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Entries for 'Gary Pearce'
Gary Pearce posted on March 29, 2013 10:37
Governor McCrory desperately wants to look moderate. He wants to distance himself from the right-wing red-hots in the legislature. If he doesn’t, he’s on the road to one term.
“State employees, teachers, Democrats and others unnerved by the idea of Art Pope’s drawing up the state’s next spending plan for Gov. Pat McCrory…must have felt sheepish about dreading its contents. Rather than terrifying those who rely on or support state government spending and programs, the $20.6 billion budget maintains the status quo and makes changes around the edges.”
Hold the mayo.
Yes, he called for hiring 1,800 more full-time teachers. But he would slash 3,000 teacher assistants.
Some history here: Those teacher assistants were part of Governor Jim Hunt’s 1977 Primary Reading Program. Because too many kids weren’t learning to read, Hunt and the legislature put “reading aides” in every classroom in the first, second and third grades. They have been there since. Reading performance has gone up, up, up. Now McCrory wants to get rid of the aides. How does that help kids learn to read?
Plus, the UNC system would get another 5.4 percent cut. And maybe a campus gets closed. And the community colleges get whacked.
And that’s all before the Senate does its budget.
Jim Jenkins’ column in the N&O hit the nail on the head about Republicans in the legislature: “They’re more interested in destruction than in building.”
Maybe McCrory wants to leave the destruction to the Jones Street wrecking crew. But he can’t duck accountability. That’s what the veto is for.
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Gary Pearce posted on March 28, 2013 09:23
Has public opinion – and politicians – ever shifted so fast on an issue as on gay marriage?
A year ago, 60 percent of North Carolina voters approved a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Yesterday, a U.S. Senator in a tough reelection fight endorsed gay marriage.
Yes, Kay Hagan is one of a lengthening list of moderate Democrats who recently changed her position. Like Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Jon Tester and Mark Warner. And one doubts they recently changed their minds; they probably had come to that conclusion long ago but were wrestling with when to go public.
In a way, they have no choice. A rising tide of young people is moving Democratic, attracted by President Obama and repelled by Republican meanness. For this generation, ending discrimination against gays is their version of Vietnam, civil rights and women’s rights. They know gay teens who were and are bullied. (We all did; we just kept quiet or joined in the harassment.) They believe it’s wrong, and they won’t stand for it. Good for them.
They, in turn, are moving their parents and grandparents. A lot of people who are coming around now long ago concluded the gay-bashing and discrimination is wrong, but they couldn’t get comfortable with gay marriage. What clinches them is a simple argument: You should be able to marry the person you love.
Just for the hell of it, why don’t Democrats in the North Carolina legislature put in a bill calling for another statewide vote on the constitutional amendment? It will go straight to the Republican trash can. And that’s the point.
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Gary Pearce posted on March 27, 2013 08:49
When President Gerald Ford nixed financial aid for New York City back in the 1970s, the front page of a brassy Big Apple tabloid blared: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”
Which brings us to the Republican bill undoing the Dix deal. Which brings us to two GOP Senators from Wake County who cut and ran from their party.
Chad Barefoot and Neal Hunt got what Senator Josh Stein was getting at when he said Republicans are killing the park plan because Raleigh is “a city you don’t like.”
Barefoot and Hunt might look safe politically. They have good districts. They have a big money advantage.
But, to keep winning, they have to win moderate Independents. The kind of voters who don’t like partisanship. The kind of voters who might see the legislature as a bunch of rural Tea Party extremists who hate cities in general and Raleigh in particular. The kind of voters who see Republicans nationally as a gang of vengeful, angry old white men.
Barefoot and Hunt have to worry that a future opponent might figure out that there are a lot of well-heeled people in Raleigh who are mad enough to give big money to a Democrat – or to a super-PAC helping Democrats.
They also have to worry that, in 2014, President Obama’s OFA might pump a lot of money into North Carolina. Or that, in 2016, Hillary Clinton might set off a Democratic tidal wave among moderate Independent women in their districts.
Hunt and Barefoot have no control over a lot of that. They could control how they voted. So they voted with Raleigh and against their fellow Republicans.
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Gary Pearce posted on March 26, 2013 09:51
As if Senator Kay Hagan needed Michael Bloomberg sticking his Gotham billionaire gun-control nose in her race.
Hagan already has a tough reelection fight. She’s one of the Obama Class of 2008 Senators. And a President’s second mid-term election historically is bad for his party.
(Not always, though. Republicans thought they would be shooting fish in a barrel in Bill Clinton’s second mid-term in 1998. Especially after Monica-gate broke in January. But, thanks to then-Speaker and philanderer Newt Gingrich, they overplayed their hand. Democrats won big. In North Carolina, John Edwards upset Lauch Faircloth.)
Still, Bloomberg puts a target squarely on Hagan by targeting the state with his TV ads.
So she faces a choice. She could do what moderate North Carolina Democrats normally do: take cover in the middle and hope the NRA crowd doesn’t come at her with guns blazing. (This blog inevitably leads to an excess of gun metaphors.)
Or she could gamble that politics has changed. Maybe gun politics has changed after Newton and other school massacres. Maybe North Carolina politics has changed with Obama’s strong showing and the potential emergence of a new Democratic majority based in urban areas and appealing to women, minorities and young people – the very people who like Bloomberg’s ads. But will those votes be there without Obama on the ballot?
You can bet that Hagan’s advisers are puzzling over this now. All politicians and political operatives are control freaks; they hate anything they can’t control. And nobody can control Bloomberg and his billions.
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Gary Pearce posted on March 22, 2013 08:36
The vote is a powerful thing. In less than a year, it has taken immigrants from pariah to power in American politics.
This week, Tea Party centerfold Rand Paul softened his position on immigration. (Remember when Mitt Romney called for “self-deportation”?) Paul’s 2016 rival Marco Rubio – and other Republicans – had already beat a retreat.
And one of the legislature’s red-hots who wants to take a big stick to immigrants talked a bit more softly. Rep. Mark Brody of Monroe said: “I know the Hispanic community was pretty upset. Everybody needs to be treated with respect.”
Especially when they vote.
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Gary Pearce posted on March 21, 2013 10:02
Bowater, as his friends call him, is a local Democrat – and an incurable optimist. While Republican preen and strut with power and Democrats wring their hands with worry, Bowater remain serenely sanguine.
One friend finally reached his limit – with the Republicans and with Bowater’s rosy view. He demanded, “What makes you so happy? Don’t you read the news?”
“Yep,” said Bowater, “every day. Just yesterday, I read on the front page that Republicans are looking to put a sales tax on 130 services. Then I read that Phil Berger’s education plan is to pay teachers less and bash them more. Today I read that Governor McCrory is going to lay off teachers’ assistants, cut the universities and community colleges and raise tuition.
By now Bowater’s friend was beside himself: “That’s my point! Look at what they’re doing! How can you be happy about that?”
Bowater calmly replied, “Because every day the Republicans move one day closer to total rejection by the voters. Keep up the good work, I say.”
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Gary Pearce posted on March 20, 2013 09:16
Opponents of fracking in North Carolina may have two powerful allies: the free market and politics.
John Murawski wrote in The News & Observer that “booming shale gas production in the Northeast” could give energy developers one less reason “to take financial risks to explore North Carolina’s virgin gas deposits in Lee, Moore and Chatham counties.”
Also, Kevin Brown, exploration manager for WhitMar Exploration, the Colorado energy company that has leased 5,950 acres in Lee County, said: “To be honest, between the low commodity price and the political uncertainty (in North Carolina), it’s kind of thrown a wet blanket on the enthusiasm there.”
Ah-ha, nothing like “political uncertainty.” Opponents’ strategy, then, is simple: Just raise the possibility that the 2014 or 2016 elections might turn out different and produce a changed political climate in Raleigh.
That may be enough to dry up interest – and scare away investors.
Isn’t the free market a wonderful thing?
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Posted in: General, Issues
Gary Pearce posted on March 19, 2013 10:06
Senator Phil Berger says national Republicans have a messenger problem, not a message problem. Democrats might well hope he believes that.
After attending CPAC – the right-wing Woodstock – Berger told Travis Fain at the Greensboro News & Record: “It’s not just a communication problem. Sometimes it’s the individual messengers ... (and) some folks who lend themselves to caricature.”
Berger said Republican policies “are supported by a broad spectrum of people.” And he liked this assessment by Texas Gov. Rick Perry:
“The popular media narrative is that this country has shifted away from conservative ideals, as evidenced by the last two presidential elections. That’s what they think. That’s what they say. That might be true, if Republicans had actually nominated conservative candidates in 2008 and 2012.”
Now for a completely different view – from a Democrat who helped rescue his party from its ideological death spiral in the 1980s and 1990s. Will Marshall, who started the Democratic Leadership Council that led to Bill Clinton that led to a Democratic revival, writes in the Daily Beast that Republicans today are where Democrats were then: caught in “the politics of evasion. They know their electoral base is shrinking, but only a few have connected the dots between their demographic quandary and their ideological stridency….
“Angry extremists have hijacked the party, and someone is going to have to wrest it away from them. If the New Democrats’ experience is any guide, there will be blood.”
Marshall says “the key difference between Democrats in 1989 and Republicans in 2013 (is that) the DLC spoke to, and for, a Democratic rank and file that was considerably more moderate than the party establishment. For Republicans, however, the ‘base’ is the problem, not the solution. Radicalism rises from the grass roots. The Tea Party–Club for Growth axis is still eager to punish ideological deviation, threatening to ‘primary’ GOP officeholders who show the slightest inclination toward compromise. And it’s not just intimidation: thanks to a combination of geographic sorting and gerrymandering, many House Republicans can truthfully claim to be faithfully representing their constituents who sent them to Washington to pull down the Temple, not to do deals with Democrats. That’s why the House stands for now at least as the Proud Tower of unbending right-wing orthodoxy.
“Eventually it will fall—just as the Democrats’ House bastion fell in 1994. But it will probably take more GOP losses to convince conservatives that they need to build majorities within an actually existing America, not the America of their dreams.”
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Gary Pearce posted on March 18, 2013 10:04
A TAPster and veteran of the Raleigh scene says “undoing” and “recycling” are the GOP trademarks thus far.
Last week, he noted: “The GOP focused on un-doing the deal on the Dix property, un-doing the state’s renewable energy policy and un-doing other done deals like the death penalty moratorium.
“In their zeal to remake the state in their own image and undo what Democrats have done, they fail to articulate or implement a coherent strategy about what they want to do.
“Why is this?
“One theory is the lack of leaders and leadership skills within the GOP. The GOP legislative leaders were on the back row when Dems ran the legislature and certainly didn’t learn much from the back row.
“Also, the majority of legislators are in their first two terms, and many of the newcomers have little or no political experience. They never served on city councils or county commissions where they would’ve learned to prioritize and compromise, and would’ve learned tolerance of those who disagree.
“This leads to the current state of things: a GOP with a to-do list that only includes un-doing.”
Then the TAPster notes the Republicans’ recycling:
“They’ve recycled a garbage truck full of old pols, including Art Pope and Jim Gardner, who now spend their time angrily getting even with Democrats and Democratic programs.
“Another recycled product came this week when the McCrory administration plopped Dale Folwell into the role as head of the Employment Security Commission. It’s unclear if Folwell is qualified for this task, but it’s clear he’s a former legislator, a flunky for Thom Tillis and a failed candidate for lieutenant governor.
“Legislative insiders recall that Folwell is so clear and focused on his mission that he famously changed his vote on a bill two weeks after the bill passed the General Assembly. And, Republican voters themselves made it clear they didn’t want him in politics with his rousing third-place finish in the primary election for lieutenant governor.
“Republicans had better learn not to mix their recycling with trash or they’ll all be on the curb when the big green truck comes through the neighborhood in the next election.”
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Gary Pearce posted on March 15, 2013 07:40
A long-time Raleigh lobbyist recalls the days when legislators helped themselves to ACC tournament tickets – courtesy of lobbyists and special interests.
Every year about this time, the demand was so strong that lobbyists felt like Ticketmaster or StubHub.
One mountain legislator – a Democrat, I should add – was especially insistent. He absolutely had to have two tickets. He was desperate. It was a matter of great state importance.
The lobbyist scrambled to oblige. He was able to get the tickets and deliver them to the legislator.
The day of the tournament, the lobbyist arrived at Greensboro Coliseum. There stood the legislator, holding up the tickets and calling to the crowd: “Tickets here. Anybody need two tickets?”
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