To say last week might have been the worst week in the life of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam is an understatement.
One could almost feel sorry for the Democrat.
Northam made comments early last week supporting a state legislator who advocated for an abortion bill allowing pregnancies to be terminated at the point a mother has physical signs she's about to give birth. By week's end, he found himself apologizing for and later denying he was in a photo under his name in a medical school yearbook in which one man appears in blackface and the other appears in a Ku Klux Klan-like robe and hood.
We don't know if the governor is one of the pictured men, but we do know he admitted using blackface at another time. We don't know why he refused to shake the hand of his black debate opponent in 2013 and don't know why yet another yearbook nicknamed him "Coonman."
But we do know that by the time the weekend was over, national and state Democrats and some Republicans - whether they knew him more than casually or not - were calling for his resignation over the photo, not over his abortion remarks.
If Northam was one of the men in the 1984 photo, he showed an alarming lack of racial insensitivity, even for 35 years ago - more than two decades after Democratic office-holders and law enforcement officials stood in school doorways blocking black schoolchildren and wielded fire hoses to push away black protesters. But in his 2017 campaign for governor, Northam held all the right (though left) policy positions to be a proper Democrat.
And while he may have believed in his heart that his Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook photo was abhorrent (nobody checked), he nevertheless tried to falsely tie his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie, to an alt-right rally in Charlottesville and maintained he was running "the most racist campaign in Virginia history."
Northam last week said on a radio show about the abortion bill in question that if a late-term abortion failed and the child was born, "the infant would be resuscitated if that's what the mother and the family desire, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother [about what might be done with the baby]."
A thoughtless racial act of 35 years ago may or may not be forgivable in today's hyper-partisan, hyper-racial America, but words practically endorsing infanticide are something else.