Maybe Gov. Ralph Northam should say, 'You first, Mr. President'

I'm disappointed in Ralph Northam, but not just for the reasons most people are saying. I'm disappointed that the embattled Democratic governor of Virginia didn't try to push back for a better deal.

True, he hasn't had much wiggle room. Even in these polarized political times, an impressively bipartisan blamestorm boiled up to call for his resignation after right-wing website Big League Politics unearthed a photo in his 1984 medical school yearbook of two men, one in blackface and the other in a hooded Ku Klux Klan robe.

Last Friday, Northam apologized for being one of the two young men "in a costume that is clearly racist and offensive," although he did not say which of the two costumed individuals was the governor.

The next day he suddenly reversed course. After further examination, he said, "I believe then, and now, that I am not either of the people" in the photo.

Say what? Suddenly Northam's narrative had slipped from merely bad to totally ridiculous.

But Northam stood firm, saying his memory somehow had confused the Halloween party in the photo with a dance contest in which he "darkened" his face with two dabs of shoe polish on his cheeks to dress up as Michael Jackson and perform a moonwalk.

Which raised a few new questions, such as how had Northam confused two such distinctly different events? Did he make a habit of wearing shoe polish on his face?

I don't think I would have trouble remembering an occasion in which I put on blackface makeup, but, since I am already black I've never felt much of a need to embellish what nature has given me.

One diligent reporter asked Northam if he could still do a moonwalk -- and he almost did. But his wife interrupted him with a firm note of caution. "Inappropriate circumstances," she said. He took the hint. Good move.

Adding to his misery, CBS News had reported another picture from Northam's 1981 yearbook says that he also was given the nickname "Coonman," which sounds a lot like a variation on a well-known racial slur. Northam would confirm only the nickname "Goose," branded on him by another friend.

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.)