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General
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 20, 2013 08:47
What do Marco Rubio and Larry Hall have in common? They made the mistake of giving their party’s response to the State of the Union and State of the State speeches, respectively.
Inevitably, this ends up looking like a hostage tape or the speech given by the leader of space aliens who just invaded our planet: “PEOPLE OF EARTH, we come in peace….”
Both Senator Rubio and Rep. Hall did as well as they could under the circumstances. Their messages were perfectly fine and well-written.
It’s just that they were doing something that nobody – repeat, nobody – can do: Stare into a camera for 10 or 15 minutes (it seems longer) and keep the audience’s interest.
Listen to me again: Nobody does that. Do you watch television? Do you see anybody ever doing that? Not even the most polished entertainer would try it.
Plus, you’re in that artificial setting right after the audience watched the President or Governor performing in a live arena, surrounded by people who are clapping, frowning and otherwise acting like human beings.
It’s a lose-lose deal.
Worse, like Rubio, you end up being remembered only for wiping away sweat and awkwardly reaching for water while fixedly staring at the camera.
(When Governor McCrory reached over for a stack of papers Monday night, somebody tweeted: “I thought he was going for water.”)
Politicians, of course, have an ego that convinces them that the people of earth – or at least America or North Carolina – are eager to hear what they say. No. People change the channel, except for the people who either love you or hate you. You’re not going to win over the people who hate you, and you’re only going to embarrass the people who love you.
If you feel compelled to respond, sit down with an interviewer, answer their questions and look and sound like an actual human being.
And stop staring at me through the camera. You’re making me uncomfortable.
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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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Carter Wrenn posted on February 18, 2013 12:19
Like a bull seeing a red cape Karl Rove lowered his head and horns swinging, charged straight for Cole Porter’s adoring but unhappy wife;— as soon as actress Ashley Judd (who starred in De-Lovely) became a possible Senate candidate in Kentucky Rove had put out an ad out saying, “Ashley Judd’s an Obama-following, Obama-loving, radical Hollywood liberal and a carpetbagger who looks down her nose at hillbillies.”
Goring a hard-bitten politician is one thing – but goring a soft-spoken, doe-eyed actress is another. The same shoe doesn’t fit every foot. And Karl Rove’s been hollering ‘Obama-loving liberal’ for so long he’s now beginning to sound like a one-trick pony.
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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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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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