McCrory's uneven State of the State address
Published February 6, 2015
by Chris Fitzsimon, NC Policy Watch and NC SPIN panelist, February 5, 2015.
Governor Pat McCrory was all over the place in his State of the State speech Wednesday night in an address that was long and oddly disjointed, full of lengthy and detailed homespun anecdotes about water fountains and student teaching, while lacking specifics about major new policy proposals like business incentives, Medicaid expansion, and how to pay for $2.5 billion worth of borrowing for highway funding and renovation of state buildings in Raleigh.
McCrory spoke for 80 minutes. That’s 20 minutes longer than President Obama’s recent State of the Union address which was criticized for its length, and it’s most likely the first time a governor has taken longer to lay out his agenda than a president.
McCrory touched on issues from education to health care to transportation to economic development, but none of his proposals seemed fully developed. It wasn’t clear exactly what he was asking lawmakers to do or how he proposed to pay for it.
One notable exception was his plea to restore the state historic tax credit program that the General Assembly allowed to expire last year, though reportedly McCrory might include a modified version of the credit in the budget proposal he’ll submit to lawmakers in a few weeks.
One heartening note was that overall McCrory sounded more like the moderate former Charlotte mayor than an ally of the right-wing legislative leadership, though he sounded like that in his 2013 State of the State speech too and then spent the next two years rubber stamping all the radical legislation passed by the House and Senate.
Folks on the Right can’t be pleased that the leader of their party wants to borrow $2.5 billion and create two new cabinet level agencies of state government, one for military affairs and the other for information technology.
Those proposals will face tough-sledding in a General Assembly with strong-willed leaders with their own ideas— particularly Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger who has shown little hesitation in openly opposing McCrory’s proposals in the last two years.
That happened again after the speech. McCrory made a subtle reference to developing a North Carolina version of Medicaid expansion, though he never said it directly. But that was enough to prompt leaders of both chambers to declare that Medicaid expansion wasn’t happening this year regardless of what the governor wanted.
Despite the length of McCrory’s address it was also notable for what he left out. He asked lawmakers to fulfill a commitment to raising starting teacher pay to $35,000 but said nothing about giving veteran teachers a raise, many of whom received barely a raise at all last year.
He didn’t mention restoring recent cuts to public school classrooms, or finding more money for textbooks or supplies or rehiring teacher assistants in the early grades.
He was silent about state employee raises and said nothing about the funding crisis in the state court system that Supreme Court Justice Mark Martin has pleaded with lawmakers to address.
And most glaringly he didn’t mention the growing state budget shortfall that now stands at $200 million and threatens any new investments– or the $700 million cost this year of the 2013 tax cut that he said would be revenue neutral.
He talked about helping veterans and folks in the armed forces, but seemed to forget that 65,000 military families no longer receive the state Earned Income Tax Credit that was abolished last year. More than 900,000 low-wage workers overall lost the help the EITC provided.
McCrory began his remarks in reelection mode, boasting about the falling unemployment rate without mentioning that it’s falling across the country too as the economy rebounds from the Great Recession.
It seemed like a speech designed for McCrory to try to do everything, brag about his accomplishments, layout a long laundry list of ideas, spin some folksy yarns, and recognize a long list of special guests and senior staff members in the gallery.
Some of the headlines about the address said McCrory laid out his vision for North Carolina, which can be summed up in his wish for “the best of everything.”
But McCrory didn’t come across as a visionary Wednesday night. He came across again as North Carolina’s mayor, pleasant and affable enough with some of his priorities and most of his rhetoric in the right place, but lacking the political skills and determination to confront the leaders of his own party who have much different ideas.
It does not instill much confidence that the next two years in Raleigh will be much different from the last two—and that’s a scary prospect indeed.
