It’s been a tough week to be a Virginian. Our governor has been splashed all over television and computer screens across the fruited plain, first for his cavalier endorsement of infantacide followed quickly by his racist medical school yearbook photos. In just a few short days, Ralph Northam went from an obscure southern governor who nobody had ever heard of to the most notorious politician in the country...and when that country includes Donald Trump in the Oval Office...thats saying something.
Of course, in politics often the coverup is worse than the crime. With Northam, his tortured response to the photos has been a disaster. First, he apologized but couldn’t or wouldn’t reveal which racist character he was dressed as, the guy in blackface or the dude in the Klan getup. Then, upon further review and no doubt on the advice of his PR team, he denied either one was him with the ludicrous formulation...I vividly don’t remember. At this hour, he still clings to power, hoping that the infinitesimally short attention span of the American people will wipe this whole kerfuffle from everyone’s consciousness by the middle of next week at the latest.
Let me attempt a defense of our embattled liberal democrat governor.
First, with regard to the now distant memory of his infantacide radio interview. In its immediate aftermath, my Facebook wall exploded with outraged pro-life memes. Several people tried to make the case that the governor supported delivering completely healthy babies onto a table, then allowing the mother one last chance to back out of motherhood via a three minute discussion, after which the healthy infant would be murdered in cold blood. This wasn’t at all what he was saying. If, like me, you cling to the notion that all life is sacred, even disabled life, his actual comments were objectionable enough without this unfair twisting of his words.
With regards to the yearbook pictures...This is a full stop horrible thing. To discover that the man who hurled accusations of racism at his opponent just over a year ago would be caught dead as either one of these men in the sickening photograph is a grave disappointment, not to mention an example of staggering hypocrisy. Yes, it was a long time ago. But, I went to college a long time ago too, and I saw my share of bad things at parties. Although I was no choir boy then or now, my parents did a good enough job of filling my head with the idea that racism was an indefensible evil, that the sight of anyone in a Klan robe or blackface would have been an automatic order to leave said party, let alone participate in such a thing.
But...do I think that Ralph Northam is a racist? That’s an entirely different question. Looking at the evidence of his life over the past thirty years, I would say, no. Is it fair then to punish him with exile from his duly elected position in government because of such an old transgression? I would hate to be judged by practically anything I did and said 40 years ago. On many subjects, 21 year old Doug Dunnevant was an intemperate moron. But, Doug Dunnevant isn’t governor of the Commonmwealth of Virginia. If you live by identity politics, if your political rise was helped along by being a merchant of the grievance industry, eventually you die by identity politics. I don’t believe that Ralph Northam is the same man he was in 1984. I believe that like all of us, he has progressed in his thinking and in his character since then. But honestly, his humiliating performance since this yearbook story broke has damaged him more than his yearbook decisions from 35 years ago. His stubborn attempt to cling to power, his willingness to demean himself and his office with these ridiculous and tortured explanations of the unexplainable have revealed him to be the personification of everything we all hate about politicians, their inability to just tell the freaking truth.
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