Pat McCrory lied. There’s really no other way to look at it. In a debate during the 2012 election, McCrory was asked, “What further restrictions on abortion would you agree to sign?” He answered, simply and definitively, “None.”
Yesterday, he said he will sign into law a bill that requires women to wait three days before having abortions. The bill is certainly patronizing to women, as N&O columnist Barry Saunders points out. And it’s also more evidence of Big Government conservatives shoving their noses in our business. But it’s the lying that is a political liability.
Pat McCrory is another politician who will say whatever he thinks is in his best political interest. During a debate in the general election, it was in his best interest to say that he wouldn’t sign any more restrictions. In a week when he angered his base by vetoing the magistrates bill, it’s in his best interest not to piss them off further.
McCrory is a man who will say anything to promote himself with little regard for the truth. When Moral Mondays were riling up Raleigh every week, McCrory told a reporter that he went to the protests. In fact, he never did. In an interview with WFAE, the public radio station in Charlotte, he said he never cut unemployment benefits when everybody knows that he did just that. In the same interview, he said that Obamacare caused Duke Energy and IBM to stop offering their employees health care. He cut that story out of whole cloth.
McCrory won’t just lie for political purposes. He’ll lie for personal gain, too. He either lied on state ethics forms or in filings to the federal Securities and Exchange Commission. In SEC filings, he claimed to be a partner in his brother’s company. On state ethics forms, he says he wasn’t. He can’t have it both ways.
And McCrory’s prevarications aren’t a new phenomenon. Before he was Mayor of Charlotte, he presided over a city council meeting in which private property was condemned to give his employer, Duke Energy, a right-of-way. McCrory claimed that he didn’t know Duke was involved. However, in a court case, Supreme Court Justice I. Beverly Lake said that emails indicated that McCrory “had contact with Duke Power officials and discussed condemning” the property. In other words, he lied.
In North Carolina, being pro-life isn’t much of a political liability, but lying is. Democrats shouldn’t harp on McCrory’s curtailing a woman’s right to choose. They need to let voters know that they can’t trust what he says. He made clear campaign promises and then brazenly broke them. He lied to reporters on things big and small. He even deliberately and shamelessly misled either the SEC or the state of North Carolina. And he’s been doing it his entire political career.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
Ask him if he’s a pedophile.
You know things are bad in North Carolina when the likes of Chris Fitzsimon sing for McCrory.
“Politics or not, McCrory deserves credit for talking tough to the legislative leaders of his own party and for backing it up with two important vetoes and promising two more, one of which we can hope will be on legislation imposing an arbitrary 72-hour waiting period on women seeking an abortion.”
http://www.yourdailyjournal.com/news/opinion_columns/153875400/Pat-McCrorys-defining-moments
The NC Dem Party now has its marching orders. Two months before the 2016 election, issue a single ad, entitled “He Lies….a Lot,” that lists McCrory’s biggest and most overt prevarications. Those noted in this blog can head the list. And repeat that ad and message ad infinitum through election day.
Not a good idea in the same year that a Clinton is on the ballot.
Actually, it could be a great idea. Would underscore how the GOP is the party of unity and consistency, i.e., McCrory and every member of the GOP presidential candidate Clown Car all being very good liars….
Only one thing matters here – Democrats need to live up to their principles and vote a candidate into office that will stop this retreat to the ’50s.
Candidate McCrory clearly pandered to the audience on this questions while Governor McCrory is caught between the very conservative “values voters” to his right flank and the more moderate place he needs to message from in the fall of 2016. He should pay the price at the ballot box, but apparently he is not afraid to double back on himself…