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Gary Pearce posted on December 14, 2012 09:30
Behind the controversy over Governor-elect McCrory’s foundation-fundraiser on Inaugural Day, there’s a story about “shadow governments.”
Since Democrats have time on their hands, they should take note of how these governments-in-waiting can develop ideas, leaders and public support.
Exhibit A is the John Locke Foundation. You may not like it, but give Art Pope & Co. credit: They gave McCrory a head start on his administration.
Governors Martin and Holshouser, by contrast, came in cold, with a short bench and little institutional knowledge.
The Locke Foundation has been preparing for this for 20 years. And one of its products, Thomas Stith, will be the Governor’s chief of staff.
Now, as an N&O editorial noted, there is the new Foundation for North Carolina – a “tax-exempt group that can accept unlimited donations and doesn’t have to publicly disclose its donors.”
Founder Jack Hawke said the group’s work will “correspond with the issues he (McCrory) laid out in the campaign. As a general rule, it will be helping to put meat on the bones around these issues and help sell them to the public.”
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Gary Pearce posted on December 13, 2012 15:51
Pat McCrory ran against a “pay-to-play culture of corruption.” Now his inauguration day features what looks like a special-interest money grab.
His foundation fundraiser gives critics and the media an easy, negative story line for his administration.
His strategy is: Suck up as much money as you can in anonymous corporate gifts. Plow it into your political machine to keep yourself in power for eight years.
His critics will say: This is a hell of a way to “clean up Raleigh.”
Public Policy Polling says McCrory starts out with a 53-25 positive rating. But that’s not a long way above 50 percent. And it’s with a 33-35 rating among registered Democrats.
How long will this last?
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Carter Wrenn posted on December 12, 2012 11:29
At breakfast the other morning Tom, who’s liberal, folded back the page of his newspaper and slid it across the table to Mike, who’s conservative, rapped the headline with his finger, and said, ‘Now, that’s what I call progress.’
Mike glanced down at the headline – West Point Chapel Hosts Gay Wedding. And laughed. ‘I reckon a battalion of ghosts all the way back to Winfield Scott are turning over in their graves.’
Last week an army chaplain conducted the first same-sex marriage in the Cadet Chapel at West Point for a lady who graduated from West Point in the first class to include women thirty years ago.
From Tom’s point of view that wedding is another small step toward enlightenment – following the three milestones of Minnesota, Maryland, and Maine voting in favor of gay marriage on Election Day.
But, if you think about it, Tom may have it backwards.
Because the Army is more than a collection of men and women in uniform – it’s an institution. It may well be the oldest institution in America – after all, the Continental Army was created before the Presidency, the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court or the public schools.
After we got drubbed by the British in the War of 1812, years ago, old General Winfield ‘Fuss and Feathers’ Scott, a sort of institution in his own right, decided a military academy was the cure to avoid future drubbings – so he founded West Point, and it gave birth to ‘the long gray line’ of cadets stretching from Robert E. Lee to Dwight D. Eisenhower.
West Point rests at the heart of one of the oldest and most respected American institutions – and if you share Mike’s point of view – the wedding last week in Cadet Chapel may be the real milestone.
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Posted in: General, Issues
Gary Pearce posted on December 12, 2012 10:21
One thing I enjoy about this blog is learning how Carter and his political crowd see the world. It’s a lot different from how my crowd sees it.
I mention this because it drives some of my friends crazy that I associate in any way with Carter. One said he avoided me for two years because Carter ran a campaign that beat his candidate in 2010.
But, as Yogi Berra said, “sometimes you hear a lot just by listening.” You can even learn something.
For example, Carter says he put on polls this year a question something like, “Do you agree or disagree with the statement that America today is not the same country you grew up in?”
Most people agreed. But I’m guessing that people in Carter’s world (call it Red America) think that’s bad and people in my world (Blue America) think it’s good.
Red America sees a breakdown in social values, morality, religious faith and responsible behavior. Blue America sees a heartening trend toward tolerance, opportunity, racial equality and social fairness.
I need to read more – and understand better. Maybe we all should, whichever world we’re in.
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Carter Wrenn posted on December 11, 2012 13:53
Gary’s progressive but he’s also old-fashioned so a year ago when he said, ‘You know, you ought to use Twitter’– he surprised me.
‘I expect,’ I said, ‘Twitter’s too young for my blood.’
‘Use it like an old-fashioned clipping service,’ he said.
Back in the old days, in the dark ages before Facebook and Google News, if you ran a campaign and needed to know what the newspapers were saying about a candidate you had to subscribe to a clipping service and say, Send me every newspaper article that mentions Jesse Helms – then every morning a manila envelope stuffed full of clippings that were two or three days old would arrive in the mail.
Now you can use Twitter like an old-fashioned clipping service. And it’s free. For instance, you can ‘follow’ Under the Dome or Rob Christensen or Joe Klein or David Brooks and a link to whatever they write appears on Twitter.
Last Sunday I read the News & Observer the old-fashioned way, sitting in bed, then meandered over to the office and turned on the computer and up popped a headline in Google News from the Los Angeles Times: Mitt Romney Pollster: Why we thought we would win.
The reporter, interviewing Romney pollster Neil Newhouse, sailed right past the philosophical and got down to brass tacks.
Why, he asked, did Romney’s polls show him winning Colorado and New Hampshire? Why did Romney’s polls show him in a dead-heat in Iowa? Why did Romney feel sure he would win Florida and Virginia?
Mr. Newhouse gave a pretty valid answer. He simply said, I’m not sure.
So much for brass tacks. Maybe the answer is philosophical.
In my world of older white Republican males hardly a soul could imagine Barack Obama winning the election. Men – and women – were certain Obama would lose. Republican pollsters and consultants had their own point of view: Anti-Obama voters, they said, were more intense and more likely to vote than pro-Obama voters. Plus, they’d add, undecided voters always vote against the incumbent. Once, sitting in a meeting, I said, That might not be so on Election Day if undecided voters dislike Romney as much as they dislike Obama – but only one person in the room thought that made any sense at all.
Now, a lot of times, the truth is ambiguous. But a lot of times not seeing the truth has nothing to do with ambiguity – it has to do with eyesight. Republicans didn’t lose because of demographics or Hispanics or Obama’s ground game. It was simpler. We lost, say, Florida and Virginia because we listened to one another and saw an election unfolding before our eyes that bore no resemblance to the election that was unfolding in Richmond and Miami.
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Gary Pearce posted on December 11, 2012 11:18
Here’s some sincere transition advice for Governor-elect McCrory – from somebody who’s been there: Focus on your key staff first, then your Cabinet.
Every incoming Governor and President makes a big show about Cabinet appointments. Too often, they short-shift their key staff.
Two examples: The Chief of Staff and the Communications Director will have more to do with a new Governor’s success or failure than anybody else.
The chief of staff, if he or she is good, will make sure everybody in the administration toes the line – and that there’s a line to toe.
The communications director will determine whether the administration’s story is being told well.
On the personal level, a governor will spend a lot more time with those two people than with any Cabinet secretary.
And the Governor can count on the chief of staff to fire a bad Cabinet secretary. If the chief of staff doesn’t work out, the Governor has to do the firing.
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Gary Pearce posted on December 10, 2012 14:23
The biggest demographic problem for the Republican Party may not be Hispanics, but cities – and increasing urbanization.
In 2012, Democrats won in cities, and Republicans won outside the cities. The more urban a state’s population, the more likely it voted for Obama.
Unfortunately for Republicans – in North Carolina and nationally – cities are where the growth is. Already, the Southern Growth Policies Board says, almost 60 percent of the U.S. population lives in cities of one million or more.
And the trend is accelerating. That’s because most job growth is in the cities – like the Triangle and Charlotte metro areas.
By 2030, North Carolina is expected to grow by another three million people. Where do you think they’ll live?
This is all part of the “Big Sort.” People in cities are younger and more culturally attuned to Democrats. One example: attitudes about gay marriage.
Governor-elect McCrory won big partly because he did better in cities, especially his home county of Mecklenburg. He beat Romney there by some 40,000 votes.
Maybe that’s why McCrory and Speaker Thom Tillis were less vehement about Raleigh’s Dix deal than Senator Phil Berger.
For Democrats, this is all reason for hope.
For McCrory, it poses a policy/political question: Does he resist this trend with his economic-development policies? Does he try to force job growth away from cities? Is that even doable?
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Carter Wrenn posted on December 10, 2012 11:20
When I read in the newspaper that the House Republican Leadership had given four Congressmen the boot, kicking them off their committees, for not loyally voting with the leadership I thought, Those guys must have been voting with the Democrats – but then I read one of the four Congressmen was Walter Jones the most conservative Congressman in North Carolina.
Congressman Jones routinely gets elected every two years, goes to Washington, keeps his promises, votes his conscience, is unfailingly polite and won in the biggest landslide of any Republican Congressman in North Carolina last fall.
So how did he get crossed-up with the Republican Leadership in Washington? Well, it turns out, by voting to cut spending too much – for instance, by voting against the Leadership’s 2011 Budget Deal with Obama to raise the debt ceiling.
So, now we have Republican Leaders in Washington unhappy with Walter Jones because he voted to cut spending too much.
What’s wrong with this picture?
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Gary Pearce posted on December 08, 2012 10:21
A veteran Raleigh observer says “Governor-elect Pat McCrory is off to a surprisingly rough start.”
Here’s the TAPster’s critique:
“He’s a seasoned politician but acts like an amateur (or a Wake school board member). Here are three examples of conflict where he should’ve known better:
“The N&O busted him for not quitting his rain-making job at a law firm. His critics are correct: he should’ve quit that job the day after the election. If he needs the money, he should pay himself from the generous transition kitty provided by the state.
“He got tangled up unnecessarily in the Dix mess. He’s not sworn in yet, so he could’ve taken a pass and let the current governor and legislators duke it out. And then clean up their mess later.
“He infuriated hundreds of Junior Leaguers by agreeing to take the spotlight off their sacred Inaugural Ball. Sounds like he will attend the Ball, but he also says he will attend another big inaugural event to raise money for a hurriedly created GOP political group. Why mess with a long-standing, harmless tradition other than to allow GOP operatives to take advantage of him to shake the tree for more money?”
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Carter Wrenn posted on December 07, 2012 12:26
Up in Washington, right after Obama won reelection, House Speaker John Boehner held a press conference to announce he’d seen the light and was ready to compromise and accept more tax revenues (which translated from political speak into plain English means higher taxes).
Next the House Republicans set off in hot pursuit of Hispanic votes, passing a bill that, as Arizona Republican Jeff Flake put it, “staples a green card” to the diploma of immigrants who graduate from colleges in the United States with degrees in Math or Science.
House Republicans also proposed allowing immigrants who are working here to bring their spouses and children to the United States without having to endure the wait for additional visas or green cards – then, as a fig leaf, to cover their flanks with less open-minded Republicans they proposed to end the Diversity Visa Lottery Program – a long-standing program that grants visas to immigrants from Africa and Asia.
None of this troubled the Democrats in Congress.
They simply said, That’s not a big deal. We’ll do all that – plus we’ll pass the ‘Dream Act’ and keep the “Diversity Visa Lottery Program.”
Republicans placed a bid to buy Hispanic votes.
The Democrats said, We’ll see you and raise you.
And the bad news is – in this poker game – the sky’s the limit.
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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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