Will the real North Carolina conservatives please stand up?
Game show aficionados will remember “To Tell the Truth,” which aired in one form or another on CBS, NBC, and in syndication for decades. Hosted by the likes of Bud Collyer (the original voice of Superman on radio and motion pictures), football great Lynn Swann, and industry icon Alex Trebek, “To Tell the Truth” was a conceptual innovation. Celebrity panelists would try to guess which of three contestants was telling the truth about his or her identity.
Public policy in North Carolina isn’t a game show. It’s a (mostly) serious debate about important issues. But when it comes to press coverage of politics and government, there is more than a modicum of entertainment. Reporters, editors, and pundits play up the flamboyant and the exceptional. They also rate and rank politicians as if they were athletes or movie stars competing for awards.
Since the 2010 Republican takeover of the General Assembly, and especially since the 2012 election of Gov. Pat McCrory, political observers have added a new dimension to the rankings: degrees of conservatism. Now, I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun, but modern conservatism is a movement of shared principles, goals, and policies. It isn’t a club you join or a catechism you memorize. As I have previously observed, conservatives have disagreed among themselves about policy priorities, political strategies, and programs details ever since the modern movement was created in the mid-20th century by a motley crew of traditionalists, libertarians, classical liberals, and former communists (the latter being the “neoconservatives” who have haunted the nightmares of sociology professors ever since).
Disagreement is hardly a feature unique to modern conservatism. It is present in all political movements. Aired respectfully and resolved creatively, disagreements signify health, not disarray. That North Carolina conservatives don’t agree on everything is hardly grounds to start writing their political obituaries. What would really be surprising — perhaps even worrisome — would be if a right-leaning governor, a right-leaning House, a right-leaning Senate, and right-leaning organizations outside government exhibited no disagreements whatsoever.
Moreover, boiling down these disagreements into a simplistic spectrum of “more” and “less” conservative obscures more than it reveals. As an example, consider the three 2014-15 budget adjustments proposed by the McCrory administration, the Senate, and the House over the past several weeks. Which proposal is the most conservative?
Well, according to most outside observers — who still speak the Right’s language with the distinctive accent of beginners — Phil Berger and his Senate colleagues have clearly proposed the most conservative budget of the three. But by one essential metric, spending growth, the Senate plan is the least conservative. Its General Fund budget exceeds last year’s by $530 million, or 2.6 percent. The version proposed by House Speaker Thom Tillis and his colleagues propose a General Fund increase of $481 million, or 2.3 percent. The governor’s budget contains the smallest spending hike at $351 million, or 1.7 percent.
General Fund totals include capital projects and reserves. Looking only at the operating budget, the Senate proposes a 2.9 percent increase next year, compared to the House’s 2 percent and McCrory’s 1.2 percent. (By the way, combined growth in inflation and population is projected at 3.8 percent for 2014-15, so all three proposals comply with a Taxpayer Bill of Rights cap on spending growth.)
On the other hand, the Senate budget is more ambitious in advancing conservative reform ideas such as prioritizing state spending, eliminating teacher tenure, reducing corporate welfare, and enacting far-reaching Medicaid reform. It also eschews the House proposal to fund additional education spending by relying more on lottery revenues — a proposal hard to square with conservatives’ traditional opposition to North Carolina’s state-run gambling monopoly.
With all that having been said, if Bud Collyer (my favorite “To Tell the Truth” host) were to ask North Carolina’s real conservative leaders to stand up, what would happen?
McCrory, Berger, and Tillis would all be on their feet, debating their differences. Soon afterward, we’d hear the opening notes of the theme music to “Let’s Make A Deal.”
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Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.