Paul Goldman is taking a shot at Terry McAuliffe, criticizing the former governor, who is reportedly planning a second run in 2021, for throwing fellow Democrats Ralph Northam and Justin Fairfax “under the proverbial political bus” in joining the many who called for the two to step down in the face of scandal in 2019.
“He didn’t care about due process, about getting the facts. He wanted to score political points,” said Goldman, a former Democratic Party of Virginia chair who served as the campaign manager for former Gov. Doug Wilder.
Gov. Northam, you may remember, came under fire in February 2019 when a conservative blogger published a photo from Northam’s medical school yearbook that featured two men in racist garb – blackface and a KKK costume.
After first acknowledging that he was in the photo, Northam backtracked and said he had been mistaken, that he wasn’t in the photo, and that’s been his story on the matter since.
A long list of prominent Democrats – including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine – called on Northam to resign in the wake of the controversy.
Lt. Gov. Fairfax would have been in line to succeed Northam as governor, but he quickly got caught up in his own controversy – two allegations that he had raped acquaintances, one a fellow student at Duke University in 2000, the second a fellow Democrat at the party’s national convention in 2004.
Fairfax vigorously denied both allegations, but he faced calls to resign from far and wide – from Warner, Kaine, five of the seven Democrats in the state’s congressional delegation.
Fairfax is also running for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, and in a typical cycle, the sitting lieutenant governor “would likely be a shoo-in for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, if Terry and other Democratic Party leaders had not demanded he resign, in effect declaring him guilty of several felonies in the court of public opinion without any due process,” Goldman said.
“That’s not what Democrats believe in. Terry now wants to benefit from that. He owes Democrats an explanation,” Goldman said.
“The principle of fair play in Democratic Party politics is important to me,” Goldman said. “Terry needs to address why he played judge and jury, the same for the party establishment. By calling on Fairfax to immediately resign, they in effect declared him guilty in the court of public opinion. They did same to Gov. Northam. This violated what we Democrats are supposed to believe.”
Story by Chris Graham
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