RALEIGH – Closet totalitarians beware: you will scarcely find a worse place to out yourself, and seek like-minded allies, than a meeting of Rotarians in Cary.

Actually, please allow me to clarify my remark.

By suggesting that a Cary Rotary Club was a poor venue for Gov. Beverly Perdue’s now-infamous suggestion that America suspend the 2012 congressional elections, I did not mean to suggest that the Kiwanis Club of Chapel Hill-Carrboro or the Lions Club of Dublin, North Carolina would have been better settings. Realistically, if a would-be dictator wants a good place to attract adherents, civic clubs are right out.

Uh, please allow me to clarify my clarification.

By referring to civic clubs in Chapel Hill-Carrboro and Dublin, I did not mean to imply that either academicians or Irishmen are natural enemies of democracy.

Hmm, I guess I better quit while I’m ahead – or at least not very far behind. Both Perdue and some of her credulous critics would be wise to follow suit.

Does anyone really believe that Bev Perdue thinks it feasible, wise, or constitutional to suspend the 2012 congressional elections? The obvious fact of the matter is that the governor was trying to make a political point with a joke. Another obvious fact is that Gov. Perdue is a poor jokester.

Perhaps less obvious, but no less true, is that Perdue’s underlying political point – that Republicans in Congress are sacrificing the interests of the country to give President Barack Obama a black eye – is itself deserving of widespread ridicule and condemnation.

In recent years, liberals have become oddly fascinated with the idea that no one could possibly disagree with them on the substance of public policy – and thus any criticism of their economic, social, or foreign-policy initiatives must be entirely motivated by politics.

For example, liberals ascribe conservative opposition to cap-and-tax and other draconian climate-change legislation as cynical obstructionism by the oil industry and its dependencies, not as reflecting legitimate doubts about whether the possible benefits of such legislation are large enough to justify their massive costs.

Liberals ascribe conservative support for parental choice and other market-based education reforms as motivated by a desire to bring back racial segregation, rather than by a desire to expand educational opportunity and increase the rate of return on taxpayer dollars.

And liberals ascribe conservative opposition to debt-financed stimulus packages as a political game, rather than as a sincere belief that Keynesian demand-side policies are foolish and counterproductive.

By denying that there is any room for legitimate debate about these and other issues, liberals have painted themselves into a corner. If their opponents are nothing more than political opportunists, but are able to use the levers of representative government and electoral politics to block liberal reforms, then what should be done to defeat them?

Some liberals, notably Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, have concluded that one-party states such as China are better situated to make public policy in the 21st century – because they need not even pretend to care about any political opposition.

This conclusion has brought many liberals to the brink of saying that America’s problems can only be solved by amending or repealing basic American freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly. Some haven’t stopped at the brink. They explicitly espouse new limitations on the right of Americans to form political associations and spend their own money expressing their political views.

I can’t read Gov. Beverly Perdue’s mind. I don’t know how far she would be willing to go to silence her critics – or to shield politicians from public accountability so they can “help this country recover” (i.e. spend the country further into fiscal insolvency) without having to worry about the consequences.

But I do know that the governor wasn’t making a serious proposal to suspend the 2012 elections. During her speech before the Cary Rotarians, Perdue tried to use a lame joke to make a lame point. She bombed.

Gov. Perdue’s real problem is not that she is a closet totalitarian. It is that her ideas are dated and wrongheaded, and she expresses them poorly.

That’s bad enough.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.