RALEIGH – If North Carolina Democrats have a horrible cycle this year – by failing to win the state’s electoral votes for the president and leaving Republicans with strong legislative and congressional-delegation majorities – you can be sure that many Democratic candidates and activists will try to blame the recent sexual-harassment mess at party headquarters.
In other words, they will make outgoing party chairman David Parker the scapegoat for Democratic disappointment. But Parker won’t be on the ballot. The real instigators of their political woes have been or will be on the ballot: Barack Obama and Beverly Perdue.
It was President Obama who decided, against the advice of seasoned pros and the tide of public opinion, to pursue a sweeping bill to federalize the regulation and finance of American health care. It was also the president who chose to pursue a policy mix of massive deficits, massive bailouts of big businesses and profligate state governments, and a massive attempt to increase the cost of energy through cap-and-trade legislation.
Within months of the president’s inauguration, voters were revolting against his program. By the end of 2010, they had delivered Republicans seven new seats in the U.S. Senate, a new majority in the U.S. House, a new majority of the nation’s governors, and nearly 700 new legislative seats across the country – including large majorities of both chambers of the North Carolina General Assembly.
There is no question that Obama’s policy choices helped determine these outcomes. The House Democrats who chose not to vote for ObamaCare and cap and trade, for example, tended to weather the 2010 storm while Democrats who did – such as North Carolina’s own Bob Etheridge – paid for it at the polls.
As a result of gains at the state level, Republicans had more influence over redistricting last year than they had in decades, and control over North Carolina’s process for the first time ever. Not surprisingly, district maps grew much less friendly to Democrats. That made them unlikely to recover lost ground in 2012, and indeed likely to lose more of it in North Carolina’s congressional delegation.
Retiring U.S. Rep. Brad Miller gets it. “I think we would all have been better off — President Obama politically, Democrats in Congress politically, and the nation would have been better off — if we had dealt first with the financial system and the other related economic issues and then come back to healthcare,” Miller told The Hill last week.
Compared with the political and policy disasters of the Obama administration, Gov. Beverly Perdue has had a modest role in shaping the contours of North Carolina’s 2012 elections. Still, her contribution wasn’t helpful. After signing a recovery-dampening tax increase in 2009, Perdue insisted that the legislature extend it in 2011. The new Republican majority said no, as was the obvious outcome from the start, while most Democrats were forced to endorse a tax hike that didn’t happen. So all they got was an unpopular vote with no revenue attached.
And after initially playing for a middle ground on regulatory reform and other issues after the 2010 Republican sweep, Perdue lurched leftward during the latter weeks of the 2011 session, vetoing popular measures to cut red tape, promote energy exploration, remove questionable barriers to capital punishment, and require photo IDs to vote. By kowtowing to a narrow base of liberal voters who opposed these bills, Perdue managed to pull her party away from mainstream public opinion rather than position Democrats for electoral recovery in 2012. (The governor later undid some of the damage by walking back towards reasonable positions on oil and gas exploration.)
Having made such a mess of things, the governor then made a late decision to retire, giving Democrats only a few weeks to put together gubernatorial campaigns and pick a nominee to run against Pat McCrory in the fall.
Certainly the sexual harassment story is distracting Democrats. Certainly there are grounds for questioning the state chairman’s handling of the case. But David Parker didn’t get North Carolina Democrats into their present political predicament. The president and the governor did that, entirely without his assistance.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.