Gary Pearce to Dems: "Stop Freaking Out About Diaper Don"

 

I really hate just copying someone else's work, but on some days, a colleague writes something so spare and true that you're tempted to outright theft. Like Gary Pearce said:

Gary Pearce

Stop freaking out over polls and pundits. Stop fretting. Start fighting.

Volunteer. Donate to candidates or the North Carolina Democratic Party.

Pick up your phones, iPads and pitchforks.

You can talk issues, per Simon Rosenberg, one of the sharpest political analysts around:

“Rs want the economy to crash, the border to be in chaos, Russia to win, the planet to warm faster, more dead kids in school, more women to die and our democracy to end.”

Or you can follow the lead of James Carville: “Mock Trump. We have to be as mean to him as he is to the people of this country.”

Carville’s message: “He’s fat, and he stinks.”

Call him Diaper Don.

Now, Carville’s style of invective may not be to your taste. But let him make his case here. You’ll be entertained, at least.

Whatever it takes, let’s take Trump down.

He’s teetering and tottering.

He’s a man in severe physical and mental decline.

He confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi.

He’s under indictment for 91 felonies. He has been found guilty of raping a woman.

He’s what he calls people he hates: a loser.

He lost the popular vote in 2016. He won the Electoral College only because of James Comey’s election interference.

He lost to Biden in 2020.

He took Republicans to historic losses in 2018, 2020 and 2020.

He could take the entire party down with him this year.

He’s ripe for a fall.

In 2024, let’s be done with him once and for all.

 

One Thing We Know for Sure

Gary Pearce, the sage of "Talking About Politics," has a straight-forward suggestion for Democratic congressional candidates running in 2018:

If I was running a Congressional race next year, I’d test this simple message in a poll:

“Trump is rash, reckless, irresponsible, unpredictable and dangerous. Somebody needs to keep an eye on him and keep him in check. My opponent won’t. I will.”

Keep it simple. Focus on the one fact people know for certain. They don’t know whether the tax bill is good or bad; taxes are confusing. They do know that Trump is rash, reckless, irresponsible, unpredictable and dangerous.

Eye Witnesses to the Dysfunction

Raleigh political guru Gary Pearce published an account by a General Assembly insider about what went on among the ruling Republican junta during the closing days of the session:

Legislative Republicans treated each other last week just like they’ve treated the state’s citizens for the last two years: with meanness, impatience, and a lack of caring, respect and statesmanship.

The multiple procedural failures also highlighted a desperate leadership void and lack of knowledge about how to govern. The inability to adjourn the session in an organized fashion left the process in turmoil, with no one exactly sure what’s going on. A civilized adjournment requires some communication between the House and Senate, and that apparently just doesn’t happen anymore, especially with a distracted Speaker.

Meanwhile, the House and Senate lobbed hand grenades at each other over the coal ash legislation. It’s unclear whether the failure of this legislation was incompetence, a conspiracy or a last-minute desire to protect a large GOP financial contributor. None of it makes sense when House members tried to amend a conference report. Everyone knows you can’t do that.

 This mess would be laughable except for the dire consequences to the state.

Veteran WRAL political reporter Laura Leslie added her own perspective:

This is what happens when you've got testosterone-soaked under-40s running your "negotiations" -- a term I'm using loosely here. There's something to be said for knowing how things work, and even more to be said for having enough perspective to keep your ego out of it.

A whole bunch of puffed-up men, stepping on their own weenies. North Carolina pays the price.

Dan Soucek: He Gone Iron It Out!

Republicans think they have the "fix" for calming down the state's teachers and winning their votes this November: Stage a big, splashy roll-out of a program to "increase teacher pay" and hope that nobody notices the small print and the continuing wholesale disrespect that veteran teachers must suffer at the hands of this governor and this conservative Republican regime in the General Assembly.

And then Senator Dan Soucek opens his mouth.

"There are a lot of other ideas out there we're still trying to iron out," Senator Soucek told Anna Oakes of the Watauga Democrat. "We'll come out with more information as we know more of what we can do. We don't know what the impact Medicaid and Medicare are going to have. That's a wild card that affects everything."

Ironing out those wild cards! That's what Senator Soucek is so goldarned good at! And nice going, Senator Soucek, stepping "off message" like that and hauling in Medicaid as a potential excuse for not treating our teachers with respect, so that you can eventually blame everything on Obama, right?

Senator Soucek, it was your side that rejected the federal dollars for Medicaid expansion. It's your side that created the last two state budgets that squeezed the living crap out of our dedicated veteran teachers. Why, it's almost like you ironed them flat! And now you're trying to reinflate their sense of well-being with some phony, empty rhetoric.

About this purported "teacher pay raise," Gary Pearce posted this morning, "What kind of company would give a raise to its newest, rawest employees, but stiff its most experienced, capable people?" Why, indeed! Does Mr. Soucek think the teachers in his district are as dumb as he continually proves himself to be?

When Good People Get Fed Up

Clay Aiken is announcing today that he is indeed running for Congress in the 2nd Congressional District of North Carolina. Incumbent Republican Renee Ellmers' campaign immediately began playing the only gay card they could think of: Aiken, sez Ellmers' flack, represents "San Francisco values."

Please!

I believe that the young man who rose out of a bad domestic situation, who became a teacher of special needs students in public school, who started a foundation to help kids with disabilities -- I believe he represents North Carolina values far more than does Renee Ellmers.

A young man who had an amazing talent and who got rich because of it.

He's pictured this morning in the N&O with "consultant" Betsy Conti and "advisor" Gary Pearce, so he's also smart enough to surround himself with some smart, experienced people with deep North Carolina political knowledge.

Aiken has a primary in May with a couple of other contenders, but one of his primary opponents has already announced that he's dropping out and will endorse Aiken.

Clay told the N&O that Ellmers' flailing attacks on him suggested that she was nervous. Yeah. Call it "flop sweat."

Jim Holshouser, Mountain Republican

Gov. Jim Holshouser, who died yesterday at age 78, was born in Boone and represented Watauga County in the General Assembly for three terms before becoming state GOP Chair and then governor in the election of 1972. I had been in Boone two years at that point, voted for his Democratic opponent Skipper Bowles in that election, but Holshouser was a good governor and a good mountain Republican of the sort that North Carolina used to have plenty of.

Hell, going back to the 1890s, moderate mountain Republicans formed a Fusion Party with former slaves to briefly take control of state government. That's what mountain Republicans used to be.

Gary Pearce summed up some of Gov. Holshouser's accomplishments, which would get him barred from the NC GOP today: "Big pay raises for teachers ... Statewide kindergartens ... Coastal Management Act ... Rural health centers ... Expansion of the state park system ... More African-Americans and women in government ... Help for black business enterprises...."

Actually, Pearce notes, citing Rob Christensen, the Jesse Helms Republicans threw Holshouser out of the party in 1976. The Helms Republicans booed Holshouser at the state GOP convention and denied him a seat as a delegate to the national convention.

This Republican bunch now in control in Raleigh, who are defecating on everything that represents moderation, fairness, and sympathy for the poor and weak, are certainly the Helms progeny, grown even more rancid than ole Jesse could even imagine.

The Empty Suit

Gary Pearce, who has known his share of North Carolina governors and can tell a hawk from a hand-saw, has taken a measurement of our new governor.

According to Pearce, Pat McCrory has "no core beliefs."

He's equipped only with a "fuzzy-minded version of jargon-filled conservatism."

"He’s good at the show," meaning he's a glad-handing idiot who likes schmoozing. "But the work? Not so much."

"Being Governor is hard work. It’s more than showing up. It takes studying and learning. It takes listening to people and managing people. It takes a vision and persuasion. Without that kind of governor, a state can get outworked – and left behind."

We have a squishy time-waster for governor and an out-of-control extremist General Assembly all too happy to take charge. We are fucked.

Do "Cut-and-Run" Republicans Have a Clue?

Yesterday the full North Carolina Senate tore to shreds the lease that had already been negotiated, drafted, and signed for the City of Raleigh to take control of the former Dorothea Dix insane asylum site for a public park. The Senate Republicans carried that vote without the help of two Republican senators from Wake County who "cut and ran" from their party's position: Senators Chad Barefoot and Neal Hunt.

Gary Pearce wrote some wise analysis of those renegades this morning:

Barefoot and Hunt might look safe politically. They have good districts. They have a big money advantage. 

But, to keep winning, they have to win moderate Independents. The kind of voters who don’t like partisanship. The kind of voters who might see the legislature as a bunch of rural Tea Party extremists who hate cities in general and Raleigh in particular. The kind of voters who see Republicans nationally as a gang of vengeful, angry old white men. 

Barefoot and Hunt have to worry that a future opponent might figure out that there are a lot of well-heeled people in Raleigh who are mad enough to give big money to a Democrat – or to a super-PAC helping Democrats. 

They also have to worry that, in 2014, President Obama’s OFA might pump a lot of money into North Carolina. Or that, in 2016, Hillary Clinton might set off a Democratic tidal wave among moderate Independent women in their districts. 

Hunt and Barefoot have no control over a lot of that. They could control how they voted. So they voted with Raleigh and against their fellow Republicans.

Thank God There's a Memo

Every politico in the known universe is all a-Twitter this a.m. over The Memo. Haven't read it yet, but I will. In fact, I just printed out the entire thing to study, highlight, underline, and annotate.

Democrats in general and progressives especially are usually the last ones to catch on that there's a war and that they are in the crosshairs. Glad to see someone thinking strategically, which is what conservatives normally do over their Cream o' Wheat.

The fake shock of those same NC conservatives over this particular memo is not convincing. They've been reading their own memos for years. It's not as though the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and Americans for Prosperity and the Civitas Whatsit haven't been producing central steering command documents for NC Republicans for a long time. And we see the results.

The results are the point, O my brethren, and if the Republican grandees in Raleigh think we're just going to sit back and mumble our Rosary as they enact their radical program, they're smokin' something with their Cream o' Wheat.

And it didn't take a memo from some consulting group for some of us to see what's going on in Raleigh.

ADDENDUM
Got home late today to discover that Gary Pearce also wrote about The Memo and made some of the same points, only better.

Dan Forest Needs a Staff

First off, who the hell is Dan Forest?

He's our newly installed NC Lieutenant Governor and someone's son who's famous in Republican circles. (That's one of his campaign pitches to the left.)

He made a show of announcing his new staff, including a "director of operations" and a "director of constituent services" (featuring a recent graduate of ASU who's just completely brilliant in Republican circles, we hear) and (natch!) a "chief of staff."

As Gary Pearce sez, quoting an unnamed Raleigh source, “Just goes to show – it’s easy to talk about reducing the size of government until it’s your turn to build a taxpayer-supported empire.”

That same unnamed critic of politico empire-building had a bit more to say:

“Why does he need a chief of staff? And why on earth does he need a ‘director of operations’? To operate what? The copier? The office microwave? 

“And why are we paying for him to have a ‘director of constituent services’? Does he have constituents who are not represented by the governor or someone in the legislature? 

“The lite gov in this state has a single function – to preside over the Senate. He bangs the gavel and does what the leadership tells him, and he votes to break ties. Who needs a staff to manage this? Does he really need a trooper to drive him around? Who wants to harm him? Who even knows who he is? 

“Democrat Walter Dalton also had a needlessly large staff when he was lt. governor, so we thought a Republican would embrace the notion of smaller government and have a little office near the Senate chamber and an assistant to answer his phone in case it ever rings.

Can't Win 'Em All

Sometimes we agree with Gary Pearce.

Sometimes we don't.

An Upside to the 2nd Primary?

Not my usual line of thought, but Gary Pearce, with loads more experience in this venue, has a valid point.

Republicans Can't Resist Extremism

Though we've ground our teeth down to nubs over President Obama's lack of real leadership and Rahm Emanuel's backroom deal-making and Congressional Democrats' wussiness, we have not bought into the cable news chatter that 2010 will put Republicans back in charge of everything legislative, including the state of North Carolina. Finally, we find another NC analyst who seems to agree with us, Gary Pearce:

So what could keep 2010 from being a Republican year? The answer: Republicans....

Republicans' stridency, negativity and hypocrisy today stun me. But they don't bother me. I hope they keep it up. It's the Democrats' best hope.

We doubt seriously that Mr. Pearce had Virginia Foxx specifically in mind when he wrote those sentences, but she certainly comes to mind when we read them.

We're relying (at the moment, at least) on former Dems operative Gary Pearce for a run-down on our new governor's first cabinet picks. Pearce's summation appears in his opening sentence: "all kinds of interesting twists."

It Wasn't an Idle Threat

Kay Hagan is suing Elizabeth Dole for the she's-an-atheist TV ad, as she promised to do yesterday if the ad wasn't taken off the air. Dole responded, "Up yours," so Hagan says she's going to the law. She has 20 days to file the libel complaint, so we'll have to wait. It's the principle of the thing, no matter how the election is decided. Looks like defamation to us (though our law degree is a bit dusty), and Dole ought to pay the piper for that particular tune she chose to play.

In the meantime, Gary Pearce recaps political libel suits from the recent past in NC. In 1988, Jim Gardner beat Tony Rand for lieutenant governor. Rand later sued Gardner over an ad that associated Rand with drug dealers, and Rand apparently won a big settlement from Gardner. Pearce says "apparently" since the case was sealed as part of the settlement.

After the election of 2000, Attorney General Roy Cooper was accused of libeling an opponent. A suit resulted, but once again any settlement is shielded from public view

Following the election of 2002, Carolyn Grant filed a similar suit against Congressman Brad Miller following Miller's first win of his seat in the 13th Congressional Dist. Miller made accusations that Grant took $40,000 from her son's college fund to buy a car. According to the Fox News candidate profile of Miller, Grant was given the right to pursue the lawsuit, but she dropped it in 2006, not, according to Pearce, before Miller was forced to spend a lot of money defending himself.

Obama in Asheville Yesterday

The Asheville Citizen-Times says there were 28,000 people there. Many were from Watauga County, including Bricca Sweet, who spoke to the crowd as one of North Carolina's original Obama "organizing fellows." (Bricca's personal essay about why she switched her party affiliation from the Republican to Democratic party was published in last Friday's Watauga Democrat.)

The Citizen-Times article speculates on the Obama effect on western N.C., which has been dependably Republican (except for Watauga and Buncombe and sometimes Jackson counties). The writer notes that the past habit of North Carolina statewide Democratic candidates to be on the opposite side of the state when a Democratic presidential candidate drops by seems to have flipped this year ("Democrats whose names will be below Obama's on the ballot want to be seen at his rallies").

"I think the perception is that [Obama] is really helping, amazing as it is," said Gary Pearce, Democratic analyst and formerly political guru to Gov. Jim Hunt.