Poor Pat McCrory. Never has the governor of any state been so disrespected by the other leaders of his own party. This weekend, Republican Senator Tom Apodaca told the Asheville Citizens-Times, “The governor doesn’t play much of a role in anything.” Ouch!
McCrory came to Raleigh with little understanding of the legislature and has been a slow learner. He seemed to think that governor was nothing more than a ceremonial position, similar to his role as a ribbon-cutter as mayor of Charlotte. Instead, he found a rough-and-tumble world of politics where a new group of leaders from his own party were jockeying for power.
McCrory tried to play nice but got rolled by the legislature. None of his initiatives took off and his vetoes routinely get overridden. At one point Republican Senator Bob Rucho, a fellow Charlottean, dismissed McCrory’s opposition to the Senate budget by saying, “If Pat had real business experience, he would not make such a poor policy decision.” McCrory worked for Duke Energy prior to running for governor.
McCrory has brought much of the scorn on himself. He has real trouble with the truth. He’s built a legacy of saying one thing and doing another. He opposed new abortion restrictions before he signed them into law. He’s created stories out of whole cloth. He told reporters he regularly attended Moral Monday protests when he hadn’t. He blamed Obama for cutting unemployment benefits when he signed the bill into law. It’s hard to earn respect when nobody believes what you say.
McCrory’s also surrounded himself with incompetence. He appointed Aldona Wos to head the Department of Health and Human Services and stuck with her despite cronyism, cost overruns, and blatant mismanagement. He’s stuck with his lawyer Bob Stephens, who is apparently also his fall guy. Stephens took the blame for the serial misfilings of ethics forms showing suspicious stock sales and money taken from companies after he became governor. Most recently, Stephens admitted that he knew for a year of the conflicts of interest that forced State Board of Elections member Paul Foley to resign last week.
As governor, McCrory has been a failure. Apodaca spoke the truth when he called him irrelevant. He lacks the political skills to successfully promote an agenda or challenge the legislature. He lacks the judgment to surround himself with highly competent administrators. He lacks the forthrightness to build the trust of either his peers or the press. He lacks the gray matter to come up with any truly innovative ideas to overcome his weaknesses. He should have stayed a ribbon-cutter in Charlotte.
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 >
I’ve lived in NC almost seven decades. This poor man has been the invisible governor. After more than two years in office he has finally shown up in my hometown a couple of times for what I can charitably call “ribbon-cutting type events”. He shows up, gets his picture taken, gives a 30 second interview to the local news and then he’s gone again. He doesn’t visit a school and perhaps read to some children. He doesn’t stop by the local Senior Center to chat with the locals who play cards and eat lunch there, and God forbid, he doesn’t go any where near any type of healthcare facility to talk to patients. Some of those folks just might give him an ear full of what it’s really like to live in NC these days and this man clearly doesn’t want to know anything about that.
I hate to say “I told you so”; but as a former Charlottean, I knew that McCrory was a lightweight at best well before he took it into his head to run for governor. I begged his Democratic opponent to run on the slogan, “More than just a pretty face”, but my pleas fell on deaf ears. As for McCrory’s vowing “not to sign” the legislature’s more outrageous bills–I learned many years ago in NC history class that there’s no pocket veto in NC. If the taxpayers and voters of NC prefer an ineffective figurehead–he can’t even woo his corporate counterparts to move here–to a governor who not only stands for something but is prepared to actually DO something, McCrory is more than meeting their expectations.
McCrory can certainly be accused of plenty of misjudgements and mistakes. But the real reason he has been marginalized is gerrymandering. The 2011 redistricting plan allowed Republican legislators to gain 65% of all the seats in 2012 with only about 52% of the statewide vote. If the GOP’s seats had matched the votes they won, Republican legislators would have had only narrow majorities and would had to have taken the governor seriously. But given the GOP’s undeserved, veto-proof majorities, McCrory knows it is pointless to try to use his veto power as negotiating leverage.
Not even I would have predicted what a joke Pat has been as governor. He is a nice but incredibly goofy and stupid man. I wonder what the GOP is going to do in 2016? I keep wondering if Dan Forest is going to challenge Pat for the nomination. He has much more in common with the NC GOP than McCrory and he is smart. I oppose probably every policy decision Forest would make, which is why his candidacy would frighten me. But he would definitely be more effective for the GOP.
You probably ought to put quotes around “worked” and “governor.”