RALEIGH – Lieutenant Governor Beverly Perdue has publicly and loudly endorsed Barack Obama in North Carolina’s suddenly critical presidential primary. The irony is that Perdue’s campaign for governor more closely resembles that of Hillary Clinton, emphasizing experience and readiness to lead over Obama’s themes of novelty and change.
Perdue is a classic resume candidate. Indeed, most political pros only get to dream of running candidates like her for statewide office. Perdue has taught school, directed a community hospital’s geriatric services, obtained a Ph.D., made history as a successful female candidate for the state legislature from Eastern North Carolina, and co-chaired the appropriations committee in the North Carolina Senate – one of the most powerful jobs in state government.
And all that was before winning statewide election in 2000 as North Carolina’s first female lieutenant governor. Recognizing that lawmakers had years ago stripped the office of most of its real power in the General Assembly, Perdue sought to parlay her service on various state boards and commissions into policy impact and political heft – and succeeded in such areas as smoking cessation, prescription-drug programs, and lobbying efforts for the state’s military bases.
Essentially, Perdue has been running for governor not just for seven years, but for much of her adult life. If elected, she’d enter the governor’s mansion with more knowledge of and experience in state government than Jim Hunt, Jim Martin, Mike Easley or any other chief executive has had in recent memory. She’s not shy about saying so. “I am the best person, the most-prepared person to meet the challenges of the 21st Century,” she told a recent gathering of state columnists and editorial writers in Chapel Hill.
Of course, there are risks to running as a candidate of experience. It makes you a candidate of the establishment. If voters are generally satisfied with how things are going, you’re a reassuring choice. But what if people are upset with the status quo and worried about the future? Recent polls for the Civitas Institute, state newspapers, and several candidates depict a North Carolina electorate with major worries about the economy and more likely to be uncertain or pessimistic, rather than optimistic, about the state’s future.
It wouldn’t be fair to characterize Perdue as promising just to maintain the status quo, though. Her speeches, commercials, and website are full of policy proposals: to subsidize more health insurance for children, to promote environmentally friendly business development, to begin another round of teacher-pay increases, to reduce or eliminate tuition costs for many college students, to alleviate the tax burden on senior citizens, and to increase the transparency of North Carolina’s budget process.
On the other hand, it would be fair to characterize her proposals as, for the most part, more of the same. That is, she’s calling for increased state action and spending in a host of areas, but more to expand current programs and initiatives than to chart a truly new course. An exception, and in my view a welcome one, is Perdue’s transparency proposal, “NC OpenBook,” which would put virtually all state grants and contracts on an easily searchable online database. As far as I know, no other candidate has offered so specific a plan to promote governmental transparency, an area where the federal government and states such as South Carolina and Texas have been far outpacing North Carolina.
While Perdue’s pitch to voters sounds more like Clinton’s than Obama’s, the latter’s candidacy is certainly good news for the lieutenant governor in her tough nomination battle with Richard Moore. It appears that the voting groups Obama will motivate to turn out in North Carolina on May 6 – young people and African-Americans – are likely to pick Perdue. To the extent that Clinton succeeds in turning out her strongest demographic, middle-aged and older women, that will probably boost Perdue, too.
But early predictions of a Perdue blowout of Moore have proven to be premature. Another downside of being a resume candidate is that lengthy service in a legislative office gives opponents hundreds of recorded votes to mine for political gems. Prospectors in the Moore camp have found several rich veins, crafting ads challenging Perdue’s votes for big-spending budgets, tuition hikes, and other controversial measures. Perdue has responded in kind – both campaigns are well-financed and well-staffed – and maintains a modest lead in some polls, parity with Moore in others.
The opportunity to make history in the North Carolina governor’s race, along with the possibility of doing the same in the presidential race, may attract enough excited Democratic primary voters to push Bev Perdue over the nomination threshold. The resume candidate would then have a whole new page to fill.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.