move the entire Commonwealth forward on racial issues.\u00a0He instead chose to bury it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Events, however, have given him a second chance to lead that discussion.\u00a0\u00a0A \u201cRacial Reconciliation<\/a>\u201d tour makes sense but piggybacking on commemoration events intended to\u00a0honor those who protested exactly the kind of racism Northam took so lightly<\/a> in his youth does not.\u00a0\u00a0He and Herring need to initiate their own discussion of Virginia\u2019s racial past, what they\u2019ve seen and done, and how their experiences changed them.\u00a0They need to call out institutions, including VMI and ESMS, that not only permitted deplorable racial insensitivity but memorialized it in souvenir yearbooks and other institutional documents.\u00a0They\u00a0need to make sure<\/a> minority communities don\u2019t have to put up with\u00a0dangerous and unnecessary infrastructure<\/a> because history left them without the political power needed to stop it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And let\u2019s not ignore the fact that a serial racist and sexual abuser sits in the Oval Office.\u00a0\u00a0None of the people calling for Northam et al to step down make similar demands of Donald Trump, who has shown both\u00a0racist<\/a> and\u00a0sexist<\/a> insensitivity.\u00a0\u00a0Northam\u2019s youth (and apparent drunkenness) doesn\u2019t excuse his behavior in college, but he at least has avoided openly racist rhetoric while in office.\u00a0\u00a0Trump has not<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0GOP failure to police Republican leaders does not mean Democrats should ignore racism and sexism in their own Party, but it does give them cover.It\u2019s time to have the conversation on racism and sexism we\u2019ve needed in the US since Thomas Jefferson cited the inalienable rights of Man in the Declaration of Independence even as his chattel slaves worked his plantation at home.\u00a0\u00a0If Ralph Northam won\u2019t resign, he needs to lead this discussion in Virginia.\u00a0\u00a0He can start at Union Hill.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few weeks have passed since scandals shook up Virginia politics, starting with the news that Governor Ralph Northam\u2019s\u00a0Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) year book page included a photo of two men at a party.\u00a0\u00a0One of the men in the photo wore a KKK costume, the other blackface.\u00a0\u00a0Governor Northam could not, in the moment, definitively […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,155,77,157,82],"tags":[162,161,158,159,160,97],"class_list":["post-407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-democratic-party-dysfunction","category-governor-ralph-northam","category-racism-and-bigotry","category-racism-in-virginia","category-va-attorney-general-mark-herring","tag-justin-fairfax","tag-mark-herring","tag-ralph-northam","tag-scandals","tag-tommy-norment","tag-virginia-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=407"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":408,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407\/revisions\/408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}