You would think that after Mitt Romney’s 47% remark defined him as an elitist with disdain for half of the country that Republican candidates would be vigilant about not making generalities about the electorate. But you would be wrong. And here in North Carolina, it’s especially bad.
For most of his term, Pat McCrory has blamed criticism of his misstatements and missteps on nefarious outside groups. In fact, these outside groups are people like teachers who got no pay raise, parents who watch their kids go to understaffed classrooms, African-Americans who believe Republicans are trying to suppress their vote, college students who think the same thing and also bemoan the cuts in higher education, women who are being denied access to health care, unemployed victims of the recession who lost their benefits despite the lack of jobs and the working poor who will pay more taxes because of the elimination the Earned Income Tax Credit.
And now Thom Tillis has weighed in. He doesn’t think they’re outside groups. He thinks they are whiners and losers. In an interview with Politico, Tillis said, “I think for the most part, what I see from the folks who are opposing our agenda is whining coming from losers.”
Somebody in the ranks of the GOP consulting class needs to get a clue. McCrory may be harder to handle. He’s a loose cannon with no self-awareness, a tin ear and not enough gray matter, but Thom Tillis is a different story. He’s supposed to be a top-tier candidate for U. S. Senate.
Why he would even mention his critics is beyond me. If he’s going to talk about the legislature, he should be putting a positive spin on the legislation that came out under his leadership, not criticizing the people who got screwed by it. And I lay much of the blame on whoever is responsible for prepping him to talk to the press.
Right now, we’re a country divided looking for leaders who can bring us together and who will try to fix the dysfunctional federal government. Instead, Thom Tillis looks like an insider politician with an us-against-them mentality. And the “them” in his equation is a large segment of North Carolina’s population. He would be wise to try to woo them instead of insult them.
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 >
They live in a fantasy world inhabited by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Those are pretty much their sole sources of information and everyone Tillis works with is as ill-informed as he is.
It’s obvious that they despise America and Americans, much more so than Al Qaeda and its affiliated groups. Al Qaeda only killed about 3,000 people in 2001. Loose gun laws killed 30,000 Americans in the year since New Town alone. 45,000 Americans die every year because they don’t have health insurance.
My question is why haven’t the intelligence agencies called in drone strikes on the GOP since they kill a lot more Americans than officially designated organizations have? My other question is why hasn’t the State Department declared the GOP a terrorist organization? Perhaps we could get the UN to declare them terrorists and send the infamous “black helicopters” to get them?
In the world I’ve inhabited it’s okay to kill people who kill Americans if they’re not Americans themselves and since my time it’s become okay to kill American citizens who are trying to kill Americans as log as they’re living in another country. That’s a pretty thin moral tightrope. I tend to believe in moral absolutes. I wish someone would give me orders to take out Wayne LaPierre and Ted Nugent. They’d end up as mulch in some rich asshole’s landscaping. With all of the guns they profess to own, it would provide an object lesson that guns don’t have magical powers to keep anyone safe.
Tillis is confused. It’s spelled W-O-M-E-N not whiner and yes sir, we are p*ssed – along with everyone else you’ve disenfranchised, disdained and deem to look down upon. Keep talking. Just keep talking.
I don’t blame the person who prepped him to talk to the press. Who is that person? Did anyone elect him/her? I was under the (naive?) impression that Thom Tillis is not an actor pretending to be a representative, but an actual representative of North Carolina citizens with the power and obligation to make real decisions in the best interests of the people in the state. Is it all so clearly a game of bluff that you blame some behind-the-scenes make-up artists and puppet-masters for messing up the script? That’s pathetic. Even if Tillis and his cohorts manage to narrow the voting registry down to rural white middle aged men with no college education, I hope even those voters won’t want to put up with his nonsense in 2014. Let him keep talking.
Thanks, Rachel. It’s not a game of bluff, but being a candidate is hard. You have to take caution with everything you say, especially in today’s world of cellphone cameras and videos. Politicians need to be prepped and taught to think before they speak instead of shooting from the hip. That’s what Tillis did in that interview.