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North Carolina - Republicans
Carter Wrenn posted on February 26, 2013 15:22
Back in 1980, Senator Helms’ political organization had won elections in 1976 and 1978. And after Reagan won, we figured the conservative millennium had dawned and we’d mastered the art of politics. Next election we lost five races.
Back in 1980, Jim Hunt had built the most powerful political machine ever seen in North Carolina and had never lost an election. He lost for the first time in 1984.
In 1980, when he was 32 years old, Bill Clinton was elected Governor of Arkansas – the youngest Governor in America. Two years later, after he lost the next election, he joked he was now the youngest ex-governor in America.
Hubris – thinking you’re smarter than you are – is a deadly vice.
Republicans in North Carolina have now won two straight elections. They worked hard and won the legislature in 2010 then kept it and elected a Republican Governor in 2012 – and they wouldn’t be human if they didn’t hear the genie of pride whispering in their ears.
But has a new Republican era dawned in North Carolina?
The polls don’t seem to say so. There’re still more Democrats than Republicans. And voters don’t see eye to eye with Republican legislation on Unemployment Reform, the Medicaid Expansion, or Tax Reform.
There’s no doubt it can be a good thing to pass an unpopular bill. But it’s a mistake to tell yourself voters agree with you when they don’t. And it’s an even bigger mistake (I know, I made it in 1982) to assume the good times will roll on and on – in politics that’s when the Good Lord throws you a curveball and you land on your backside in the dust, eyes wide open to a new kind of wisdom that comes with humility.
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Gary Pearce posted on February 25, 2013 10:46
Kim Genardo of NBC-17 is following a well-trod path from capital reporter to Governor’s communications director. Most every governor hires a capital reporter to tame the savages. I made that switch from the N&O to then-Lt. Governor Hunt in January 1976 – 37 years ago! (As I recall, I was about 13 years old.)
Two issues arise here – one past and one prospective. First, the past: Was she talking to the Governor about the job when, as the N&O noted Saturday, “she did a one-on-one interview with McCrory for WNCN 10 days ago”? If she was, she shouldn’t have done the interview. It puts her coverage in question.
Second, looking ahead: Which master will she serve – Governor or media?
It’s a tricky task. Some Governors think that, since you were one of them, you should have some kind of mojo that insures positive media coverage. But some journalists think you’ve sold out and gone over to the dark side.
Some hacks-turned-flacks turn into media scourges. They block reporters’ access to the great man, yell and scream at reporters who write tough stories and thereby poison the relationship.
I made my share of mistakes, but learned one big lesson: Your job is, in fact, to serve two masters. Yes, you work for the Governor, but your paycheck comes from the taxpayers of North Carolina and you have a unique responsibility to serve the public.
So you have to respect the role journalists play in getting information to the public, even if your boss and the people around him get mad. You have to help both sides: help the governor tell his story and help the reporters write their stories.
Fortunately, I had a boss who understood the role of the media, liked to read newspapers and watch the news and – most of all – didn’t hold a grudge. Oh, he got mad about stories. But he vented his anger with me, not them, and he was willing to talk to the reporter again. After all, there will be another paper and another broadcast tomorrow.
Governor Hunt also found that reporters’ questions alerted him to problems his own people wouldn’t tell him about. Never in history has a gubernatorial appointee volunteered: “Governor, you know that assignment you gave us? Well, we have made a total hash of it.”
So good luck, Kim. All you need is a cool head, a thick skin and a sense of humor.
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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 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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Carter Wrenn posted on February 15, 2013 11:11
Cautiously holding their fingers to the wind most politicians avoid controversies like the plague – but State Auditor Beth Wood, a farm girl who put herself through East Carolina University, has a trait that’s all but extinct in politics: Grit.
Last year, after Wood audited the state’s new Medicaid Processing Computer System, she blistered fellow Democrat Beverly Perdue, saying Perdue had turned a $250 million project into a $500 million boondoggle that was two years behind schedule and hadn’t processed a single Medicaid claim.
Last week, she held a press conference with Governor McCrory, reporting her latest audit: This time she’d found the State Medicaid Department had spent $1.4 billion more than its budget over the last three years and has overhead costs that are $180,000 higher than the same costs in other states our size.
A long trail of wreckage (beginning with the benign neglect of Governor Mike Easley and compounded by Governor Perdue’s decision to appoint a lobbyist head of the Department of Health and Human Services) winds back across a decade to those two audits.
Lanier Cansler, the lobbyist, served as a Republican legislator from Asheville in the 1990’s, then, in 2001, Governor Easley appointed him Deputy Secretary of the DHHS; a couple of years later Cansler left government to become a lobbyist and one of his first clients was a company bidding for the biggest contract in state government – the State Medicaid Claims Processing Contract.
Cansler’s client won the contract but the new computer system never got off the drawing board – two years later (and twenty million dollars poorer) the state cancelled it. Then Cansler began to lobby for another company that was bidding to get the next version of the same contract and succeeded again. The state awarded his client the $250 million contract.
Then Governor Perdue appointed Cansler head of the DHHS and three years later, when Wood did her first audit, Cansler’s former client was two years behind schedule and $200 million over budget – which Cansler explained to legislators by saying, Yes, there was a problem – but on the other hand the federal government was paying 90% of the costs so the problem wasn’t as bad as it seems.
For years, Cansler had also praised another DHHS project, Community Care of North Carolina, calling it a paradigm of efficiency and a money saver. But, according to Wood’s latest audit, that was another illusion: She reported, “North Carolina’s Medicaid cost per eligible (person) is higher than any other state in Region IV and is higher than the national average. The question should arise, if Community Care of North Carolina saves significantly on Medicaid expenditures, why does North Carolina spend so much more on Medicaid than comparable states?”
Now Governor Pat McCrory has to figure out how to plug a $1.4 billion three-year old hole in the Medicaid budget, and figure out how to do the impossible: Turn a brother-in-law contract into an overnight success.
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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 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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