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Entries for 'Gary Pearce'
Gary Pearce posted on February 22, 2013 12:08
Oh my goodness gracious, Republicans are all aflutter and Twitter is all atwitter over a leaked memo by liberals to “attack…cripple…eviscerate” GOP leaders and even, worst of all, “mitigate the worst legislation.”
I haven’t heard so much caterwauling since Jesse Helms was screeching that Ted Kennedy, liberals, blacks and queers were attacking him so you better send money fast.
Of course, the best way to get anything reported and read is to stamp it “confidential” and caution all the recipients not to share it with absolutely anybody. Worked like a charm here.
Now, I don’t like using words like “attack, cripple and viscerate.” But that’s how excitable operatives talk to show how tough they are – Democrats AND Republicans. So pay no attention to the crocodile – or elephant – tears over how mean this is. Especially from people who demonize President Obama and called Governor Perdue “America’s dumbest governor.”
Along with the purple prose, I found some interesting information and ideas about how to fight what the plan-writers believe is bad public policy. That's called democracy and debate.
Between the lines I also read some welcome fight and focus.
To wit: “McCrory’s giving pay raises to Cabinet officials (high-level government bureaucrats) while trying to cut benefits for those who are doing their best to try to work hard emerges as the most salient line of attack against him….”
That’s good information to have – and to get to the voters.
So spare me the whining and the inevitable high-minded denunciations. Politics ain’t beanbag, as they say. If you’re not ready to get some mud and blood on your uniform, get off the field.
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Gary Pearce posted on February 21, 2013 15:18
Sarah Ovaska at NC Policy Watch reveals that one Republican legislator who voted to cut unemployment assistance was himself getting that assistance last year.
Rep. Jason Saine, a Lincolnton Republican, collected unemployment checks for 15 months while he was out of work. But now that he’s in the legislature, he voted with his GOP colleagues to slash unemployment aid for people who can’t find a job.
That’s right: he voted against letting other North Carolinians get the same benefits he got.
He says he voted for the cuts to get North Carolina out of debt. Here’s an idea: Why doesn’t he pay back the difference between what he got and what he voted for?
Saine lost his job in May 2010. Then, Ovaska wrote: “A stroke of luck came in August 2011, when the county Republican Party he chaired selected him to take over the legislative seat left vacant when former N.C. Rep. Johnathan Rhyne left the legislature to move to nearby Gastonia.”
Yes, he was picked for the seat by “the county Republican Party he chaired.”
Well, at least Republicans can say they created a job for one unemployed North Carolinian.
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Gary Pearce posted on February 20, 2013 08:47
What do Marco Rubio and Larry Hall have in common? They made the mistake of giving their party’s response to the State of the Union and State of the State speeches, respectively.
Inevitably, this ends up looking like a hostage tape or the speech given by the leader of space aliens who just invaded our planet: “PEOPLE OF EARTH, we come in peace….”
Both Senator Rubio and Rep. Hall did as well as they could under the circumstances. Their messages were perfectly fine and well-written.
It’s just that they were doing something that nobody – repeat, nobody – can do: Stare into a camera for 10 or 15 minutes (it seems longer) and keep the audience’s interest.
Listen to me again: Nobody does that. Do you watch television? Do you see anybody ever doing that? Not even the most polished entertainer would try it.
Plus, you’re in that artificial setting right after the audience watched the President or Governor performing in a live arena, surrounded by people who are clapping, frowning and otherwise acting like human beings.
It’s a lose-lose deal.
Worse, like Rubio, you end up being remembered only for wiping away sweat and awkwardly reaching for water while fixedly staring at the camera.
(When Governor McCrory reached over for a stack of papers Monday night, somebody tweeted: “I thought he was going for water.”)
Politicians, of course, have an ego that convinces them that the people of earth – or at least America or North Carolina – are eager to hear what they say. No. People change the channel, except for the people who either love you or hate you. You’re not going to win over the people who hate you, and you’re only going to embarrass the people who love you.
If you feel compelled to respond, sit down with an interviewer, answer their questions and look and sound like an actual human being.
And stop staring at me through the camera. You’re making me uncomfortable.
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Gary Pearce posted on February 19, 2013 08:55
Tea Party types must have gone into cardiac arrest last night when Governor McCrory said he’s “kind of an Eisenhower Republican.”
Just not as ambitious. Ike built the Interstate highway system; Pat wants to “fix the lights” on the Interstate. And, like Ike, he’s afraid to confront the Joe McCarthys in his party.
Still, “Eisenhower Republican” is an odd self-appellation in the Republican age of Ted Cruz and Ted Nugent. And McCrory’s speech struck me as not much different from every State of the State speech given by every North Carolina governor, Democrat and Republican, going back to – oops! – “Governor Householser.”
Most striking was what we didn’t hear: a call to dramatically slash taxes and downsize government. He did come out against “seat warmers,” but I wasn’t sure whether he was talking about legislators or car seats on cold mornings.
McCrory said tax reform should be “revenue neutral.” He wants more lottery money for education. Energy exploration, he promised, would mean more revenues so government could do more things.
It was a vision of expansionist government, not just efficient government. How does the Tea Party like that?
McCrory showed little passion, save when he talked about addiction and college-campus binge drinking. Certainly we all applaud that.
He sounded more like a mayor – or president of the homeowners’ association. His administration’s proudest accomplishment so far apparently is ending double-billing for tolls and apologizing to the “customers.” Very commendable.
And he doesn’t like people waiting an hour and a half at DMV. What about the long lines to vote?
Observers keep asking what kind of governor McCrory is going to be, like it’s some deep enigma. No, this is it. What you saw is what you get. He’s a pleasant, modestly ambitious man who wants to fix the lights and long lines – and a rubber stamp for whatever the right-wingers do in the legislature.
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Gary Pearce posted on February 18, 2013 10:27
The Economist notes: “North Carolina has a Republican governor, a conservative majority on the state Supreme Court and Republicans controlling both legislative chambers.” Plus, Republicans have nine of our 13 congressional seats. Plus, “It seems that Mr. McCrory, like his state, is turning right.” Witness his “bashing Agenda 21” and deriding “the educational elite.” Plus the rightward rush of the legislature.
But here’s the good news.
The Times magazine focused on the digital “obsolescence” of the Romney campaign and national Republicans. It quotes digital-minded young Republicans who believe “Democrats have overwhelmed Republicans with their technological superiority.”
They remind me of 1980s Democrats who thought we were losing just because Reagan and Republicans were masters of TV. It was much more than that, and so it is today. The digital divide, in fact, reflects a cultural divide that is rooted in Republicans’ image.
What’s that image? According to voters in their 20s: “Corporate greed, old, middle-aged white men, rich, religious, conservative, hypocritical, military retirees, narrow-minded, rigid, not progressive, polarizing, stuck in their ways, farmers.”
That explains why, as the Republicans operatives noted, “1.25 million more young people supported Obama in 2012 over 2008.” That also perfectly describes North Carolina Republicans today.
Yes, North Carolina Democrats have a long way to go. But they have a lot to work with.
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Gary Pearce posted on February 15, 2013 09:38
“We are being compassionate,” said state Rep. Mike Hager of Rutherfordton. “We have a mindset of pulling...government burden off these small businesses.”
Well, that sums it up. Republican compassion is for businesses and corporations, not people. Remember: People aren’t corporations, my friend.
First North Carolina Republicans slashed help for people who can’t find work. Then they slammed the door on people who can’t get insurance or health care. Now they’re raising income taxes on 900,000 taxpayers at the bottom of the pile.
You read it right: raising taxes. You see, tax cuts are reserved for those of us at the top – and corporations.
Rep. Julia Howard, chair of the House Finance Committee, defended it this way: “Our tax dollars are very sacred this year with a lot of things we need to do, and that is $105 million that we are literally writing checks for.”
You see, these taxes are “sacred.”
A businessman I know – no raving liberal – cornered me this week and demanded: “How can they go to church after cutting unemployment assistance by $200 a week?”
Apparently, it’s the gospel of “comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted.”
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Gary Pearce posted on February 14, 2013 10:47
After receiving a typically enthusiastic introduction from former Governor Jim Hunt Tuesday, Governor McCrory said, “Note to staff: Never have me speak after Jim Hunt again.”
Here’s another note he should send them: Know my audience.
McCrory was speaking at N.C. State’s Emerging Issues Form on manufacturing. He seemed to think he was speaking to a group of business people and manufacturing executives. The speech was spot on for that audience. But not for this one, which was mostly policy wonks – lobbyists, lawyers, educators, association executives and the like.
I don’t fault McCrory. But he should fault his staff. The first rule of speechwriting is: write to the audience – and make sure the speaker knows who they are.
That quibble aside, it was the first time I had a chance to measure McCrory as a public speaker.
He has one great strength: He’s likeable. Don’t underestimate that in a politician. (See: Mike Easley.)
What I couldn’t figure from his speech is what he really is: An affable front man for a radical ideology, or the model of a moderate, pro-business Charlotte Republican.
Either out of instinct or calculation, he distanced himself from Republican red-hots and from some of his and his administration’s fumbles.
He praised the value of a liberal arts college education “like the one I got.” In a bow to Hunt, he talked about the importance of pre-K education.
After saying why he opposed Medicaid expansion and a state insurance exchange, he said, “one thing I have to tell the politicians” – who might that be? – is that health care reform is the law of the land.
Clearly, this is a hard man to pin down. But in today’s polarized politics, that might be a strength – one Democrats shouldn’t underestimate.
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Gary Pearce posted on February 13, 2013 10:28
Thanks to the 2012 campaign and Mitt Romney, President Obama has found his voice. That gives him a big advantage over Republicans the next two years.
For all his writing and oratorical skills, Obama never found a way in his first term to effectively tell his story – and sell his message. That led to the 2010 electoral disaster.
But something has changed. It started election night. Democrats asked: “Where was this guy in that first debate?” It continued in his inaugural speech. And he showed it again last night in the State of the State.
Obama even looks different – looser, more relaxed, more confident. And he has figured out how to explain his vision of government in as strong and compelling a way as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton did theirs.
Here was the key line last night: “They (the American people) know that America moves forward only when we do so together; and that the responsibility of improving this union remains the task of us all.”
Here’s how he said it at the inaugural: “The commitments we make to each other - through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security - these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.”
That theme set him up last night to draw this contrast with Republicans: “…we can't ask senior citizens and working families to shoulder the entire burden of deficit reduction while asking nothing more from the wealthiest and most powerful. We won't grow the middle class simply by shifting the cost of health care or college onto families that are already struggling, or by forcing communities to lay off more teachers, cops, and firefighters. Most Americans – Democrats, Republicans, and Independents – understand that we can't just cut our way to prosperity. They know that broad-based economic growth requires a balanced approach to deficit reduction, with spending cuts and revenue, and with everybody doing their fair share. And that's the approach I offer tonight.”
Of course, Obama might never have found that message without Mitt Romney. Romney set out an opposing vision, and Obama had to counter. And Romney gave Obama an opening that he seized with alacrity.
In 1996, remember, Bob Dole talked about “building a bridge to the past.” Clinton countered with “building a bridge to the future.” That became the theme of his second term.
In 2012, Romney and Republicans – sometimes deliberately and sometimes clumsily – talked about a nation of builders and a nation of takers, the “47 percent.” Now Obama has flipped their own message against them.
Marco Rubio is a prettier, more pleasant face than John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and Rand Paul. But Obama has him and the Republicans in a rhetorical box, hoist by their own words.
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Gary Pearce posted on February 12, 2013 10:35
Some Republicans seem determined to be “the stupid party,” in Bobby Jindal’s memorable phrase.
Like U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx.
The Sunday New York Times took a look at how some students today pay for college. The story focused on Steve Boedefeld, an Appalachian State University student who wants to avoid graduating with a big debt. So he is using “the money he earned fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and the money he now saves by eating what he grows or kills.”
Rep. Foxx, whose district includes Appalachian and who heads a House subcommittee on higher education and work force training, just didn’t get it: “I spent seven years getting my undergraduate degree and didn’t borrow a dime of money.”
The story added: “She was bewildered, given her own experience, by tales of woe she had heard from people with $80,000 in debt.”
Gee, maybe it’s because back in her day (and mine) tuition, room, board, etc. at a North Carolina university cost about $550 a year. With inflation, that would be $4,000 now. But today, a bachelor’s degree from Appalachian State can cost $80,000.
Two problems here for Republicans.
First, it’s another example of being oblivious to facts. Just like the federal budget, health care, climate change, evolution and how old the earth is.
Second, it sounds like either ignorance or callousness about getting a college education today.
Just last month, Governor McCrory got carried away on radio with Bill Bennett and questioned the value of a liberal arts education.
This may play well with the Republican red-hots. But North Carolina has a lot of people with college educations – and a lot more who want one for themselves or their kids. We’ve also become a hot location for college-educated people around the nation and the world.
The more Republicans dis these people and their values, the more they hasten the end of what could be a brief reign on top of the political heap.
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Gary Pearce posted on February 11, 2013 11:26
Jim Gardner almost changed political history twice – 20 years ago and 40 years ago.
In 1972, he was the fair-haired boy of the North Carolina Republican Party. Six years earlier, he had unexpectedly defeated a long-time Democratic congressman from the East, Harold Cooley. How big an upset was it? Cooley was chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, for Pete’s sake. Eastern North Carolina hadn’t elected a Republican congressman since Reconstruction. And Gardner was barely 30 years old.
Gardner had been one of the early founders of Hardee’s out of Rocky Mount. He was handsome and a hell of a speaker. He caught the early Republican wave in 1966 and rode it to Washington. Gardner was a fire-and-brimstone conservative. He knew all the racial code words, like “law and order,” “forced busing” and welfare.
He was Jesse Helms before Jesse Helms.
But one term in Congress was enough for Gardner. In 1968, he ran for Governor and nearly beat Bob Scott. He immediately started running for 1972.
Then he ran into a quiet, more traditional Republican from the mountains, state Rep. Jim Holshouser. Holshouser edged Gardner in the Republican primary. So it was Holshouser, not Gardner, who rode the Nixon landslide into the Governor’s office in 1972 – the same year Helms was elected to the Senate.
Gardner went back to the business world, full of high-flying plans. But they crashed in the Nixon recession and gas shortages of the 1970s. He fell into a string of bankruptcies, bad debts and business failures that would plague him later.
He stayed out of politics until 1988, when Republicans recruited him to run for Lieutenant Governor. Governor Jim Martin was sweeping to reelection that year, and once again Gardner was at the right place and the right time. He destroyed Tony Rand, his Democratic opponent, in a debate. And he began planning another run for governor in 1992.
Then he ran into Jim Hunt. Hunt was coming back into politics in large part because Democrats feared Gardner. They fought a bruising campaign. We (I was working with Hunt’s campaign) pounded Gardner with his business record. Hunt asked him in a debate: “If that’s how you run your business, I’d hate to see how you’d run the state.” Hunt won big.
Now Gardner is back. He was front and center when Governor McCrory named his transition team. Gardner’s old strategist, Jack Hawke, played the same role with McCrory. And now McCrory has picked Gardner to be ABC Chairman.
You wouldn’t think it’s possible to bankrupt the state’s liquor system. But Gardner has quite a track record.
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