The clock seems to be ticking for Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam.
The highest reaches of the Democratic Party inside and outside the state have said he should resign over a racist photo on his medical school yearbook page from 1984. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, presidential candidates and, perhaps most important, both of Virginia’s senators and its longest-serving black representative all said Northam should step aside.
Northam didn’t help himself Saturday with a news conference in which he compounded matters. He denied he was in the photo — after first apologizing for it Friday — and then said he had used shoe polish to darken his face to look like Michael Jackson for a dance party in the 1980s.
He had learned to moonwalk, he said. What do they say about what to do when you’re in a hole?
Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, as well as Rep. Bobby Scott, all Democrats, said in a joint statement after Northam’s Saturday news conference that “we no longer believe he can effectively serve as governor of Virginia and that he must resign.” Prior to issuing that statement, they had already called Northam to tell him that themselves.
As of Monday afternoon, Northam was still holding on, but he was a man on an island.
The entire episode shines a light not just on Northam’s troubles but also on the politics of race in the Trump era. Democrats are saying that if they hope to have the moral high ground, they have to have zero tolerance.
A higher standard
Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat from Texas, said on CNN Monday he doesn’t think the Democratic Party can stand up to the “bigotry” of President Trump with Northam still in office.
“I don’t think we can do that,” he said, “unless we hold all of our officials to a high standard.”
Trump tweeted that what Northam did was “unforgivable!” But lots of people saw irony in that. Trump, after all, from the day he launched his presidential run in 2015, said Mexico was sending rapists and drug dealers to the United States; exploited white grievance to win the presidency; and as president expounded a kind of moral equivalency between white nationalists and those protesting them after the deadly, racially tinged violence in Charlottesville, Va.
Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who is seriously considering a presidential bid, pulled no punches Sunday in an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press.
“We have a president who’s a racist,” Brown said, noting Trump’s role in the birther movement, in which he questioned former President Barack Obama’s birthplace; Trump’s family’s role in alleged housing discrimination decades ago; his response to Charlottesville; and his administration’s role in what Brown called “suppressing the vote.”
Democrats see a double standard in the Trump era. They point out that Northam and Al Franken before him had to go (Franken for sexual misconduct allegations), but Trump, Iowa Rep. Steve King (who questioned how the terms white nationalist and white…
