The editorial board of The Washington Post has decided that it’s time for embattled Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam to resign. The “circumstances are decisive,” the editors wrote in an editorial Wednesday, “what’s done cannot be undone. He must go.” But the impetus for their demand is not Northam dressing in blackface (well, not really), nor is it because they’re hoping the equally embattled lieutenant governor will take his place (“he has his own problems,” after all), and it’s certainly not because the “moderate” governor attempted to justify infanticide. No, it’s a bit more, well, complicated than that.
“Gov. Ralph Northam (D) can no longer effectively serve the people of Virginia who elected him,” the editorial begins. “His shifting and credulity-shredding explanations for the racist photograph on his medical school yearbook page, and the silence into which he then succumbed for days — after initially promising to do ‘the hard work’ of atonement and apology to restore his standing with Virginians — is simply too much.”
In other words, it’s not the blackface photo (or Michael Jackson impression) that’s the nail on the coffin for Northam; it’s his “shifting and credulity-shredding explanations” for it.
“His decade-long record in public office is admirable; it is equally true that his governorship has been irredeemably wrecked by the self-inflicted, racially callous and clueless mess he has made in recent days,” they continue. The editorial board reminds their readers that “facts do matter” and, in this case, Northam’s left too many “unsettled and unanswered.”
“First and foremost among the questions they raise: How could he possibly have admitted to something as damning as appearing in the photo if he was certain he wasn’t one of the people in it? How did that photo wind up on his page if he didn’t furnish it to the yearbook editors? What do the governor’s now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t statements say about his judgment?” they ask. “The explanations Mr. Northam has proffered are vague and unconvincing. Virginians deserve better. Mr. Northam’s time is up.”
So, how does The Washington Post feel about Northam’s potential replacement, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax — the rape accusation against whom they chose not to report a year ago? He “has his own problems.”
“He has been accused of sexual assault by a college professor,” the Post notes. “That’s a serious matter. But it is not relevant to Mr. Northam’s travails or to his manifest inability at this point to be an effective governor.”
And what of the second man in line for the job, Democratic Attorney General Mark R. Herring, who called for Northam to “step down” before revealing that he himself had also worn “brown makeup” in the 1980s? The editors notably don’t offer any clear judgment about him.
“It’s reasonable to guess that other revelations elsewhere, about other public figures with their own histories or photos of offensive, insensitive or racist conduct, may surface in coming days,” the board muses. “Each should be judged on its own set of circumstances. In the case of Mr. Northam, the circumstances are decisive; what’s done cannot be undone. He must go.”
So what about Northam defending infanticide? Not a factor in the paper’s call for his ouster. In case you missed the governor’s infamous interview, here’s what Northam said that reportedly is the reason his old yearbook picture was dug up in the first place:
“When we talk about third-trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of the mother, with the consent of physicians, more than one physician by the way, and it’s done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus which is non-viable,” Northam said in an interview with WTOP’s “Ask The Governor” last week. “So in this particular example, if the mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen, the infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if this is what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physician and the mother.”
That “discussion … between the physician and the mother” Northam references would be about whether or not to let the born-alive baby “die on the table.” But for The Washington Post, this heinous assertion is not a reason that a political leader should resign. Such an extreme measure is reserved for “shifting” explanations.
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