Learnin’ from — ROY ????
It apears DC Dems are drooling and fawning all over our Accidental Governor.™ (A weak sister RINO opponent who spent four years thumbing his nose at his base? Twenty thousand votes out of Durham County in the middle of the night? Hell of a mandate there.)
Yep. He’s had his ass handed to him via numerous veto overrides. He’s pretty much ignored in the big discussions in our fair capital city. And he’s apparently The Great White Hope for national Democrats:
Roy Cooper wants Democrats to do something they haven’t done in state politics in years: Go on offense.
His eyes on 2018 state Legislature races and potential special elections before then, the North Carolina governor is launching a multimillion-dollar, multiyear effort to knock Republicans out of the state capital. And national Democrats, reeling from losing hundreds of seats in statehouses across the country over the past decade, are hoping other governors pay close attention.
Cooper’s initiative is the latest frontier in a state that’s a cauldron of just about every political fight in America—redistricting, voter ID, public education, gender. The two major parties are just about equally matched here, though unaffiliated voters outnumber Republicans. North Carolina is where Hillary Clinton swooped in for her final, exuberant past-midnight campaign rally—only to see the race called later that day for Donald Trump; it’s where a local battle over who can use which bathroom became a national brawl over human sexuality.[…]
Roy Cooper reminds me of the main character, Peter Gibbons, in that classic comedy “Office Space.” Peter decides he’s not going to do ONE DAMN THING, and Lady Luck keeps smiling on him. All kinds of good things end up happening for him.
It’s pretty hard to identify any major achievements during Cooper’s sixteen year tenure in the AG’s office. Raleigh’s GOP establishment regularly — for some reason — gave him a free pass every four years.
His crime lab was a full-blown disaster. All kinds of innocent people got jailed. Criminals got off because of delays and screwups. It earned national criticism from even leftist media. Local governments had to farm out their crime lab needs in order to get a timely response for court cases. (For some reason, the weak sister RINO incumbent didn’t think this needed to be brought up in an ad or two prior to the November vote.)
Cooper was also Johnny-Come-Lately on some of the biggest cases in the state. (See John Edwards, Mike Easley, Duke lacrosse, various police corruption probes.) The feds would do the leg work. Ol’ Roy would show in time for the cameras.
He pretty much announced his intention to run for governor on election eve 2012. We had an empty desk and an empty suit running the Justice Department for FOUR YEARS while ol’ Roy pursued his dream of Blount Street. Just like Peter Gibbons, he didnt’t do a damn thing and STILL came out smelling like a rose. 
A national poll came out showing that Cooper is officially MEDIOCRE. In terms of popularity, Cooper shows up at #24 — right in the middle — among the nation’s 50 governors. He’s got 48 percent of the state’s voters either disapproving of him, or having no opinion.
*Yep, we’ve got the second coming of JFK here.*
We’ve got a guy here with a real lack of accomplishment, a less-than-impressive election win over a less-than-impressive incumbent, and less-than-impressive polling numbers halfway through his first year. One can only HOPE Democrats use this guy as a model for their future plans.
If Republicans can get off their current ME-TOO kick and manage to offer a distinct, real choice for voters in 2020, they can end the Roy Cooper story right then and there — crushing a lot of driveby dreams at the same time.
Legislative Republicans cowardly caving in on HB2 / bathroom privacy and giving Cooper a budget full of money for Democrat constituencies has probably made him think the idiots we have in legislative leadership in the General Assembly will keep running scared. Sadly, he may be right. It is time for some new leadership. The Beaufort Observer had some good thoughts on that:
http://www.beaufortobserver.net/Articles-NEWS-and-COMMENTARY-c-2017-07-21-286995.112112-It-is-time-for-conservative-leaders-in-the-General-Assembly-to-grow-a-backbone.html
The GOP should not kid itself…Cooper will probably be re-elected fairly easily. Unlike the idiotic McCrory, Cooper will never turn on his base. Unlike McCrory, he has smart political advisors—not a dummy like McCrory’s chief of staff, Thomas Stith. Add in the fact that the Democrats still totally control the politically-powerful UNC system, the Attorney General’s Office–and thanks to Bob Edmunds–the State Supreme Court, and the NC GOP is in serious trouble. Don’t be at all surprised to see the GOP lose its veto-proof legislative margin in 2018. When that happens, Cooper will be in total control along with his backstop–the Democratic Supreme Court. RINO Republicanism always loses in the end. Always has. Always will.
McCrory indeed screwed up badly, and we knew that from the get-go from his cabinet selections, half of which were not even Republicans. Then he failed to put GOP activists in the sub-cabinet positions. Holshouser and Martin had been smart enough to put solid Republicans in those slots. A lot of the bad advice McCrory got was from his bad appointments. Stith did his share of that, but to be fair, Stith was selected before Jack Hawke really knew how sick he was. Stith was always Hawke’s front man, but his Hawke out of the picture, Stith was clueless. If Hawke had been there pulling Stith’s strings as was intended, I think we would have seen a far different outcome.
As to the Supreme, the main culprit is not Edmunds, but instead the dolt advising Edmunds, consultant Paul Shumaker, who was the idiot who pushed the stupid idea that Edmunds would run better in a non-partisan election.. The secondary culprit is David Lewis, who as committee chairman in the House went along with Shumaker’s stupid idea and put it into law, despite members of his own committee telling him as it went through that the Supreme Court election really needed to be partisan.
I think you need look no further than to our esteemed members of the house. While I really do not think Moore is liberal (or conservative) he is simply very eager to please special interests. Some of those special interest groups are in reality the Dems – for example, solar lobbyists have a lot of “influence” and they live or die on government handouts – classic Dem business model – so they cozy up to Moore and we have legislation that is incongruent with conservative dogma. Each of you know countless other examples. The answer is to expose these folks for who they are.