Pat McCrory's Creepy Race-Based Fundraising

Republican Pat McCrory is running again for governor of North Carolina and has clearly decided to take the Jesse Helms-blazed low road to get there.

McCrory began feeding race-based fears in a fundraising e-mail yesterday, resurrecting Southern whites' favorite racial scapegoat, ACORN: Did you know, for example, that (according to McCrory's white nightmare), "Hundreds of Acorn type organizers are descending on our state in an attempt to influence the election"?

The only way to ward off this evil, according to McCrory, is to overturn Gov. Perdue's veto of the Jim Crow-inspired Voter Photo ID bill. And, oh yeah by the way, give Pat McCrory copious amounts of cash so he can continue his trash-talk and take North Carolina back to the 1920s where it belongs.

"Political Trash Talk" is exactly what Greensboro News&Record's editorial writer Doug Clark labeled McCrory's scummy pitch:

Pat McCrory was a good candidate for governor in 2008, and maybe he'll win the anticipated rematch with Bev Perdue next year.

But this is the wrong way to go about it.

"Is someone else voting in your name?"

No, Pat. Is someone else writing this political trash talk in your name? (Probably.)...

The concern about voting fraud is phony, contrived, calculated to arouse the gullible.

I'm disappointed McCrory is running with it. He can do a lot better, and he would be if he'd focus on jobs, the economy, education and making state government work effectively and efficiently.

Voter ID isn't going to make North Carolina a better state. All it's done so far is make people more suspicious of each other -- and give Republicans a silly issue to run on.

McCrory's decision to belly up to the racial politics smorgasbord reminded loftT over at BlueNC of the gospel of voter suppression that Paul Weyrich was preaching all the way back in 1980:

"Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome — good government. They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."