RALEIGH — Over the past two years, it’s become commonplace to search for deep meaning in The Lord of the Rings, given its new cachet, and to make allusions to it when discussing a host of real-world issues and personalities.
No, I’m not going to do that here. I’m not going to compare North Carolina’s ongoing budget struggles to The Lord of the Rings. Let’s face it. The General Assembly doesn’t rise to that level of maturity. The more appropriate work is J.R.R. Tolkien’s original children’s tale, The Hobbit, which gave birth to the later Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Specifically, I’m thinking of the climactic end of the story, after Bilbo Baggins has used the Ring’s invisibility powers to help the men of Lake-town to kill the dragon Smaug. Recovering his progenitor’s treasure from the dragon’s mountain cave, Thorin and Bilbo’s other dwarvish friends prepare to fight separate armies of human bowmen and elvish spearmen who are coming to partake of it. Later, stout and stubborn dwarvish allies come marching, axes in hand, to give their cousins aid. Then a horde of evil goblins show up, prompting the men, elves, and dwarves to unite against a common foe. Finally, a force of eagles appears at the last minute to save the day for the forces of light against the wolf-riding goblins.
This Battle of the Five Armies is an exciting but surprisingly brief passage in The Hobbit — and a perfect analogue to the budget battle now underway in Raleigh, which also involves five distinct factions:
* Senate Democrats. A cohesive horde under the command of Sen. Marc Basnight (D-Dare) and Sen. Tony Rand (D-Cumberland), among others, the Senate Democrats tried to overrun their adversaries with the political equivalent of scimitars and wargs. But most inside-the-Beltline denizens thought that the Senate leadership’s predictions of budgetary woe without another billion-dollar tax increase next year were just so much crying wolf.
* House Democrats and the Richard Morgan Republicans. This unlikely coalition of political dwarves, normally quarrelsome and jealous, was willing to approve nearly half a billion in higher taxes next year, mostly through reimposing sales and income taxes enacted in 2001 as “temporary” increases. But they parried the Senate Democrats’ blow for still-higher taxes, in part by using an old battlefield trick. They backed themselves up against an impassable stream — the possibility of a state-government shutdown this week without a budget in hand — and thus cut off their own retreat. This was intended to give the enemy a clear sign of their stubbornness and ferocity.
* The Senate Republicans emerged from the political hinterlands, rhetorical spears in hand, to probe and joust when the opportunity presented itself. Too few in number to offer a real impediment to the tax-goblins on their own, these GOP elves signalled a willingness to launch a final, desperate volley — to support Gov. Mike Easley’s threatened veto of an emerging budget compromise, thus bringing back the spectre of a government shutdown.
* The House Republicans must feel very much like the men of Lake-town did in the Tolkien story: they and their political supporters thought they slew the big-government dragon last November, winning 55 percent of the vote statewide, only to see a handful of mercurial dwarves emerge from the top of the mountain to hoard the political prize that was rightly theirs. Divided and weary of the conflict, they were unsure how to proceed as of Sunday. Some believed that the House-Senate budget deal, including the tax extensions but not the Senate’s excise-tax hikes, was the best they can hope for, and feared that a gubernatorial veto would clear a path for a state lottery. Others agreed with their Senate counterparts that sustaining a veto would be the best way for legislative Republicans to recover their lost honor and restore their party’s fiscal conservatism.
* And finally, with little warning, Easley came flying — or coptering, as the case may be — onto the battlefield to “save the day.” Arguing that the House-Senate compromise relied too heavily on optimstic revenue estimates, the governor and his fellow fowl in the administration may well turn the tide of battle with their lofty rhetoric and veto. Or they may be trampled underfoot by a first-of-its-kind veto override.
And what of Bilbo Baggins? In the story, he is dismayed at the senseless waste and carnage of the Battle of the Five Armies, and seeks to wait it out unnoticed. But at the last moment, he gets bonked on the head with a rock.
North Carolina taxpayers, put your helmets on.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.