For the most part top GOP officials in the state are behaving like adults after their big election win Tuesday night, keeping the gloating to a minimum, promising to get things done and work across the aisle, etc. It will be interesting to see if that attitude remains after a few weeks in power in Washington, but they are saying most of the right things now.
Governor Pat McCrory even told WRAL-TV that the election was no mandate for the GOP and that the state is still divided. He’s right, but that didn’t go over too well with the Tea Party wing of his party.
While most Republican elected officials seem to be taking the high road, that is not the case for some of think tanks on the right, even the ones that are allegedly non-partisan who dedicated most of their energy in the last few weeks before the election to defeating Senator Kay Hagan.
One staffer of Raleigh’s most well-known right-wing policy group tweeted that he hoped Senator Mitch McConnell would “banish Harry Reid to a basement office near the boiler room.” That’s some classy nonpartisan commentary.
The Asheville staffer for the group noted the loss of two Republican state House members from Buncombe County, Tm Moffitt and Nathan Ramsey, with this lament.
“… I have this unsettling feeling about what it all means to have as our victors people who, either through deceit or stupidity, want more money to fund teachers who can’t or won’t do basic math.”
And while on subject of vitriol from the Right, here’s what the Charlotte staffer of the same group said about the news that Charlotte-Mecklenburg School Superintendent Heath Morrison had stepped down after an investigation found that he misled the school board about a key project and mistreated staff members— “that will teach me to say something nice about a bureaucrat.”
Quite a week for the allegedly respectable think tank, blatantly showing their partisan loyalty and calling for revenge against Democrats in Washington, calling local Democrats deceitful and stupid and regretting ever praising anyone in public service—presumably because they must all be inept or corrupt.
And remember this is the allegedly more respectable right-wing think tank in town.
McCrory makes ironic claims
Speaking of Governor Pat McCrory, he has been busy on the post-election interview circuit lately reminding people after a campaign that he largely sat out that he is still relevant in Raleigh, despite the growing power of Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger.
And while McCrory tried to remain above the partisan fray in his interview with WRAL, his thin-skinned nature surfaced a few times, once when he complained about critics attacking his decisions and people running against him for a year and half, adding “the campaign cycle of people running for three years, I don’t think that’s the way the founders meant it to be.”
That’s an odd observation for a politician who after losing the 2008 gubernatorial election to Democrat Beverly Perdue spent the following four years attacking her and campaigning for the office again.
McCrory is also not happy with ads run against him by environment groups for his lackluster regulation of coal ash and his close ties to Duke Energy, asking in the WRAL interview, “why don’t we have conversations with each other, and talk to each other? Accept our differences and then find common ground, solutions.”
It seems like it is better communication McCrory wants with environmental interests, a sentiment that is more than a little ironic given his decision to ban environment groups and the media from attending a meeting with state and federal officials in Raleigh this week about offshore drilling. He wants to talk to environmental groups but not let them attend big meetings on environmental issues.
One final gerrymandering note about the election
The folks on the Right keep trying to convince us that gerrymandering was not a major factor in this week’s election results, that the Republicans won a resounding victory that somehow transcended their massive built in advantage from the district lines they drew just three years ago.
It’s an absurd claim. There were 80 legislative races in which there was only one major party candidate on the ballot because the races were already decided by the lines that were drawn. The outcome in many more was a foregone conclusion.
And it was even worse in congressional races. One political observer points out that if you take away the votes that Republican Robert Pittenger received because he was unopposed, Republicans received roughly 53 percent of the votes cast in congressional contests.
The state has 13 House seats and 53 percent of 13 is 7. But thanks to the gerrymandered districts, Republicans now control 10 seats in a state where their U.S. Senate candidate won by just 1.6 percent of the vote.
