If Northam resigns, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax would take over, but he, too, is facing controversy: the same website that exposed Northam's yearbook is reporting an allegation that Fairfax sexually assaulted a woman at the 2004 Democratic National Convention https://t.co/Ika6JE7DxT pic.twitter.com/Sa6GS1AGvB
— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) February 5, 2019
They’re trying to out slime each other.
Via Free Beacon:
Let the record reflect that when news broke late Friday that Ralph Northam’s medical school yearbook contained a picture of him in either blackface or a Klan outfit, I was the only one in the informal Free Beacon office pool to predict he’d last through the weekend. As I am now writing about sitting Virginia governor Ralph Northam on a Tuesday, I’m feeling rather pleased with myself.
What made the prediction easy is that while people can change, they tend not to. It’s not as though blackface or the Ku Klux Klan were acceptable in 1984. The sort of person who was bold and shameless enough to take the photo back then is probably going to be bold and shameless enough to believe he can get away with it today.
You can make the case, as Charles Cooke does over at NRO, that the photo in isolation is not a resignation-worthy and it is “downright illiberal” to “force a resignation from a man on the grounds of a mistake he made 34 years ago.” Others might counter that the photo is so racist that he cannot conceivably maintain the confidence of his constituents even decades later.
That’s all been made irrelevant by the way Northam has reacted. At first, he did the right thing and apologized “for the decision I made to appear as I did in this photo.” But as early as Saturday morning, the Associated Press reported that Northam was privately telling Democrats that he wasn’t in the photo. He then proceeded to go public with that claim, saying in a press conference, “I believe now and then that I am not either of the people in this photo.”
Bizarrely, Northam then admitted that he does remember doing blackface when dressing up as Michael Jackson. “I had the shoes, I had a glove and I used just a little bit of shoe polish to put under, or on my cheeks,” he said. “The reason I used a very little bit is because, I don’t know if anybody has ever tried that, but you cannot get shoe polish off.” Northam smiled when asked by a reporter to moonwalk, and only chose not to when his wife chimed in about the “inappropriate circumstances.”
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