RALEIGH – Judging from recent political controversies, it’s clear that state and national Democrats think they will benefit politically by sticking up for Big Labor and Big Business. I don’t get it.

Let’s start with Gov. Beverly Perdue. On Tuesday she issued her first veto of a major piece of legislation. Did the governor choose to pick a fight with Republicans over education policy, or voter ID, or health care reform, or some other issue about which her Democratic base feels passionately and with which she might rally support among swing voters?

No. Perdue chose to veto a bill that would have reduced North Carolina’s fiscal deficit by hundreds of millions of dollars a year – thus making tax hikes or state-employee layoffs less likely. She chose to veto the bill on the grounds that it limited her ability to give grants to large corporations.

I’ll shed employees, cut services, and raise taxes, Perdue is telling the voters of North Carolina, but I refuse to cut corporate welfare.

This is a strategy for political recovery? Add in the fact that the giveaway programs Perdue used her veto to protect – such as Golden LEAF and Job Development Investment Grants (JDIG) – were set up by a disgraced former governor, Mike Easley, from whom Perdue needs to be running away as fast as possible, and you have a political mess.

Even if you think business-incentive programs are a necessary evil, because competing states and countries offer them, surely you can see that using a highly publicized veto to protect them at the expense of other state programs and taxpayers is likely to make North Carolina voters angrier at Perdue, not more supportive of her.

It would have been wiser to sign the bill, and then come back to the legislature for immediate action if the governor thought she needed incentives to land a major prospect. With several public statements over the past couple of weeks, Republican leaders had left that door wide open for Perdue. She chose not to use it.

So state Democrats are left defending corporate welfare as one of their leader’s highest spending priorities. Good luck with that. Because of a number of factors – controversial state incentive programs, federal bailouts of banks and car companies, and general unease about the economy – the public has become extremely hostile to big business as an institution.

In a 2010 Gallup survey, for example, only 19 percent of respondents expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in big business. Small business – which tends to benefit from broader tax relief or infrastructure improvements, not cash grants or targeted tax breaks – was far more popular, at 66 percent.

It gets worse for the Democrats. At the national level, Democratic leaders have chosen to fight their way back to political power by sticking up for labor unions. Democrats and allied special-interest groups are rallying in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and even here in North Carolina on behalf of public-sector union rules, unsustainable health care and pension plans, and collective-bargaining privileges.

So in addition to associating themselves with corporate welfare for big business, Democrats are associating themselves with organized labor, which got only a 20 percent confidence rating in the same Gallup poll.

I don’t wish either businesses or unions ill. I think that public confidence in both institutions could and should be significant improved. Simplifying the tax code, abolishing special privileges, and ending the bailout mentality once and for all would send voters a message that big-business insiders will no longer be able to manipulate the political system for their own benefit at the expense of small firms and taxpayers.

As for labor unions, it would be best for them to return to their roots as purely voluntary associations serving members with group insurance, legal representation, and job training and placement. They should no longer seek to use government power or threats of violence to compel membership or dues, target “scabs,” or manipulate the political system.

For now, however, big business and big labor are institutions with major image problems – except among Democratic politicians and strategists.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.