The Virginia mess (updated)

It's a bizarre and alarming situation.  Virginia Governor Ralph Northam is under fire after a photo from his 1984 yearbook surfaced showing a man in blackface and another in a KKK outfit (it's not yet established whether either figure was Northam).  Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax has been accused of a sexual assault in 2004.  And Attorney General Mark Herring has admitted to wearing blackface at a party when he was 19.  All three are Democrats; if all three leave office, the next in line for the Governorship is the Speaker of the House of Delegates, a Republican.

This certainly looks like an unfolding disaster, but I don't think any one of these men can be written off just yet, much less all three of them.

First off, I reject the view that Northam's photo can be dismissed as meaningless youthful stupidity because it wouldn't have seemed all that bad by the lower standards of the time.  I can remember 1984 (I was 24 that year) and it was certainly recognized that blackface was offensively racist -- and a KKK outfit far, far more so.  Choosing such a photo for a yearbook would not have been a mere act of harmless thoughtlessness, even then.  It's a serious issue, and the calls from many prominent Democrats for Northam to resign reflect that.

(For another view of this question, see Bluzdude.  I disagree with the thrust of his post, but he's always worth reading and this is a discussion that we as a party need to have.)

Of course, people can change over decades (I certainly believed in some cringe-worthy things that far back).  The question is, has Northam changed?  His adult political career doesn't suggest racism, but if his views have evolved, he needs to convincingly explain how and why, and completely repudiate the mentality shown by the 1984 photo, not try to minimize how bad it was.  Otherwise he can never regain the confidence of the non-white members of his state's population, or of whites who abhor racism.  So far, he hasn't done this.  But it's possible he may yet rise to the occasion.

The accusation against Fairfax is by far the most serious.  A person can repudiate offensive attitudes over time, but a violent crime must be punished, if proven, regardless of how the perpetrator's views of it have evolved.  However, Fairfax continues to flatly deny the accusation, insisting that the encounter in question was consensual and that the accuser showed no sign of discomfort with it at the time.  I'm inclined to give more credibility to him here than to other similarly-accused figures of recent years, because there is only one accuser.  Sex abusers, whether they're cold-blooded predators or horny frat-boy types who genuinely don't recognize the seriousness of what they're doing, tend to rack up multiple victims -- Moore, Kavanaugh, Franken, Weinstein, and others all faced multiple accusers.  So I'm not prepared to judge Fairfax as probably guilty yet, as I do those others.  If more women come forward to accuse him, of course, it will be a different matter.

Finally, Herring's situation differs from Northam's.  There was no KKK outfit involved, and what he confessed to was gross behavior at a party -- a semi-private setting -- not choosing a photo to represent himself in a yearbook.  It's at least possibly more analogous to telling an offensive joke among friends which one wouldn't repeat in public.  Even more than with Northam, he deserves the chance to repudiate his past racist stupidity and explain how and why he's renounced such attitudes since then.

So don't write off Virginia to the Republicans just yet.

But W. Hackwhacker makes a solid point here.  We'll have a lot less of this kind of headache to deal with if we run more women for office.

Update (Friday afternoon):  There is now a second accuser against Fairfax.  If this is indeed "ratfucking", it's a highly professional job.