RALEIGH – After Sunday’s jaw-dropping endorsement of Pat McCrory by the Raleigh News & Observer, it’s become clear that the North Carolina left-leaning media establishment doesn’t quite know what to make of the mayor of Charlotte. It’s as if the campaign has been an extended riff on the old Saturday Night Live character of “Pat” – with the big-city editors playing the role of puzzled onlookers stumbling around awkwardly trying to figure out his true identity.
The question on their minds has been: Is he or isn’t he one of them? You know, a conservative Republican (eek!) For a variety of reasons, the newspapers’ editorial boards really wanted a reason to oppose Beverly Perdue. But my guess is that they couldn’t bring themselves to endorse someone who could be mistaken for Robin Hayes, Richard Vinroot, or Patrick Ballantine – the last three GOP candidates for governor, whom most of the big papers had editorialized against, often vociferously.
So they decided to operate on the assumption that while McCrory says he’s a conservative Republican, his statement shouldn’t be taken at face value. Therefore, it would okay to give him the nod (among the state’s large metro dailies, only the Wilmington Star News endorsed Perdue).
Uh-uh. There’s no mystery here. The political class outside Charlotte may not know him well, but Pat McCrory has been the dominant political force in North Carolina’s largest city for many years. He’s got a long record. He’s spent years commenting on policy issues in print, broadcast, and public appearances. I wouldn’t count on many surprises.
On most issue of state import, McCrory is a conservative in the mainstream of the Republican Party. He says that state spending and taxes are too high. He favors market-based reforms of the education and health-care systems. He thinks needless regulations hamper business growth, job creation, and domestic energy production. He opposes same-sex marriage and more gun control. He says that the state is ignoring its core responsibilities, such as public safety, while spending scarce resources on low-priority programs and pork-barrel items.
Admittedly, McCrory differs from most of the conservative movement on some local issues. He supported public funds for the construction of a basketball arena and a NASCAR museum in uptown Charlotte. While critical in principle of economic-development incentives, he argues – as do many public officials – that North Carolina can’t afford to abolish targeted tax breaks or subsidies if other states offer them. Most famously, he helped get a half-cent sales tax enacted in 1998 to fund transit projects in Mecklenburg County, and led the campaign against a 2007 attempt to repeal the tax via public referendum.
Like most fiscal conservatives, I didn’t agree with the mayor on these matters. But guess who did? Richard Vinroot also spoke out in favor of the transit tax. Robin Hayes (and Elizabeth Dole) supported Mecklenburg’s efforts to qualify for federal transit funds. In 2004, Patrick Ballantine expressed concern about the state’s role in helping to fund the Charlotte-Mecklenburg transit plan, but didn’t promise to eliminate all state transit funding (or all incentive programs, for that matter). Conservatives are hardly unanimous on every issue, and conservative politicians in particular sometimes dissent in cases where saying no means risking some short-term financial fail-out – federal transit funds spent elsewhere, for example, or companies choosing other jurisdictions more willing to hand out largesse.
The truth of the matter is that Pat McCrory’s philosophy and gubernatorial platform aren’t substantially different from those previously advanced by Hayes, Vinroot, or Ballantine. In the latter two cases, in fact, McCrory’s “culture of corruption” theme sounds a lot like his predecessors’ strong criticisms of the campaign tactics and public record of Mike Easley. Furthermore, McCrory has explicitly pointed to South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford as an inspiration and model for governance. Sanford is one of the most conservative governors in the United States.
So why have the editors of The News & Observer, The Charlotte Observer, the Greensboro News & Record, and other papers tried mightily to talk around McCrory’s conservatism in their endorsements of his candidacy? Because they appear to be unimpressed with Beverly Perdue, unhappy with her campaign, and unconvinced that she will offer a clean break from an Easley administration that has spent the past two years battling with the media over secrecy, scandals, and a mental-health system gone horribly awry.
Perhaps liberal editorial writers believe that if McCrory is elected, he will prove malleable and easily persuaded to abandon his agenda for theirs. It just goes to show that they still don’t know him particularly well.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.