Terry McAuliffe and the battle for Virginia

THE ONLY man to serve two terms as governor of the Old Dominion since the civil war was a courtly “Virginia gentleman” and segregationist called Mills Godwin. Hailing from the rural south of the state, whose large black population and racism recalled the Deep South, Godwin claimed that letting black children attend Virginia’s better schools “would be a cancer eating at the very lifeblood of our public education system”. It is interesting to wonder what he would have made of Terry McAuliffe, who looks well-placed to match his achievement in November.