#ncpol: Pat, we hardly got to know you.
So, our third Republican governor since Reconstruction is going down in history as the first North Carolina governor to be voted out of office. Some people have laughably tried to pin Pat McCrory’s loss on some imagined right-wing stridency.
I have been networking with some conservative renegades inside Charlotte for some time. For years, prior to 2012, they regaled me with stories of then-mayor Pat sticking it to conservatives and the whole limited government agenda. He stepped out publicly to oppose conservative efforts to roll back taxes in Charlotte. He bragged about his “good friend” and golfing buddy Jim Black. Ol’ Pat also had a long-term deep bonded friendship with former councilman and mayor Patrick Cannon — last seen being dragged off in handcuffs by the FBI on bribery charges. 
Pat McCrory was and is a social butterfly. Ideology and party affiliation are annoyances to people like him.
I had been hearing from insiders in Raleigh that the whole governor thing was a strain on the McCrory marriage. Mrs. McCrory didn’t like Raleigh, and rarely visited. She spent most of her time at the family home in Charlotte. McCrory himself was more inclined toward a night at home alone with a beer and a football game on the TV than with the political inside baseball of our capital city. 
After years of Jim Hunt, Mike Easley, Dennis Wicker, and Bev Perdue, Republicans were hungry for the chance to get back upstairs in that house on Blount Street. Ol’ Pat came close in 2008. So, he was by default the front runner for 2012.
While legislative leaders stood strong on fighting ObamaCare, McCrory waffled. In 2014, when the House and Senate w
ere fighting over spending levels in the budget, McCrory sided with then-speaker and soon-to-be-senator Thom Tillis and his much higher spending levels. McCrory even bounced around on both sides of HB2 — his alleged poison pill. He settled down firmly as an opponent only when his campaign team began to realize how dire his prospects were. While Common Core opponents stood strong with the NCGOP at the polls, McCrory surrounded himself with Common Core fans and did next to nothing to kill off that bureaucratic nightmare. And then there was the whole praising Jim Hunt as his hero thing.
The steady political instincts of Jack Hawke were sorely missed. Hawke would have had McCrory run away from picking a fight with the Sons of Confederate Veterans over license plates. Hawke would have urged more diplomacy and forethought on the whole I-77 tolling fiasco. He also likely would have nixed the selling of fisheries commission seats to environmental activists. And how about the hiding from Trump? Richard Burr is arguably getting six more years in DC because his opponent ran ads tying him to Donald Trump.
It’s also amazing how little of a footprint four years of Republicans has left on state government. An awful lot of deep-pocketed Democrats 
got appointments under this Republican regime. There was very little house-cleaning at the various agencies. As a result, Governor Roy Cooper won’t need to do much tweaking after he’s sworn in.
In 2012, we went with a governor — and a Republican leader — who had little to no devotion to the party platform or conservatism itself. And it filtered down through the ranks. Legislative leaders went into the campaign bragging about how they threw even more money at public education than the Democrats did.
We posted earlier about a treatise Rep.-elect Beverly Boswell submitted to House leaders. It’s basically a restatement of the GOP platform and basic conservative principles. It got poo-pooed by Team Timmy in the House. But it actually should be respected as a great roadmap to leading the party out of the McCrory debacle and BACK INTO the upstairs portion of that big house on Blount Street.
“In 2012, we went with a governor — and a Republican leader — who had little to no devotion to the party platform or conservatism itself. And it filtered down through the ranks.”
Doesn’t this describe the 2016 Presidential race, too?
I would not say bye bye so soon what are the odds that he will run for chairman of the ncgop this next state convention
Donald Trump saved the Republican Party in 2016. You could actually say that Trump saved the GOP from itself. Would that someone could have saved North Carolina Republicans from the likes of Pat McCrory. We learned a painful lesson from his tenure.
The biggest contrast was in personnel. The old saying in politics is that ”personnel is policy”. Jim Martin and Jim Holshouser understood that and put solid Republicans in all the important policy making slots, and had a robust office within the governor’s office to ride herd on all state jobs and put Republicans in them. Jim Martin had a staff of 14 under Wilma Sherrill doing that.
What did McCrory do? He had no Wilma Sherill and no office within the governor’s office to track and fill personnel slots within the administration. He had one guy, Charles Duckett, handling boards and commissions, and occasionally sending a resume for a full time job but with no authority or clout to push anyone. McCrory outsourced filling the key policy positions to his cabinet secrtaries, and half of them were not even Republican to begin with. The ones who were Republican were never policy oriented party activists, so they ignored the party faithful as much as those who were not even Republican.
All of this impacted policy, as these people who were not grounded in sound GOP policy often went off in other directions. The fact that the party faithful were mostly ignored when it came time to fill boards and commissions or full time jobs estranged McCrory from party activists, as did the policy glitches made by some of the deadwood that McCrory filled his administration with.
The root cause of McCrory’s problems were putting in people who were not well grounded in GOP policy in the cabinet slots and then turning over the filling of other positions to them, instead of riding herd on it with a robust staff from the governor’s office.
I hope that Dan Forest is watching. He should follow the successful Jim Martin model, not the failed Pat McCrory model.
You nailed it, Raphael!
I am waiting to see how long it takes for the McCrory campaign to blame the HB2 bill for his loss. Which is really the only reason he did as well as he did.
Watch and see.
McCrory is a spineless flip-flopper, with no allegiance to any ideology whatsoever. He was only out for himself and his poll ratings, and voters who had been fooled in 2012 had enough of Phony McCrony. May his political career rest in peace.
All of the above so true. Pat read this everyday in 2017 as you look in the mirror.
Amen!
Hey. This is the country’s most famous republican gov. Voter ID…Refusing to expand Medicaid.. Strictest voter suppression laws in the usa.
And yet, you pecker-breeds complain he wasn’t conservative enough? He pandered rightward everyday…and that ain’t enuff?
Quit whining.
Voter ID? That is just common sense protection of election integrity that many states and most developed countries in the world have. Only the extreme left opposes it because it interferes with their ability to steal votes. It is an election integrity issue, not a conservative / liberal issue.
The Obamacare Medicaid expansion? That is fiscally irresponsible and most Republican states said NO to Obama on it. McCrory waffled and wanted to keep his options open but Phil Berger put forward the legislation to make a firm NO on the issue, putting our waffling governor in a box.
”Voter suppression”? If you mean suppressing illegal alien votes (which are illegal), votes by dead people, and votes by fictitious people (see ACORN), North Carolina has a lot we need to do to tighten up. Illegal votes SHOULD be suppressed as they are after all, illegal. All you have to do is look at what happened in Bladen County or the hundreds of students illegal registered to a gravel parking lot and a school administration building in Durham to see that lots more needs to be done to secure ballot integrity in NC from the leftwing fraudsters.
McCrory pandered leftward as much as he pandered rightward, and therein lay the problem. Ask the commercial fishermen, for example.
Idiotic nonsense. Go find a safe space for this drivel.
“So, our third Republican governor since Reconstruction is going down in history as the first North Carolina governor to be voted out of office.”
Be fair, Brant.
Until 1976, no Governor could run for re-election in NC.
There has only been one other GOP governor who could since then — Martin. He served two terms.
Perdue knew she’d get beat, so she didn’t run again. Had she, she’d have been punted without a doubt.
Jim Martin ran a much tighter ship on policy, and worked much closer with the party faithful, and was rewarded with an easy win for a second term. McCrory didn’t and as a consequence, wasn’t.
There is another big lesson in this race and that is Republicans do NOT need to let the biased liberal media have control of debates. Moderators should NOT be from the biased liberal media, and should not have control of questions. In McCrory’s debates, the biased liberal media moderators tried to make the debate mostly about the liberal talking points. I call this a media circus debate. Trump also had that problem, as have GOP presidential candidates in past races.
The best way around this problem is to insist on debates being Lincoln-Douglas style, with no moderator and with each candidate choosing half of the questions. That is fair and even-handed which the media circus debates are NOT. Media circus debates have the GOP candidate double teamed by the Democrat and the moderator.
If a moderator is deemed necessary, then the best bet would be to have dual moderators at each debate, one chosen by each side. Questions should still come from the candidates, NOT the moderators.
You really have to wonder how much longer North Carolina’s conservative voters are going to continue to support the NC GOP. McCrory wasted his first term. The UNC system is more liberal than ever. The Democrats took control of the NC Supreme Court thanks to the Mark Martin-Bob Edmunds fiasco. Conservative voters have been more than faithful to the GOP, but have gotten little in return. Had it not been for Trump, pundits would be writing the obituaries of both the national and NC Republican Parties. Something to think about.
You are right about McCrory wasting his first term, and he did so by not being a policy-oriented Republican, as he should have been. His administration wandered off in too many directions.
You are wrong about the Supreme Court debacle. Yes, Paul Shumaker may have given his usual incompetent advice against party labels to his clients on the Court, but it was the legislature that had the final say. When a more astute member of the House Elections Committee pointed out to its chairman, David Lewis, that the legislation responding to the court throwing out the silly and liberal ”retention election” should provide for party affiliation of the candidates effected, which in that election was Edmunds, on the ballot, David Lewis refused to bother to amend the bill and said it could be done next year. Lewis’ failure to take this more astute advice of one of his committee members is the reason we had the debacle on the Supreme Court. While there might be a Shumaker / Martin / Edmunds component, the main cause was a David Lewis problem. If the party affiliation had been on the ballot, we would still have a GOP majority.
It’s all about the epic incompetence of the NCGOP Central Committee. They lost the Governor’s mansion, the lost the North Carolina Supreme Court, and they lost a lot of trust, good will, and support from the grass roots rank-and-file membership. That’s a triple play.
Thank the Lord McCrory is gone. I agreed with the H2B issue, but that did not help with his incompetency as governor.
Better an incompetent who drifts all over the political spectrum than a George Soros / Tom Steyer go-fer like Roy Cooper. I am sure Cooper will push to get all the Anthony Weiners of the world access to bathrooms and shower rooms with women and little girls, too.
I dare him to eliminate single sex bathrooms. Please, please, please start with the public schools’ bathrooms and locker rooms. Even my clueless liberal mother friends would pitch a fit. There is a huge difference between in theory and in practice — especially when it comes to one’s own kids. Bring it on.