Poll shows North Carolinians can't get no satisfaction
Published October 4, 2013
Editorial by Winston-Salem Journal, October 3, 2013.
The latest High Point University[News & Record poll didn’t specifically ask voters if they were in a foul mood, but the answers provided pretty much lead to that conclusion.
Four hundred and forty-seven North Carolinians expressed uniform disappointment with our president, governor, U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan and the state legislature's latest batch of laws, the News & Record of Greensboro reported. Nobody is getting good grades on job performance.
And the poll was taken before the Washington budget impasse closed federal offices and facilities around the country. Things can only have gotten worse.
The national polling organizations have been asking voters to assign blame to either Republicans or Democrats for the Washington crisis. But that’s a narrower issue, the shutdown alone, than the obvious conclusion to be drawn from the local poll: North Carolinians appear to be mad about everything and everybody.
In North Carolina, there is deep dissatisfaction that our government isn’t working. And that should be no surprise. The national economy has improved a bit, but the state economy lags behind. And the government officials we elect to help steer the economy back to health seem incapable of having so much as a civil conversation with each other. Our state legislators are divided along both partisan and intra-party lines.
Each side keeps pointing at the other saying, “Blame them!” But voters aren’t thinking that way when it comes to the economic malaise and other problems. They want things fixed, no excuses.
During the 2012 gubernatorial campaign, Pat McCrory ran a brilliant ad that played to popular dissatisfaction with the overly partisan political atmosphere. He walked through an empty industrial building and spoke of working together. That’s not happening here or in Washington.
That, we suspect, is what North Carolinians want: a government like the one that the governor promised. And they’d like it at the state, local and federal levels.
In short, they want our politicians to act like responsible adults.
We can only hope that they get what they want.
