Yearbooks, youthful boorishness, and incendiary allegations weaponized for political combat during the #MeToo era.
Not the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, but the three-pronged scandal now engulfing Virginia politics. Not a Republican under fire, but three Democrats: Gov. Ralph Northam, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, and Attorney General Mark Herring.
The ugly brawl in the gutter that the country witnessed as Kavanaugh fought his way into the Supreme Court is beginning to look like a tame warm-up for the antics in Virginia, which Democrats had believed was safely in their corner after decades as a Republican or a swing state.
Many of the elements of the Kavanaugh saga are present in Virginia. Northam, like the now-justice, is having to answer for the contents of his yearbook, though in his case it’s from medical school, when he was 25, not high school.
There are even the same legal players for accused and accuser. Fairfax has retained Wilkinson Walsh Eskovitz, the law firm that represented Kavanaugh. His accuser, Vanessa Tyson is using Katz, Marshall, & Banks, which represented Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford.
But the new and highly combustible element in the Virginia scandals is race. Northam’s 1984 yearbook page includes a photograph of a man in blackface next to another in a Ku Klux Klan robe. He apologized but then reversed himself saying he was not in the picture. But he then stated he had dressed in blackface to impersonate Michael Jackson.
After an interval in which Fairfax was accused of sexual assault, Herring, second in line in the state’s succession, announced that he too had worn blackface, at age 19 in 1980, dressing up as a rapper.
This was not how Black History Month was supposed to go for the Democrats. Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey are both vying to become their party’s second African-American president.
Central to the party’s message is the contention that President Trump is a racist, with his controversial comments on the day a white nationalist murdered an anti-racist demonstrator in Charlottesville, Va., at center stage.
The first day of Black History Month — on which Booker, who campaigned for Fairfax, chose to launch his campaign — also marked the emergence of audio tape from 1975 in which former Vice President Joe Biden embraced segregation, arguing separation of the races was a matter of “black pride.”
Northam’s reaction to his predicament has been roundly denounced by senior Democrats as glib and inadequate. He was elected by black voters, winning 87 percent of African-Americans and 42 percent of whites in 2017. Now, those black voters are confronted by the spectacle of a white man telegraphing that he’s entitled to stay as governor despite the pain he has caused in what was a slave state until 1865.
Herring seemed to have learned from Northam’s roundly mocked weekend press conference, apologizing fully and without equivocation. But neither he nor Northam have followed the example of Florida Secretary of State Michael Ertel, who resigned immediately after 2005 photos of him in blackface were discovered. NBC’s Megyn Kelly lost her job after questioning whether Halloween blackface was racist.
All three top Virginia Democrats are clinging to office. To complicate matters further, the third in line is Virginia House Speaker Kirk Cox, a Republican. Having just cemented Virginia as a blue state with wins there by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Northam and Fairfax in 2017, the party is not about to hand over the governorship to the GOP.
The Fairfax case presents a terrible dilemma for Democrats after the party’s wholehearted embrace of the #MeToo movement. At the core of #MeToo is a setting aside of due process in favor of believing the alleged victim, an approach which was at the heart of the Kavanaugh battle.
One of the foremost proponents of #MeToo is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, another Democrat in the 2020 race.
Blasey Ford elicited much sympathy from Americans, even though she could not give a date or a place where she was allegedly assaulted by Kavanaugh and no one corroborated her account.
That is ominous for Fairfax. In contrast to Blasey Ford, Tyson, a fellow at Stanford University, has given a very detailed and specific account of what she says happened to her in Fairfax’s hotel room on July 28, 2004.
According to multiple reports, Fairfax launched an expletive-laden tirade against Tyson during a private meeting Monday night. Two sources told NBC News that Fairfax had said “fuck that bitch.”
Fairfax’s misrepresentation of the Washington Post’s investigation of Tyson’s claims — the newspaper flatly rejected his claim it had found “significant red flags and inconsistencies within the allegations” — his profane anger toward his accuser, and his use of Kavanaugh’s lawyers are, at best, highly problematic for Democrats who would like him to stay.
But if Fairfax, a rising Democratic star at 39 years old, were to depart while leaving in place two white men who have admitted to wearing blackface, the moral authority of the party’s stance on race would be grievously undermined. If he remains and the two others go, what would that say about the party’s message to women voters?
A depressed turnout among black voters and suburban women could be the only way Republicans win back Virginia in the age of Trump, who advocated a racist “Birther” theory about President Barack Obama’s birth and has been accused of multiple instances of sexual assault.
With Democrats already jittery about a potentially powerful independent presidential bid by Howard Schultz in 2020, what is happening in Virginia is a slowly unfolding nightmare.
