RALEIGH – So far in the 2011 legislative session, Gov. Bev Perdue has used her veto power twice: to defend corporate welfare at the expense of local governments and the taxpayers, and to defend President Obama’s health care program at the expense of constitution principle and the taxpayers.

What’s next? Will Perdue veto the bill removing North Carolina’s cap on charter schools to defend public employees against competition? Will she veto bills requiring voter IDs, suspending involuntary annexations, and protecting homeowners against new local taxes? All are bills supported by significant majorities of likely North Carolina voters.

Most importantly, will the governor veto a Republican-crafted state budget in a few weeks that cuts spending more than she wants and rejects her proposal for $600 million a year in higher taxes?

After the November elections, when Republicans gained control of both houses of the General Assembly for the first time in more than a century, panic-stricken Democrats tried frantically to forestall the onset of conservative governance in Raleigh.

Some said Perdue should immediately call a special legislative session to pass some long-sought Democratic initiatives and strip the incoming Republicans of power over the redistricting process. Others began searching the list of House and Senate winners to find moderate or freshman Republicans they might be able to flip on particular issues.

Neither strategy offered much prospect of success. The remaining option was to begin planning for the strategic use of the governor’s veto power to block key items in the Republican agenda. While the GOP had gained a veto-proof majority in the Senate, they would need four Democratic votes to overcome Perdue’s veto in the House. That would give the governor’s allies leverage.

By January, everyone knew that the governor and her legislative allies were going to deploy the veto. But few expected them to deploy it so quickly, on a budget-rescissions bill and a measure adding North Carolina to the list of states challenging ObamaCare in federal court. It seemed unlikely that Perdue would want to start saying no to every major initiative emerging from the Republican legislature.

But that’s where we seem to be going.

If the strategy is to recast Perdue as some kind of Governor No, I think it will prove to be a counterproductive one. Picking fights with the General Assembly over corporate welfare and ObamaCare will not ingratiate her with swing voters, who dislike both, and will only help her with the Democratic base when it comes to the latter cause.

Moreover, swing voters are unhappy not just about the weakness of the economy and the profligacy of the government but also about the apparent inability of elected officials to take sensible, resolute action on major issues. Two of the main issues in the midterm elections were government deficits and ObamaCare. Weeks into the 2011 session, Republican lawmakers took action on both priorities. The governor chose to block them.

And with regard to the budget-rescissions bill, Perdue’s veto came back to bite her this week when the administration announced plans to borrow about a half a billion dollars from various state accounts to cover cash-flow problems as the state paid out income tax refunds during March and April.

If the governor had allowed the Republicans’ rescissions bill become law, much if not all of the borrowing would have been rendered unnecessary. Instead, Perdue is proposing to tap funds such as an Employment Security Commission reserve and a state account for school capital needs.

Lawmakers, legislative staffers, and outside attorneys are questioning the legality of the governor’s maneuver, particularly in the aftermath of a state court decision finding prior fund transfers by former Gov. Mike Easley to be in violation of state law. But more importantly, Perdue’s actions amount to placing corporate welfare higher on the state’s priority list than jobless benefits or school construction.

That won’t make any sense to North Carolina voters. Under such conditions, playing the role of Governor No today will only make Perdue more likely to end up cast as Governor No More in 2012.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.