North Carolina GOP gets message - too much, too far

by Tim White, Fayetteville Observer, August 25, 2013.

Thank you, Colin Powell, for speaking truth to North Carolina power. Republican leaders who shrug it off will do so at considerable peril.

The former secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was in Raleigh on Thursday, keynote speaker at the CEO Forum.

He used the occasion to call out state leaders for the election-reform legislation that Gov. Pat McCrory signed just over a week ago. He made his comments moments after McCrory left the stage and was still in the audience.

Powell said he wants to see "policies that encourage every American to vote, not to make it more difficult to vote. It immediately turns off a voting bloc the Republican Party needs," he said. "These kinds of actions do not build on the base. It just turns people away."

Powell, who easily could have been the country's first African-American president, had he chosen to run, left little doubt that the law was aimed at cutting minority voting: "What it really says to the minority voters is, ... 'We really are sort of punishing you.' "

Powell gets it. Unfortunately, many state GOP leaders, buoyed by recent successes at the polls, don't. The party continues to run off its members who don't hew to the straight-and-narrow of party doctrine and slam the door in the faces of people it will need someday - like hard-working minority entrepreneurs whose striving for success lines up with traditional Republican precepts of support for business and economic initiative. As the party's old, white and wealthy core begins to die off and the nation's ethnic balance increasingly tilts Hispanic and black, Republicans could become an endangered species if the party doesn't change its message.

Powell wasn't the only one wondering about North Carolina's recent harsh budget and education initiatives. Earlier last week, former Wall Street Journal columnist Al Hunt wrote a Bloomberg News column about this year's General Assembly moves. He interviewed McCrory and talked with state business executives.

"North Carolina," Hunt wrote, "is channeling Alabama and South Carolina when it comes to the best economic, social and political model for a U.S. Southern state." Of the two Carolinas, he wrote that "the two states last year had roughly identical, strong economic growth, and both have jobless rates worse than the national average. Multiple surveys have long rated North Carolina's as one of the best business climates in the U.S., its higher education system is better than its neighbors, wages are higher and poverty less pervasive."

But, Hunt wrote, it's over. "The North Carolina model, which served the region and country so well, is gone."

Are Powell and Hunt right? I don't doubt Powell for a second. The electoral reforms were blatant attempts to tamp down Democratic voting, just as redistricting was. Court challenges are unlikely to succeed, because it will be difficult to prove that they were aimed at disenfranchising black voters. The GOP will harvest great short-term gain. But in the long term, as our society becomes more racially and ethnically mixed, Republicans lose.

As for Hunt's suggestion that the state has dealt itself a losing economic hand, we'll have to stand by for a bit. He was jumping the gun. Our unemployment rate did just rise again, now the third-worst in the nation. But tax and regulatory reforms were just passed, so their effect on hiring and industrial development won't be apparent for six months to a year.

But if our economy is still a bottom feeder a year from now, it won't be fun to be a Republican seeking re-election.