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Gary Pearce posted on April 16, 2013 09:50
It’s hard to talk about politics when Americans are being blown apart at a great event in one of our great cities. A celebration of human aspiration and achievement becomes a terrorist’s target. A race that celebrates leg power and stamina becomes an abattoir of lost limbs and broken bodies.
But politics inevitably intrudes. We immediately and logically suspect Islamic terrorists. The lunatic right erupts over a rumor (untrue) that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer blamed the Tea Party. (Boston: Boston Tea Party: Income Tax Day: Patriots Day. Get it?) Someone on the left will predictably pontificate: “What does this say” about America? “What kind of country are we becoming?”
It says nothing of the kind about America. We always have among us sick fucks (pardon the language). Terrorists, assassins, murderers, fanatics, anarchists.
But the cowards who plant bombs and run away were far outnumbered by the emergency workers and ordinary people who ran to the blast and tried to save the wounded. Our better angels, as Lincoln called them, always overcome evil.
Our real test will come later: how we respond.
After 9/11, we made our country more safe, but maybe less free. We set about hunting down the killers, and we eventually got them. Unfortunately, we launched two ill-advised wars that cost us much money and too many lives and broken bodies.
This time let’s stay focused on the real evil-doers. And never let them blow up our fundamental goodness.
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Carter Wrenn posted on April 15, 2013 14:27
Republicans and Democrats over in the legislature have been battling hammer and tongs but, still, it raised eyebrows last week when the News & Observer reported Republicans have declared war on the cities.
House Speaker Thom Tillis explained the new conflagration philosophically, saying ‘Part of the conflict is due to a different world view of the role of government.’ Other legislators were blunter, saying ‘Cities are getting too big and too powerful’ and ‘Cities are too arrogant.’
The mayors (who’re mostly Democrats) tried to fight back but the legislators (who’re mostly Republicans) had them over a barrel: The General Assembly had the power – legally – so it rolled happily forward redrawing school board districts, rewriting local housing regulations, and taking the airport from Charlotte, the water system from Asheville and Dix Park from Raleigh.
But, a year from now, this war may take a turn that surprises the General Assembly: Years ago, when Jesse Helms first ran for Senate, most of the voters lived in small towns and rural crossroads not big enough to be called towns. But those days have long-since vanished. Cities are now the political dynamos and cities and suburbs decide elections and mayors (like Raleigh’s Mayor Nancy McFarlane) are popular – more popular than, say, a Republican legislator from Raleigh.
So what began as a legal fight may spiral into a political fight and, next election, if Mayor McFarlane decides to lead one of those independent Super PAC campaigns, Republican legislators in swing districts in Wake County could become casualties.
There’s also another more nuanced problem. Legislators changing government policies – like cutting spending or reforming the tax code – is one thing. But Republican legislators passing laws to weaken Democratic mayors is another thing entirely. Voters are pretty tolerant of politicians’ foibles and clay feet and hardly a soul believes anymore American Democracy is an exercise in selflessness or clean hands – but sometimes when a politician goes too far he runs afoul of a political current that runs bone-deep – then the wind changes and tolerance ends and a bedrock American spirit (that cannot abide a politician who grabs for too much power) breaks loose and wreaks havoc.
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Gary Pearce posted on April 15, 2013 10:42
Now that UNC-Chapel Hill has a new chancellor, maybe it can move beyond the battles over sexual assaults and athletics-versus-academics and get on with the real war – the one with the new Republican majority in Raleigh.
And it will be war.
This is a fundamental social, cultural and political conflict. It is free inquiry versus free enterprise, scholars versus CEOs, free-thinkers versus true believers. It is, writ large, the same battle that has gone on since Jesse Helms railed against Chapel Hill in the 1960s. It is, 50 years later, the Speaker Ban Law sequel.
It is the ultimate brawl between the two traditions that have long defined North Carolina politics: the liberalism of Chapel Hill against the conservatism of North Carolina’s rural areas, fundamentalist churches and selected boardrooms.
But this time the anti-UNC crowd controls the legislature and the Governor’s office.
Governor McCrory, though he is quick now to defend liberal arts, has questioned gender studies and any studies that don’t put “butts in jobs.” Art Pope has long railed against what he sees as UNC’s hostility to business. And then there is a strong streak of anti-intellectualism in some Republican quarters.
In past years, UNC could count on the solid support of North Carolina’s newspapers. That relationship, especially with the N&O, has been strained by battles over public records. Some veteran N&O hands question whether the paper has gone too far and is damaging the university.
This wouldn’t be the nation’s first war between the academic world and a business-government complex that wants to “reform” academia. See the University of Virginia.
And here, like there, it could become a fight to the death of one side or the other.
Does Chancellor Folt know what she’s getting into? Holden Thorp certainly knows what he’s getting out of: big-time college athletics, the N&O’s firing range and Art Pope’s turf.
As an N.C. State alum, I could sit back and enjoy this. After all, State doesn’t face the same hostility. It puts butts in jobs: scientists, engineers and agribusiness managers. (And even a few of us history majors.)
But Chapel Hill is an essential element of North Carolina’s progressive tradition. Which is why it’s in the crosshairs.
And why it’s worth fighting for.
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Gary Pearce posted on April 14, 2013 08:07
With Republican legislators pushing drug tests for welfare recipients, let’s look at two Southern states’ experiences.
For a year, Georgia has encouraged businesses to alert the agency if a job applicant fails a drug test, so that the state can deny them unemployment benefits. How many people have the tests caught?
Exactly one.
Or maybe we should follow Arkansas’ example.
When Republicans there pushed for drug testing for welfare recipients, Democrats proposed an amendment that ANYONE receiving non-salary benefits from state government should be subject to drug testing as a condition of the transfer (i.e., contractors, companies with tax incentives, etc.). The bill died in committee.
The way this legislatuere is going, drug tests for legislators may be in line.
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Gary Pearce posted on April 13, 2013 08:05
A laurel and hearty handshake go out to Rep. Robert Brawley for boldly speaking up for the right of legislators to take free gifts from lobbyists. Right on, brother!
The legislature should pass this bill. Because it then would take almost no time before most of the members are in jail or forced out by scandal. A most healthy house-cleaning would result.
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Gary Pearce posted on April 12, 2013 08:03
I commend to your attention PoliticsNC, a new blog by Thomas Mills, a Democratic consultant who gives me great hope for the future.
Here’s a sample from a recent post he did that stirred up some Democrats:
“Two myths seem to be dominating Democrats’ analysis of their problems. The first is that Art Pope “bought” the elections for Republicans. The second is that focusing on education is the winning message for Democrats. Like many myths, they each have a grain of truth but both are greatly exaggerated.”
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Carter Wrenn posted on April 11, 2013 14:52
Years ago some crafty Democratic gnome sitting cloistered in a cell pouring over reams of demographics (trying to figure out the political inclinations of people who didn’t vote) had a revelation: If those folks did vote, a lot more Democrats were going to get elected.
Now, in a way, that sounds odd (after all, How could he know?) but as far as political theory goes he was standing on rock-solid ground. Demographics seldom lie.
Of course there was no way to keep an earthshaking fact like that secret – word of the gnome’s discovery quickly reached Democratic legislators. About the kindest thing to say about what happened next is: Those legislators started passing laws to help themselves get elected – they passed a ‘motor-voter’ law so that every time anyone over eighteen years old applied for a driver’s license they were also handed a voter registration form. But, to the Democrats’ chagrin, while registration soared, most of the new voters never even bothered to go to the polls.
It was a setback but the Democrats legislators took it in stride. They went back to work and tackled the problem from a different direction, writing a whole new set of laws – they passed ‘early voting’ and ‘same-day registration’ and ‘Sunday voting’ and, suddenly, in 2008 what they’d been dreaming of actually happened: Those non-voters flocked to the polls and for the first time in forty-eight years – in the same election – the Democrats elected a Governor, a U.S. Senator and the Democratic candidate for President won North Carolina.
The Democrats must have felt the Promised Land was within reach but then the unexpected happened: Republicans won the next two elections. Suddenly, Republicans were in control of the State House and Senate, and – the way they saw it – if Democrats could pass laws to elect Democrats, they could repeal them, or better still, add a few new laws to elect Republicans. They rolled out bills to repeal Sunday voting, end same-day registration, end straight-party voting and curtail early voting. Then proposed laws to make it tougher for college students to vote and to make absentee voting easier (since Republicans vote more often by absentee than Democrats).
There’s a kind of rough justice in all that but looked another way it’s also proof of an unkind truth: One bad deed begets another and, after that, it’s an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth with no remorse anywhere.
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Gary Pearce posted on April 11, 2013 08:00
Today I yield my time and space to Nation Hahn, my social-media guru and guide to all things New Politics. He’s one of the state’s bright talents and one of my prime hopes for the future. He offers a timely and telling warning to Democrats:
“Gary called for a Democratic Moses recently. It is an apt comparison because we are in the desert as far as the eye can see. Every time I see a key legislative debate it feels as if Senator Josh Stein and Representative Deborah Ross are largely alone in offering a counter narrative. It is disconcerting that we also have little infrastructure in place to allow Eric Mansfield, Cal Cunningham, Grier Martin, and others the ability to offer their response to the current actions of the folks on Jones Street.
“Beyond Moses, however, we need new ideas. I am concerned by the number of progressives who believe that the way that we will win in the future is to simply bash Art Pope, slam the Governor and the General Assembly as out of touch, and attack their ideas. Simply being a Cassandra ain’t going to cut it. We’ll be as disregarded as she was in the myths of old.
“We have to offer new ideas and a new narrative for North Carolina. And North Carolina isn’t alone — this is an issue in states across our country. After fifty years of gains created by progressives on the federal and state level we have retreated over the last fifteen years. We have found ourselves protecting our gains as they fall under an all out attack by conservatives which has led to a dramatic shift of our standing on the spectrum.
“Traditionally conservatives fought to defend and conserve, while progressives advocated for new ideas and bold solutions. That tradition has been turned on its head and that is one reason we’ve been losing of late. People are hurting economically in rural North Carolina, for example, and my fellow progressives have found themselves stuck defending the status quo while conservatives call for change. When you are hurting, a new idea, even if it is a bad idea, sounds better than the status quo.
“It is time that we move beyond the tired narratives and beyond simply calling for our progress to be protected. It is time to call for real progress once more. It is time to offer new ideas and reach for the brass ring. The genius of Governor Jim Hunt is that he always offered a bold vision for the future. I believe that many of us still turn to him for leadership because even now, more than a decade and two administrations removed from his last term, he still has bold new ideas for the future.
“It is time that we follow Hunt’s lead and develop the big ideas of the future. Otherwise, we’ll be an ineffective, marginalized Cassandra as the folks on Jones Street dramatically reshape our state.”
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Carter Wrenn posted on April 10, 2013 11:10
My grandmother used to say, ‘Idle hands are the devil’s workshop’ – and while legislators are waiting for the Senate to introduce its budget over in the General Assembly, they’re making a strong case that temptation and too much time on your hands is as deadly a combination as ever:
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One legislator sponsored a bill to make teaching cursive handwriting mandatory in public schools, saying teaching cursive would develop brain activity in third graders and help them read historical documents like the Constitution – which a Google search shows, is available in print on the Internet in 123,000 places.
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Two legislators declared the 1st Amendment (and the Freedom of Religion Clause) of the Constitution doesn’t apply to North Carolina, and that under the 10th Amendment, the legislature can nullify federal laws they don’t like – but they missed one crucial fact: The last time the state legislature tried to nullify the Constitution it didn’t work out too well.
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A Senator filed a bill to prohibit male students and female students from rooming together in dormitories at UNC – it’s hard to argue with that, but a better question to ask might be how on earth UNC ended up with a Chancellor who could be gulled into believing it made common sense to allow gay men to room with straight women in UNC dormitories?
So, with the time they had on their hands, legislators wrote bills that enraged women, nullified the Constitution, stimulated brain activity, separated gay men and straight women at UNC, and threatened FBI agents – is it any wonder (according to the latest polls) only 23% of the voters approve of the way the state legislature is doing its job?
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Gary Pearce posted on April 10, 2013 09:15
The more you hang around, the more things come back around. Like controversial Dix land transfers and privatizing the Department of Commerce.
At the dedication of N.C. State’s new Hunt Library last week, one visitor took note of a Duane Powell cartoon in Governor Hunt’s office. It poked fun at his hotly debated plan to transfer land from Dix to NCSU (for what become the Centennial Campus, a jewel for the school and one of the world’s most outstanding university research campuses.) That was in 1984, almost 30 years ago.
This week, Governor McCrory proposed privatizing the Department of Commerce. Exactly what Lt. Governor Bob Jordan proposed in 1988, exactly 25 years ago, when he was running against Governor Jim Martin.
By the way, Martin and his Republican allies denounced the idea then. They said it would hurt the industry-hunting efforts of the Department of Commerce (which Hunt had created in 1977).
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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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