RALEIGH – Everyone knows that North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue is in big trouble. The governor and her staff certainly know it. It isn’t just the fact that Perdue’s polling numbers have been upside down since 2009. It’s the reality that Raleigh is a very different place than it was just three months ago.
After decades in public office as state representative, state senator, lieutenant governor for eight years, and now governor for two years, Perdue is for the first time without powerful friends in the state legislature. The new Republican majorities have committed themselves to a policy agenda with which Perdue has significant personal and political disagreement. Their majorities are veto-proof in the Senate and close to veto-proof in the House.
But don’t count Perdue out. She still enjoys some advantages – not the least of which is that she gets to act first. She gets to choose which issues to heighten and which battles to pick. If she chooses wisely, her ability to compete for reelection in 2012 will be significantly enhanced.
In large part, she’ll set the stage for all subsequent events when she releases her 2011-13 budget proposal, probably next month. Based on what the governor has already announced in recent weeks, she plans to propose a plan that rewrites the state’s organizational chart, eliminates thousands of positions, rethinks some longtime state programs and operations, and reduces the regulatory burden on North Carolina’s struggling private-sector employers, particularly small businesses.
Perdue’s approach sounds fiscally conservative. That’s why she is getting cautious praise from Republican lawmakers and panicky criticism from some Democrats and left-wing activists. My guess is that both responses were expected and desired.
As I said, the governor isn’t a political neophyte. She’s been around long enough to see many politicians and political trends come and go. She recognizes that Republicans gained public support in 2009 and 2010 as voters began to associate Democrats with fiscal recklessness. The 2012 electorate will be different from the 2010 electorate, certainly. But even in the very Democratic year of 2008, most winning Democratic candidates, including Bev Perdue and Barack Obama, ran as fiscal centrists who would cut taxes for most households and businesses, not raise them.
To propose more taxes in 2011 would be to worsen Perdue’s political problems, not alleviate them. Most North Carolinians don’t think the state’s fiscal woes are caused by excessively low taxes. Mobilizing those who do won’t win nearly enough votes to give the governor another term in 2012. It will turn off independents and other voters who swung heavily against Democrats in 2010 on fiscal issues.
That’s not to say Democratic strategists are wrong to advise Perdue to pick some fights with legislative Republicans. After the Republican Revolution in 1994, both Bill Clinton and Jim Hunt worked with their GOP adversaries on some issues and picked fights with them on others. It was a successful strategy, one that Perdue will surely seek to emulate.
But she ought not to do it over taxes. Nor should she do it over a Republican proposal to require voters to present picture identification in order to cast votes in North Carolina.
I know some civil-rights leaders are convinced that the requirement is basically a phantom poll tax to depress turnout among minorities and the poor, but there’s scant evidence to support such a charge. Perhaps some Republicans exaggerate the extent of voter fraud – because the state hasn’t been requiring identification in the past, it’s hard to know what the real numbers are – but the fact is that other states already require IDs, their constitutionality has already been upheld by the Supreme Court, and the vast majority of citizens of all political stripes consider IDs a reasonable safeguard against illegal voting.
Some Democrats I know think Perdue should pick her fight with Republicans on social issues such as abortion rights. Others think she should choose education, health care, or the environment.
The point is that she has the choice. The human being with the greatest power to determine the governor’s political fate is Perdue herself.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.