Top Virginia Democrats face growing crisis over scandals
The political crisis in the US state of Virginia has deepened after its third-ranking elected official, Attorney General Mark Herring, admitted to wearing blackface in the 1980s at a college party.
Herring said in a statement on Wednesday that he donned brown face paint and a wig at a party in 1980 to impersonate a rapper.
Governor Ralph Northam was already fighting for his political life over a racist photo from his 1984 medical school yearbook that emerged last week, and the lieutenant governor sought on Wednesday to fend off allegations of sexual misconduct.
The No. 2 in line to succeed the governor, Herring apologized for “a callous and inexcusable lack of awareness and insensitivity.”
Herring, 57, has expressed ambitions of running for governor himself and one of those calling for Northam’s ouster.
Northam, 59, acknowledged last weekend to having worn blackface, a practice dating to 19th century minstrel shows caricaturing slaves of African descent.
His admission came after a conservative media website published a photo on Friday from Northam’s page in his 1984 medical school year book showing one man wearing blackface beside another masked figure in robes of the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).
After initially saying he was one of the two depicted in the photo, Northam changed his story and said neither was him.
Meanwhile, pressure intensified on Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, 39, the No. 1 in line, after his accuser released a statement alleging that he had forced himself on her sexually in a hotel room during the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
Fairfax, who is black, has acknowledged knowing his accuser but on Wednesday repeated his assertion their encounter was consensual.
Fairfax, 39, would succeed Northam were he to step down.
The deepening crisis embroiling the top three-elected politicians in the executive branch of Virginia’s government raised the unlikely prospect of Democrats losing the governorship to a Republican.
Kirk Cox, the Republican speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, is No. 3 in line to succeed the governor.
Cox, 61, a former high school teacher who has served in the state’s Republican-controlled House since 1990, issued a statement on Wednesday saying the controversies in the executive branch “are disturbing.
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