I am a year older than the Governor of Virginia. I grew up in Texas. As any Texan will tell you, Texas is not the South. Its got too much of the West in it. But, we are close enough, proximally and culturally, to not be entirely distinct. Texans understand Southerners, and agree with them on many things.
I did not hang out with the young men in my high school or college classes who would have been happy to stage a black-face minstrel show or put together a joke-lynching, but I did go to school with them. I saw their confederate flags, I heard their rebel yells. I didn't like them, but I didn't offer outward objections to their displays of the symbols of US domestic terrorism. I pretended like I didn't hear or see any of it.
When I was a younger a friend of mine offered to sell me a "N****r hunting license," a wallet sized card that said all the same things that a deer hunting license did, with the appropriate substitution of nouns. Otherwise, it had an official state seal and looked very much like a deer hunting license, though the ink was a different color, blood red. This was in 1973.
I declined to buy it, mostly because I was broke, but also because it felt really dirty and wrong to have something like that in my wallet, even as a "joke." A few days after he offered to sell it to me, my friend gave it to me for free. To avoid a scene I just put it in my wallet.
I know it sounds like I'm setting you up for the humiliating reveal, but the truth is I went home and burned it, grinding the ashes into the driveway with my heel, that very day. I felt terrible for having accepted it in the first place. I vowed to never mention it to anyone.
I also never confronted my friend about it.
So, I know a little of Ralph Northam's background. Had I seen his 1984 medical school yearbook in 1984 I would have shrugged my shoulders and said "well, that's Virginia" and not given it much more thought. Now, I find it shocking a school would sanction that, even passively. I now find it surprising that printers would print it.
My problem with Gov. Northam is related to my problem with Justice Kavanaugh. What they did decades ago is not among the facts I draw upon today to judge their fitness for their respective offices. What informs my judgment today is how they reacted, now, to facts about their past. In both cases, they failed the test.
Gov. Northam first issued the "I'm sorry you felt hurt" non-apology that is so commonly mistaken for remorse in corrupt US political life. Bzzt. Not good enough. Pack your bags. Then, he made it worse. Since he is likely the person in the KKK robes (check his posture, it's clearly him to my eye), he decided to pretend his yearbook page was hacked like a Twitter account, an even more flamboyantly corrupt position to take. Get the eff out, a-hole.
But, the guy who would replace him is a sexual predator. Great. Then the second person in line also has a minstrel show performer past. After that, the next guy won his position in a coin flip, and he belongs to another political party.
Florida, you need to step up your game. Virginia is ballin'.
How can I say with such certainty that the Lt Governor is guilty as accused? First, it is a myth that there's some guerrilla force of political operatives bringing accusations of sexual misconduct for profit or spite. It's far too costly a proposition for far too uncertain an outcome. Accusers are vilified, bullied and ostracized, no matter the facts. This is still a patriarchy. No one elects to make an accusation, they are compelled to do so.
Secondly, I've been falsely accused of sexual misconduct. I ultimately was cleared of all that because no evidence could be found to corroborate the allegations. No one else who knew me reported anything even remotely similar. I had no such allegations in my past. There was no evidence of misconduct in my recorded communications or overheard conversations.
That's the point. No one seems to do such a thing only once. If there's one true accusation, there's always another. In the Lt. Governor's case, there's another. If he doesn't resign, there will be others. Buh bye.
There is no moral equivalence between the stupidity of being in minstrel shows as a kid and sexual assault. I wish Virginia had the luxury of moral purity, but it doesn't. If it wipes out the chief executive and the next two in the line of succession, handing the seat to another political party, it begs the term "democracy" to describe the government.
Clearly, the Lt Governor has to go. What he did is a straight-up crime, he's just lucky the statute of limitations has run out. He could redeem himself, but it would take a genuine transformational moment. He clearly has not yet arrived at any such moment.
Then, once Governor Northam appoints his replacement, he could resign, and the rest of the government could decide what to do about the Attorney General with a chief executive who is fit for the job. That would be ideal, but its unlikely.
I think that permitting Governor Northam to continue to serve until the Lt Governor is replaced is the best way forward at the moment. I went into my past above to make the distinction between indulging in a widely practiced cultural mistake in the distant past and sexual assault. The fact that Ralph Northam likely grew up as a redneck frat-boy dickhead doesn't mean that he can't be trusted today with the levers of government. There are people just like him (and the state Attorney General for that matter) at every level of every human organization in this country.
That's sad, but it's not as dangerous as having a serial rapist in office.
