RALEIGH – After a weekend of soccer games, fall planting, community theatre, and several hours in my car with an excellent Barnes & Noble series on the Crusades, I’m a bit frazzled. That’s going to be my excuse, anyway, for letting several recent political developments bounce around in my head without devoting sufficient time to developing any of them into subjects for full-fledged columns.
Instead, I’m just going to sketch them out in bullet form and invite reader comment to [email protected]. Perhaps in a few days I’ll be able to develop one or more of these into more substantial arguments. Or perhaps by then I’ll change my mind.
• Rudy Giuliani supporters are way overconfident. Hillary Clinton is clearly pulling away with the Democratic nomination, and can probably only be stopped by herself – committing a egregious blunder, such as a well-covered gaffe or failing to commit sufficient resources in Iowa. Giuliani, on the other hand, may be leading in national polls of GOP-leaning voters, but there is a fairly good chance that someone else will win Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, Nevada, and South Carolina (Mitt Romney leads in all except South Carolina).
Smart political analysts I know argue that Giuliani can afford to lose all these early races and still come out on top by winning Florida later in January and then the spate of big states holding primaries on Feb. 5. I think they are fooling themselves. Because none of the campaigns will really have enough money in the bank to run full-fledged media campaigns in big states such as Illinois and California, the results from the earlier caucuses and primaries will have a huge effect by earning free media and creating momentum. If Giuliani wins nothing until Florida, I don’t think he’ll win much afterward.
• Sen. Kay Hagan of Guilford County is a major player in the senate and a potential Democratic star in statewide politics. If the rumor is true that she has decided not to run against Sen. Elizabeth Dole next year, that would be telling. I think that for many reasons, including geography and financial connections, Hagan is in the best position among potential Democratic nominees to challenge Dole. But she also has the most to lose by falling short – someone else would take her senate seat, probably not just temporarily, and Hagan’s legislative clout and political profile will both grow in tandem in the coming years. We’ll see her on the statewide ballot soon enough, with another U.S. Senate race approaching in 2010 and possibly several Council of State opportunities in 2012.
• After some pointless head-butting on issues that are either relatively unimportant or not relevant to the job of governor of North Carolina, Democratic candidates Beverly Perdue and Richard Moore are finally debating something that matters a lot: highway funding. Perdue and all three Republican candidates argue that the General Assembly ought to rewrite the 1989 transportation bill the created the Highway Trust Fund to end the annual $170 million cash transfer to the state budget’s General Fund. Even if the original rationale behind the transfer – that it held the General Fund harmless for the loss of a previous state sales tax on cars – made sense two decades ago, they say, North Carolina is in such dire need for highway investment that the transfer ought to end.
Not so fast, Moore responds. If the $170 million transfer is ended, that means that lawmakers will have to come up with an equivalent amount of General Fund tax revenue or else reduce spending by that amount. He thinks it’s too early to endorse such a move.
He’s right to observe that ending the transfer has costs. But he’s wrong not to endorse the move. All the candidates should clearly state how they are going to close what everyone now realizes is a large annual gap between highway needs and highway spending. One of the solutions is to excise $170 million in wasteful state spending so the Highway Trust Fund dollars can be dedicated to highways. There are others. We ought to be spending at least $400 million to $500 million a year more addressing the state’s crumbling roadways and congestion woes, so it’s not too much to ask that our gubernatorial candidates say how they’d do it.
• All candidates make mistakes. They travel constantly, talk incessantly, don’t get enough rest, and screw up. But some errors are just more inexplicable than others. Barack Obama’s weird flag-pin gaffe is such an unforced error, and yet has much potential to do him harm.
It’s not hard to understand what Obama was trying to say, that patriotism is about more than symbolism. Yes, it is. But for most people, it includes symbolism. How foolish.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.