Maybe Gov. Ralph Northam should say, 'You first, Mr. President'
By then Northam's goose was pretty well cooked as far as his governorship was concerned. Even former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee under whom Northam served as lieutenant governor, had turned against him, calling the situation untenable for the party and the state's government.
Other top Democrats -- including the state's two senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, its African-American legislative caucus and most of its congressional delegation, plus a list of 2020 presidential candidates -- are asking him to resign and allow Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, who also happens to be African-American, to take his place -- if Fairfax can survive a sexual assault allegation reported Sunday in Big League Politics and vehemently denied Monday by Fairfax.
As the blackface scandal throws the state's leadership into disarray, President Donald Trump and other top Republicans took advantage of this opportunity to criticize Democrats for a change, after years of taking heat for other interracial debacles.
In tweets Saturday night, Trump said Ed Gillespie, Northam's Republican opponent in the 2017 gubernatorial election, would have won had the photo turned up during their campaign. A lot of people say the same about Trump's fate had the public known then what we are learning now about his Russia connections.
But on race, Trump's troubles go back to the 1970s when his real estate company was charged by the federal government with giving preferential treatment to whites -- and more recently with, among other episodes, his disparaging of Mexican immigrants as criminals and "rapists" and attempts to ban immigrants from Muslim countries.
That's why I think it would be enlightening, to say the least, if Northam had decided to fight back with a more clear-eyed sense of purpose. Instead of dragging his heels on the way to a resignation that appears to be inevitable under his cloud of suspected racism, I would like to have seen him borrow a tactic from Trump's playbook: deep stubbornness.
For example, Northam could say he won't leave office unless Trump leaves the White House first. He could point, for example, to the Trump administration's report last week that officials don't have resources to reunite thousands of children separated at the border from their parents. Would he have treated immigrants from Europe entering the U.S. illegally that way?
I don't expect Northam to try such a protest, but that's a question worth asking.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
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