RALEIGH — For those of you out there who think that partisan politics consists of elaborate conspiracies and carefully thought out gambits designed to manipulate the public to embrace one ideology or the other, I submit to you a case teaching a very different lesson.
Consider the handling this week of North Carolina’s most potential political issue: our stagnant economy. Over the weekend, the news broke that Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bill Cobey had exchanged sharply worded missives with the Easley administration about what he argued was their lack of attentiveness and action on the state’s economic problems. The governor’s fiscal-policy aide, Dan Gerlach, responded that the bulk of North Carolina’s unemployment problem had been created by our growing trade deficit with China, as traditional manufacturers in such industries as textiles and furniture lost business to exports from Chinese-based firms.
Cobey argued, naturally, that this was little more than blame-shifting by Gov. Easley, who is conveniently incapable of influencing the nation’s trade policies, Instead, the Republican suggested, the governor’s own decision to raise taxes several times in response to state budget deficits had contribute to the erosion of North Carolina’s economic base, as had increased regulations. Nonsense, said the Easley folks. If you exempted manufacturing and restricted your analysis to just the past few months, they said, North Carolina actually experienced one-percent job growth, bettering the national average.
Which is kind of like saying that you restricted your analysis of the California recall results to the Bay area, Gov. Gray Davis received a strong endorsement from the voters for his continued public service.
Actually, employment in traditional manufacturing industries has been declining fairly steadily for many years. What’s new in the North Carolina economy isn’t that fewer people are making socks, towels, and dining-room tables but that fewer new industries are springing up or expanding to employ the people who used to make socks, towels, and dining-room tables. State fiscal and regulatory policies are relevant to the discussion of why that may be so, though in fairness they play a modest role in comparison to market factors.
That’s not the point of today’s column, however. The point is that in the midst of a partisan to-and-fro about Easley’s economic record as governor — an issue surely destined to be the central debate in his coming attempt at re-election — Sen. Elizabeth Dole showed up in Winston-Salem, speaking to a convention of the North Carolina League of Municipalities, and proceeded to confirm essentially the governor’s take on the economy. She blamed trade policy, and Chinese currency manipulation in particular, for the state’s economic ills and demanded action.
Not surprisingly, Easley was manifestly gleeful the following day when he addressed the same group of municipal officials and was able to say that he agreed with Dole. Thanks to a popular Republican senator, he now had another talking point with which to rebut next year’s political challenge from Cobey or one of the other Republican candidates seeking to replace him.
If this is an elaborate, cloak-and-dagger political plot hatched at the upper levels of the vast right-wing Republican conspiracy, then I hereby turn in my Secret Decoder Ring and tote bag in disgust. No one in my cell was notified.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.