Friday follies
Published November 7, 2015
by Chris Fitzsimon, NC Policy Watch and NC SPIN panelist, November 6, 2015.
The McCrory Administration’s improper reaction to pay to play request
The latest pay to play scandal in the McCrory Administration continues to draw headlines and confusing reactions from inside the administration.
McCrory does not dispute the account of a meeting he arranged between a campaign donor, Graeme Keith Sr., and state officials about a prison maintenance contract Keith wanted extended.
McCrory reportedly convened the meeting and then turned things over to Keith who said that he had given money to politicians and it was time he received something in return.
McCrory claims he was engaged in a side conversation and didn’t hear the remarks and that if he had he would have ended the meeting. But McCrory’s Secretary of Public Safety Frank Perry and most everybody else in room the heard them, so it’s not clear who McCrory was talking to.
And Perry says Keith repeated the reminders about his political contributions in another meeting and another phone conversation.
Reporters with the Raleigh News & Observer and the Charlotte Observer broke the story last weekend that was based on documents and on the record conversations with administration officials.
Other media outlets have followed up on the story this week with several of them including a new statement from Perry that the administration acted properly.
Hardly.
The N&O reported that Perry himself sent a text to McCrory’s top aides after the decision was made to extend the contract saying “Very bad decision.” “Sorry, but this will soil our Gov.”
It doesn’t sound like Perry thought at the time the administration was acting properly.
The questions now for McCrory are pretty simple.
If he thought that Keith’s mention of his political contributions was so troubling that he would have left the meeting with him if he had heard it, then why did top administration officials continue to meet with him after they heard it and after he repeated it two more times?
And why, as many commentators have wondered, did McCrory or someone close to him not end the contract talks altogether with Keith after he kept bringing up his donations and his expectations to be rewarded.
There are a lot of ways to describe how the administration reacted in this pay to play fiasco, but properly is not one of them.
GOP amnesia on business rankings
Senator Chad Barefoot and other Republicans took to Twitter this week to tout the news that Site Selection Magazine says North Carolina has the second best business climate in the country.
The inference of course is that all those tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy in the last few years are paying off and that North Carolina has turned the corner thanks to the current leadership in Raleigh. It’s the Carolina Comeback.
Left out of Barefoot’s comments was the fact that in 2010, the year before the Republicans took over the General Assembly, Site Selection Magazine said North Carolina had the best business climate in the nation.
Republicans brushed aside the ranking then, saying it didn’t mean anything, that taxes were too high and regulations too restrictive for business leaders to consider North Carolina a place to relocate their company.
But not only was the state ranked first in business climate five years ago, the magazine also said then that North Carolina ranked first in a survey of business executives too and the magazine’s editor commended then Governor Beverly Perdue for making the state business friendly.
So maybe we didn’t have to slash funding for education, roll back environmental protections, and give huge tax windfalls to the wealthy to have a good business climate after all.
Crickets from the right about latest economic news
And finally speaking of job growth, folks on the Right were awfully quiet Friday morning with the news the U.S. economy created 271,000 jobs in October and the national unemployment rate fell to five percent, the lowest rate in seven years.
Listening to the Republican presidential debates, you’d think the country was still mired in a deep recession. More than one candidate has blasted President Obama’s economic policies bellowing that the country can’t stand another four years like the last eight.
Let’s see, unemployment and the federal budget deficit are down, the stock market is up and gas prices have fallen to near two dollars a gallon. And apparently the country just can’t stand for any more of that.
