RALEIGH – Mike Easley is a smart, talented man, a politician who has won nearly every election in which he’s competed and won over many North Carolinians with his personal charm and wit.
But Easley continues trying to peddle a story about mental-health reform that just won’t sell.
I left a recent Chapel Hill meeting of the state’s editorial writers just before the governor arrived to give a dinner speech, but according to several accounts he persisted in arguing that his administration had opposed the adoption of mental-health reform from the start, and thus should not be held responsible for the convoluted and wasteful manner it was subsequently implemented.
This account, which Easley bases on his recollection of conversations with then-Health and Human Services Secretary Carmen Hooker Odom, does not improve in the re-telling. Most people involved with the debate on mental-health reform back in 2001 do not recall strenuous objections from Odom, Easley, or anyone else in the administration. Sure, they may have had reservations about aspects of the proposal – as policymakers often do about particular elements of any complex reform plan – but that is very different from the general proposition the governor is seeking to advance.
More importantly, it doesn’t matter what private reservations the Easley administration may have nursed about the plan. The governor signed the bill. He could have vetoed it, or become personally engaged before its passage to insist on legislative changes. He didn’t. It actually makes Easley look worse, not better, if one comes to believe that he thought the plan was a bad idea but signed it anyway. At least those who believed in the plan can be credited for good intentions and serious effort. What defense does Easley have? Indifference?
Furthermore, even if one buys the notion that the Easley administration opposed the legislature’s bill, once the governor signed it, it became his constitutional responsibility to implement the plan as carefully and thoughtfully as possible. This the administration manifestly did not do. It bungled the details, including determining eligibility and setting the reimbursement rates. It apparently was not tracking the numbers closely enough to spot major cost spikes, because the governor said Sunday that he wasn’t made aware of budget overruns until 12 months ago.
So, in fact, it doesn’t matter what Easley’s opinion of mental-health reform was in 2001. The legislature sets state policy. The governor carries it out. He performed his appointed task badly, and should have long since exercised the good judgment and grace to accept responsibility for the mismanagement while announcing changes in policy and personnel to set things aright.
Instead, Easley’s recalcitrant and disputatious performance made a bad situation far, far worse. Attempts to get Odom to confirm the governor’s account of their conversations resulted in the termination of longtime HHS spokesman Debbie Crane. The termination was, in turn, blamed on HHS, though current Secretary Dempsey Benton soon spoke up to deny that he fired Crane. She spilled the beans to the press about the governor’s ham-handed and obnoxious communications office, even alleging that it had urged the state’s public-information officers to destroy public documents (emails). On Sunday, Easley added additional fuel to the fire by referring to a letter from Odom, and then explaining to a reporter that not only could he not produce the letter for public inspection because he destroyed it, but that he routinely destroyed such correspondence, also public records.
I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that Mike Easley has had the worst two weeks of his administration. The News & Observer raked him over the coals for the mental-health debacle and his refusal to talk. Then when he finally talked, his problems proliferated. What was originally a significant policy miscue became a public-relations disaster, a personnel misstep, and an invitation to further journalistic and legal investigation.
And it all stems from the fact that Easley, master political marketer, is wedded to a pitch that he’ll never be able to sell. But he just can’t seem to stop himself.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.