Barber, GOP compete for North Carolina

by Ned Barnett, News and Observer, February 7, 2015.

The day before Gov. Pat McCrory delivered his address on the State of the State, the Rev. William Barber came by The News & Observer to talk about the state of the state’s soul.

The governor spoke of a North Carolina with its economy on the mend and called for a continued push to create jobs and close the economic divide between North Carolina’s urban and rural areas. He acknowledged that all was still not well years after the Great Recession. “You know and I know there are a lot of people still suffering out there,” he said.

But the governor didn’t focus on that suffering or address the divide over social, tax and funding issues created by the Republican leadership of the General Assembly. McCrory’s version of the state was narrowly focused on chamber of commerce measures, and his vision for it was equally bland: Make a modest investment in transportation, restore historic preservation tax credits, fix up or tear down dilapidated state buildings and improve the efficiency of government operations.

Barber represents a coalition with a much different view of today and tomorrow in North Carolina. The state Barber sees is under assault by “extremists.” He charges them with, among the things, curbing voting rights, tilting taxation in favor of the wealthy and big business, denying Medicaid to hundreds of thousands of working poor people and undermining public education with policies that are widening the gulf between schools attended by the well-off and schools in low-income areas.

The Goldsboro minister has created a movement by stressing morality, not politics. He is president of the state NAACP, but he is pushing for changes that go beyond issues of race. As he likes to say, what his movement seeks through Moral Monday protests at the legislature and across the state, “Isn’t about left and right, it’s about right and wrong.”

The state’s Republican leaders haven’t paid much attention to Barber and his coalition of mostly progressive groups. And they think he merits even less attention after Republicans won handily in November’s midterm election and former House Speaker Thom Tillis, a leader of the legislature Barber decries, won a statewide election for U.S. Senate.

But Barber hardly feels rebuffed by the election. He notes that Tillis got less than 50 percent of the vote, North Carolina’s minority turnout was better than the national average and the changes his coalition is calling for have broad and growing support.

“We don’t think about quitting. This is working,” Barber said. The NAACP has opened seven new branches in Western North Carolina and has held some 200 events across the state. “People are taking a long-term view. This is about the soul of the state,” he said.

He intends to show the breadth of that support with a series of events and demonstrations in the capital this week leading up to the traditional Historic Thousands on Jones Street rally on Saturday. Yes, that’s Valentine’s Day, but Barber will stress that it’s also the birthday of the great abolitionist, orator and author, Frederick Douglass. Whether there will be arrests for civil disobedience as there were during previous Moral Monday protests, Barber said, “is not up to us.”

What Barber calls the “Forward Together Moral Movement” will present state lawmakers with a list of 14 requests, including these:

• Reverse the changes in election law that created heavily gerrymandered voting districts, reduced early and Sunday voting, eliminated same-day registration and required a state-approved photo ID for voting.

•  Raise the minimum wage and index it to inflation and reinstate the Earned Income Tax Credit.

• Raise all teacher salaries and restore public school funding to previous per-student funding levels.

•  Expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

•  Repeal the death penalty and restore the Racial Justice Act.

This is, of course, also a list of what will not happen so long as the General Assembly is controlled by Republicans, especially Senate leader Phil Berger. But it is important that such changes be demanded and that such a North Carolina be envisioned – or rather re-envisioned since these goals are what state leaders once endorsed.

Barber thinks the political pendulum has swung so far right it is verging on swinging back. “That is what always happens with extremists – hubris,” he said. “They go too far.”

Many criticize Barber and others who protest as being extremists as well. The governor called them “outsiders.” Former state Sen. Thom Goolsby called them “morons.”

And so the real struggle here may not be best cast as between right and left or even right and wrong. It is a struggle to find North Carolina’s center, the political place where its policies and laws reflect what it is and is becoming. In that sense, the tensions between those locked into power and those locked out truly has become a contest to find and reflect not the state’s soul, but its heart