#ncpol: The AG has been RUN OVER. (Call the crime lab.)

Pat McCrory would be IN MUCH BETTER SHAPE politically if he had governed the last four years like he carried himself in last night’s debate.  He sounded like an actual Republican, and called Roy Cooper out like he should have been called out long ago.

The Cooper campaign has benefited greatly from in-kind contributions from the state and national drive by media, as well as from a horde of liberal activists.  The same limousine liberals Pat McCrory has sipped cocktails with at uptown parties for decades has been beating on him like a red-headed step-child.   In a recent hit piece by a liberal web site, McCrory was quoted telling a group of pastors about the toll the HB2 fight has taken on him personally:

 […] “My wife and I ,” he went on, “we’re being shunned for a political disagreement, a value disagreement…And it’s personal, it’s death threats. Last week I was verbally assaulted by a 21-year-old drunk student. And she was arrested. And those are tough. Everyone says, ‘Gosh you must have thick skin.’ I don’t have thick skin, I just hide it…It gets to me, I just hide it until I go home and sit in a room or walk a dog and I go, ‘Wow, this is depressing.’ So I need to let you know it’s not easy.”[…] 

Perhaps McCrory is having a Trump-style epiphany.  Trump, like McCrory, has long played footsie with urban liberals.  Trump in Manhattan, McCrory in uptown Charlotte.  It’s all good clean fun when you’re hitting the charity and cocktail party circuit, and doing ribbon cuttings. But when you get in a position where you can impede the leftist political agenda — as McCrory and Trump have done — the claws come out.  It’s WAR.

Trump has responded by slapping back at his former cocktail party pals.  Is this a sign that McCrory has learned the same lesson Trump has? 

Some of the best lines of the night: 

McCrory cast Cooper as ineffective and self-serving. “You’re about as straight as another trial lawyer who became a politician in North Carolina – John Edwards,” McCrory said, referring to the former Democratic U.S. senator who got embroiled in scandal.[…]

Like his ads, McCrory attacked Cooper over problems at the state crime lab.

“If you can’t handle the crime lab … how are you going to handle all of state government?” the governor asked.

Cooper said he’d ordered an independent investigation of the state crime lab issues years ago.[..]

INVESTIGATING and DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT are two different things.  As we noted recently, Democrat AND Republican-aligned local governments and law enforcement agencies are contracting with private labs to avoid having to do business with Cooper’s taxpayer funded crime lab.  MORE: 

[…] Todd asked McCrory why he continues to support Donald Trump even though he condemned his lewd remarks of a sexual nature on a video leaked last week.

“Mr. Trump needs to have his mouth washed out with soap, but so does Mrs. Clinton,” said McCrory, who said he supports the Republican nominee’s stand on other issues.

“It’s hard to believe that Gov. McCrory continued to support a presidential candidate who condones sexual assault,” Cooper said.[…]

Said the gubernatorial nominee of the party whose presidential nominee has been MARRIED for decades to a Golden-Gloves groper — the King of The Dirty Whores himself — and has helped cover up his escapades.  

This was a good night for the governor.  He needs a whole lot more days and nights like that to pull this thing out.

I know, I know.  A lot of folks run for office saying one thing, and then do something different after being sworn in.  We’ve got a whole lot of people who have won election to Capitol Hill and Jones Street since 2010 as evidence.  

But with the beating he’s taken from the media and the activist left and his old cocktail party pals, maybe he’s starting to realize where his true friends might be.

Something else that might help for November?  A road map as to what a second McCrory term will look like.  A conservative agenda — demonstrating leadership and a commitment to smaller government and greater personal freedom — for the future.