RALEIGH – Political experience differs as much in kind as in amount – a point clearly illustrated by the first candidate forum of the 2008 governor’s race. Beverly Perdue and Pat McCrory are both experienced politicians, but McCrory came to Saturday’s North Carolina Bar Association event in Atlantic Beach ready to speak, via television, to North Carolina voters. Perdue came ready to speak to the relatively small audience of lawyers, reporters, and dignitaries in attendance.
The difference was striking, and not to Perdue’s benefit.
It went beyond simply the audiovisual experience, though it was noticeable there. McCrory is as a longtime mayor who lacks much formal lawmaking power. His influence has come from engaging the public directly, through media interviews and public speeches. At one time, he even hosted his own show on Charlotte’s primary talk-radio station, WBT-AM. Having both agreed and disagreed with McCrory on local issues over the years, I haven’t always cheered his effectiveness as a communicator, but I’ve always recognized it.
At Saturday’s forum, McCrory was comfortable, relaxed, smooth, and folksy. He led off his performance by contrasting the fantasy of speedy investigations and satisfying resolutions on CSI and Law & Order to the reality of overworked beat cops and underfunded crime labs trying to clear cases in North Carolina. He ended with an extended and funny Andy Griffth Show riff that also contrasted fiction and reality. (I felt like having a “big Orange drink” afterward.)
Perdue is a longtime state legislator who wielded substantial lawmaking power as a Senate appropriator and leadership insider. For the past eight years, she’s held the office of lieutenant governor – bearing an illustrious title but no more power, and indeed probably less, than before. Perdue has made many, many speeches in her career, but a large number of them have been floor speeches on legislation or appearances in front of friendly political gatherings and genial civic groups.
At Saturday’s forum, Perdue at times seemed uncomfortable, anxious, and off-balance. She made joking reference to reporters and other individuals in the room that most of the audience watching at home wouldn’t have understood. She referred repeatedly to what “y’all know” about her record, a questionable choice given that most North Carolina voters probably don’t know much about her record. The assumed personal familiarity sounded odd and egotistical. In both the opening and closing statements, she also clumsily stated strident opposition to school vouchers, an issue that hasn’t come up yet in the campaign and didn’t during the forum itself.
I know why Perdue did it. Some of her advisors previously helped get Mike Easley elected, and they pulled the same stunt on the 2000 Republican nominee, Richard Vinroot – claiming that his voucher proposal would rob North Carolina public schools of funds (and even citing the John Locke Foundation as their source). The attack made no sense, because Vinroot had argued for a means-tested scholarship program that would have yielded a smaller annual revenue to public schools only by reducing their enrollment and thus their annual expenditure, leaving public schools with more resources per student than they had before. Easley lied, to put it bluntly. But because the news media repeated his falsehood without question, it probably had some impact on swing voters concerned about education.
The real problem here is that in 2000, Easley was criticizing an idea that Vinroot had truly made a key element of his campaign. Pat McCrory hasn’t proposed any particular school-choice policy, other than lifting the statewide cap on charter schools. It would have looked less clumsy for Perdue to save her voucher attack for later in the campaign, so it would have seemed relevant. In fact, it would have been smarter to save it for later, anyway, to maximize its impact on voters in the homestretch.
The fact that Perdue made her silly voucher attack Saturday told me two things: 1) she and her campaign team are far more worried about the McCrory candidacy than they let on publicly, and 2) she is a candidate largely unschooled in the art of televised debate against a capable opponent.
Perdue still has important advantages. Having spent the better part of three decades in Raleigh, she has a grasp of policy detail and will rarely be stumped for an answer to any question about state government. And the ability to perform in public forums and debates isn’t as critical in modern campaigning as performing well in broadcast ads and raising money to finance them, like it or not.
Still, it shows how experience in one political arena doesn’t necessarily translate well to another political arena. Pat McCrory actually reminded me, stylistically, of Mike Easley, minus the Eastern NC drawl and programmatic rhyming. Beverly Perdue came across as a state legislator trying to establish her credibility as a candidate for higher office. Shouldn’t she have already done that eight years ago?
It was a stumble, albeit in a race with a long, long stretch of track still to traverse.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.