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EGACY Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow.

WEDNESDAYS • Jan. 17, 2018

INSIDE

The General Assembly Issue

Virginia’s General Assembly gaveled into session last week with Republicans holding on to power in both chambers by the slimmest majorities. Read all about the bills introduced and what happened inside.

Richmond & Hampton Roads

LEGACYNEWSPAPER.COM • FREE

Northam, now governor, pledges less toxic politics STAFF & WIRE

Ralph Shearer Northam took the oath of office Saturday as Virginia’s 73rd governor, invoking the state’s “complex” history of both slavery and patriotic leadership to call for a new “Virginia way” forward. “This unique heritage endows us with a responsibility to shape the future, to leave this place better than we found it,” said Northam, a 58-year-old Democrat. A former state senator and lieutenant governor, Northam succeeds his friend and benefactor, Terry McAuliffe, after leading a wave election last fall in which Democrats made dramatic gains in the state legislature. Although his win was powered by Democratic resistance to President Trump, Northam issued a call for civility before some 4,000 guests gathered in the cold outside the state’s historic capitol building. The audience included at least nine former governors — Republicans and Democrats — as well as Virginia’s congressional delegation and members of a legislature that, thanks to the recent elections, features a record number of women and greater diversity than ever. Invoking lessons learned from his parents while he was growing up among the isolated fishing villages and farms of the Eastern Shore, Northam nodded to his reputation as a less-than-flashy politician. “It taught me that you don’t have to be loud to lead,” he said in his thick waterman’s accent. He turned and exchanged laughter with the General Assembly’s Republican leaders, all wearing traditional gray morning suits. Perhaps no group was happier to

Gov. Ralph Northam, right, and his wife, Pam, smile after he took the oath of office in Richmond. WIRE see Northam take office than those Republicans, who mistrusted McAuliffe as overly partisan but view Northam as cut from more familiar cloth. In remarks that spanned about 20 minutes and opened, literally, with a ray of sunshine after a morning of sparse snow flurries, Northam appealed for Virginia to set a more generous political tone for the entire nation. “It can be hard to find our way in a time when there’s so much shouting,

when nasty, shallow tweets take the place of honest debate, and when scoring political points gets in the way of dealing with real problems,” Northam said. Calling on lawmakers to refer to their “moral compass,” Northam noted the disparities of Virginia’s past and present. Just across the city, he said, Patrick Henry — a Founding Father and former Virginia governor — had called for liberty or death atop a hill while human beings were sold as property at its

foot. Today, residents of low-income neighborhoods on one side of the Capitol might expect to live only 63 years, he said, while affluent people in the other direction enjoy life spans 20 years longer. It is time, he said, finally to do what McAuliffe had failed to accomplish: expand Medicaid to an estimated 400,000 low-income Virginians. Democrats on the platform stood and

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