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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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Carter Wrenn posted on February 14, 2013 14:20
I settled into my chair, rocked back, opened a book, and a few minutes later Obama’s measured voice floated across the room saying John Boehner ought to delay the Sequester, then Obama explained how government ought to do more for people with less and it’s only fair the well off pay a little bit more – and whether you agree with him or not Obama’s voice sounds reasonable and logical.
Then the voice of a Republican Congressman speaking in short clipped sentences floated across the room saying Obama invented the Sequester, calling it the Obama-quester three times and it was like listening to a teenage child or Sean Hannity during a rant.
It’s odd: Even as I disagreed with Obama he sounded reasonable. While the Republican Congressman sounded petty and mean.
The next morning in the News & Observer there was a poll about Obama’s soaring approval ratings and Congress’s sinking popularity and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal – explaining the Republicans’ demise – said, It’s time Republicans started sounding like adults.
As the Lord told St. Peter, The things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart: Obama’s got an old-fashioned liberal’s heart and words like ‘saving the middle class’ roll off his tongue like honey. Obama-quester is a kind of vision too but when the word rolled off the Republican Congressman’s tongue it sounded like a howl.
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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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Carter Wrenn posted on February 13, 2013 10:48
After Tea Party candidates rolled to victory in 2010 they headed for Congress to cut spending, and late one night, six months later, President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner announced they’d made a deal to pass the biggest annual spending cut in history.
Now, two years later, it turns out the cuts were an illusion: Most of the spending that got killed, the Washington Post reports, was already dead – because President Obama and Speaker John Boehner cut money that was never going to be spent. They ‘cut’ $14.6 million that had been authorized to build the Capital Visitor Center – which had already been built. They ‘cut’ $375,000 that had been authorized for a road that didn’t exist. And cut $6 billion that had been authorized to pay for the Census in 2011 – but the Census ended in 2010.
A former Obama official also told the Post that both sides, both the President and the House Leaders, knew what they were calling cuts were simple authorizations that were never going to be spent.
The Tea Partiers got fusselled.
As Congressman Mick Mulvaney ruefully explained, looking back, “Many of the cuts…were smoke and mirrors. That’s the lesson from April 2011: That when Washington says it cuts spending, it doesn’t mean the same thing that normal people mean.”
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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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Carter Wrenn posted on February 12, 2013 09:54
War’s broken out in Raleigh.
The Republican County Commissioners launched a blitzkrieg, hiring a lobbyist (for $25,000) to get the Republican legislature to redraw the districts of the Democratic School Board members – then the Democratic School Board struck back (to keep their districts) by spending four times as much ($100,000) to hire their own lobbyist.
Politically, it’s an all-out war. But, so far, the only casualties are taxpayers.
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Carter Wrenn posted on February 11, 2013 17:19
There’s a full throated debate going on in Washington – Republicans are saying ‘the Sequester’ wasn’t their idea, it was Obama’s idea, and the White House is saying, ‘Obama’s idea! John Boehner not only voted for the Sequester, after it passed he bragged he’d gotten 98% of what he wanted.’
Meanwhile the Republicans, after frantically searching for a way to match the President’s bully-pulpit, at last have found one by whacking Obama with the Twitter hashtag #Obamaquester.
So here’s where we stand: Two years ago, Obama invented the Obamaquester to cut spending, and, two years ago, John Boehner was for it (98%). But now Obama’s against it. And so are the Republicans. And the whole thing’s clear as a bell on Twitter.
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Carter Wrenn posted on February 11, 2013 13:36
After three days on a retreat at a spa near Washington, and after meeting with President Obama, House Democrats headed home ‘billing and cooing’ like reconciled brides because they’d built a ‘closer relationship’ with the President.
But in this case the path to reconciliation wasn’t romantic: It was money.
To sooth the Congressmen Obama promised to hold eight fundraisers, so, as he put it, ‘Nancy Pelosi will be Speaker again – pretty soon.’
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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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Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
The Charlotte Observer says: “Carter Wrenn and Gary Pearce don’t see eye-to-eye on many issues. But they both love North Carolina and know its politics inside and out.”
Carter is a Republican.
Gary is a Democrat.
They met in 1984, during the epic U.S. Senate battle between Jesse Helms and Jim Hunt. Carter worked for Helms and Gary, for Hunt.
Years later, they became friends. They even worked together on some nonpolitical clients.
They enjoy talking about politics. So they started this blog in 2005.
They’re still talking. And they invite you to join the conversation.
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