In the end the 2009 elections in North Carolina told us very little about 2010.

There were good signs for Republicans:

-Energized conservatives turned out in large numbers for the Wake County School Board races, electing all of their candidates and defeating an incumbent Democratic Raleigh City Councilman in the process.

-Defeated Democratic Mayor Yvonne Johnson in Greensboro, the first incumbent ever to lose that office. Johnson’s loss is the continuation of Republican gains on the Greensboro City Council that began in 2007.

But there were also good signs for Democrats:

-Anthony Foxx turned out more Obama wave voters in the Charlotte Mayoral race than we had anticipated, pushing him over the top and bringing David Howard as a third Democratic City Councilman along with him. The lesson there is that the new voters will come back out- with a good candidate. Foxx was a good candidate. Creigh Deeds in Virginia and Jon Corzine in New Jersey were not.

-Democrats swept the Asheville City Council race, dispatching controversial conservative and 2008 Republican Congressional nominee Carl Mumpower.

Ultimately these races were decided by local issues and the strengths of the candidates involved. It was a good night for the GOP nationally but the lesson in North Carolina is that if Democrats have good candidates who run effective campaigns they may be able to overcome the national tide.

GASTONIA, N.C. (AP) – The lunchtime event at Milano’s Italian Restaurant in Gastonia provided all the usual flavor found at state Republican Party gatherings in recent years.

It didn’t come from the lasagna, chicken parmigiana and manicotti ordered by the two dozen officials and party activists gathered in a back banquet room.

It began with the state GOP chairman chiding state Democrats, followed by the usual complaints from party faithful in attendance about how the Democratic Party has run most of state government for 100 years.

But new chairman Tom Fetzer tried to turn the griping into something constructive.

“We can either spend our time talking about how unfairly the Democratic majority governs, or we can become a majority and do a better job of governing ourselves,” Fetzer told the crowd between bites of spaghetti.

Sensing an electoral opening after Democrats drew a budget that raised taxes, GOP leaders are already talking up legislative elections, even though those won’t occur until November 2010.

Fetzer and Republican legislative leaders are wrapping up a 12-city “Budget Tour” to places like Gastonia that began after the General Assembly closed a bruising seven-month session Aug. 11 in which lawmakers cast tough votes on spending and taxes. They’re talking about campaign fundraising and targeting Democrats in competitive districts.

The state GOP struggled in the 2006 and 2008 elections as Democrats expanded and retained their majorities in the House and Senate. The 2010 elections take on greater importance because the majority party in each chamber will have the power to draw favorable legislative boundaries for the next decade based on new census figures.

“Those are probably the worst cycles for Republicans that we’ve seen in a long, long time,” said Senate Minority Leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham. “The political winds are at least, early on it seems … shifting in another direction.”

It will take more than a strong breeze to break Democrats, who hold a 30-20 Senate lead and a 68-52 House advantage. Democrats have held or shared control of both chambers continuously for more than 100 years, save for four years in the 1990s when the GOP led the House.

Fetzer argued at tour stops that Democratic lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Beverly Perdue made all the wrong choices in response to the recession and need to be held accountable. Democrats voted for and Democratic Gov. Beverly Perdue signed a budget that raised taxes by $990 million this year and that Fetzer argued failed to protect the public schools.

The budget “raises taxes at precisely the wrong time,” said Fetzer, a former Raleigh mayor and political consultant elected chairman in June.

Democrats defended the $19 billion budget and said the higher taxes, while painful, are temporary and helped prevent deeper cuts to education, social services and public health.

“It’s easy to sit back and criticize,” said House Majority Leader Hugh Holliman, D-Davidson, calling Republican complaints the “kind of typical rhetoric that’s going on right now. It’s a little earlier than normal.”

There are 13 districts in the House – including Holliman’s – and eight in the Senate – that Republicans hope to take from Democrats next year. To win, Fetzer said, Republicans will aim to match Democratic incumbents in fundraising.

The task will be daunting. The state Democratic Party gave $4.3 million to candidates and political committees during the 2007-08 election cycle, compared to $801,000 by the state Republican Party, according to campaign finance reports.

“It is very difficult to go out and raise money because people interested in legislative action … they’re not going to give with a long-term vision. They give for the next session,” said Jack Hawke, state GOP chairman from 1987 to 1995. “That leaves Republicans with no natural base to go raise money.”

Fetzer has asked party regulars to give $1 a day to party campaign coffers. He said state business leaders who have given more to Democrats recently must be persuaded to shift to Republicans.

In Gastonia, Republicans clapped when Fetzer said the party would fully fund the challenger to Democratic Sen. David Hoyle, co-chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

“We’ve been outspent year after year after year and election and election after election. And Tom is focused on getting us the money so we can equip our troops,” Gaston County Republican Party chairman Cliff Priest said.

Hoyle, now in his ninth term, has won every two years because he said he’s received support from whom he calls mainstream GOP voters and doesn’t seem fazed about a new effort to unseat him.

“I’ve had them sending money against me nine times,” Hoyle said in an interview. “It’s nothing new, but different faces.”

Fetzer told the Gastonia group it will be painful if Republicans don’t knock off Hoyle and other Democrats next year, particularly with redistricting to follow.

“Winners get to govern. Losers go home and grumble,” he said. “And if we don’t win in 2010 we’re going to have 10 years of grumbling.”

The State Senate Wednesday elected eight members to the UNC Board of Governors.Twelve candidates were nominated and the top eight vote recipients were to be elected.

According to a press release from the GOP, Democrats have controlled the voting process so that the real election is conducted behind closed doors.

“Their method is to select the winners in a closed caucus; they then have the nominees who fail to make the cut ‘withdraw’ their names,” the press release said. “The vote on the Senate floor then proceeds with only eight names eligible for the eight seats. Any ballot marked by a Senate member that contains a name other than the pre-selected eight is disqualified and not counted.”

Senate Republican Leader Phil Berger (R-Rockingham) made the following statement:

“Yesterday’s vote on the State Health Plan illustrated how Senate Democrats fix a bill behind closed doors. Today, we saw how they manipulate the UNC Board of Governors election. This “Soviet” styled balloting is an affront to our Democratic system and to the people of North Carolina.”

These are the members elected to the board:

• John Blackburn of Linville currently serves as Chair of the Appalachian State University Board of Trustees, of which he has been a member since 2005. He is President and General Manager of Linville Resorts, Inc. Blackburn has served on the Crossnore School Board of Trustees, the Cannon Memorial Hospital Board of Directors, and was a co-founder of the Avery County YMCA.
• Peaches Gunter Blank of Nashville, Tennessee, is a current member of the UNC Board of Governors, where she was first elected in 2005. She is private consultant in healthcare issues who previously served as Chief of Staff and Deputy to the Governor of Tennessee, President of the Hospital Alliance of Tennessee, and as a senior policy staff member for Governor Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. She served for five years as Chair of the Board of Trustees of North Carolina State University.
• Laura Buffaloe of Roanoke Rapids is a current member of the UNC Board of Governors, where she was first elected in 2006. She is a retired educator who worked at Halifax Community College, serving as Dean of Instruction from 1998-2000 and Vice President of Instructional Services until her retirement in 2005. Buffaloe is a graduate of Elizabeth City State University and received her Doctorate in Education from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and has served on numerous civic boards.
• Phil Dixon of Greenville is a current member of the UNC Board of Governors, where he was first elected in 2005. He is a practicing attorney, who has represented local school boards for the past 21 years. Dixon has served as Chair of the Pitt-Greenville Chamber of Commerce and the Pitt County Mental Health, Mental Retardation, and Developmental Disabilities Area Board. He is a graduate of Eastern Carolina University and received his law degree from UNC-Chapel Hill.
• Paul Fulton of Winston-Salem is currently serving his second term on the Board of Trustees of UNC-Chapel Hill. He worked for Hanes and Sara Lee Corporations for 38 years and was President of Sara Lee from 1988-93, Dean of the Kenan-Flagler Business School from 1993-97, and is currently Chairman of the Board of Bassett Furniture Industries, Inc. Fulton served as a Trustee at Winston-Salem State University for 8 years, Co-Chair of the Carolina First fundraising campaign at UNC-CH, and as Co-Chair of the state’s Higher Education Bond Oversight Committee.
• Hannah Gage of Wilmington is the currently Chair of the UNC Board of Governors, where she was first elected in 2001. She is a businesswoman and retired broadcast executive who built and managed radio stations across the Southeast. Gage served as a Member and Chair of the UNC-Wilmington Board of Trustees, on the N.C. Coastal Land trust board, and on Southeastern N.C. Community Foundation board. She is a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill.
• Franklin McCain of Charlotte currently serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees for North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. He is retired from Hoest Celanese Corporation and is Chairman of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund North Carolina Committee. He received his undergraduate and Master’s degrees from North Carolina A&T and received worldwide acclaim as one of the four A&T students who took part in the Woolworth sit-in in 1960.
• Burley Mitchell of Raleigh is currently a member of the NC State University Board of Trustees. He was Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, on which he served from 1982-1999. Prior to that, Mitchell was a member of the Court of Appeals, Secretary of the Department of Crime Control and Public Safety, an Assistant Attorney General, and District Attorney. Mitchell is currently an attorney with Womble Carlyle in Raleigh. He graduated from NC State and received his law degree from UNC-Chapel Hill.

The UNC-Board of Governors is the policy-making body legally charged with “the general determination, control, supervision, management, and governance of all affairs of the constituent institutions.” It elects the president, who administers the University. The 32 voting members of the Board of Governors are elected by the General Assembly for four-year terms.

BY Kerry Hall
NBC17

RALEIGH, N.C. — Republican leaders are calling for North Carolina to reign in government spending.

In a press conference Thursday, they said Gov. Beverly Perdue has failed to make necessary and tough choices in her budget proposal.

“I came into session last week expecting to see a budget that called for sacrifice on the part of government,” said Rep. Paul Stam, of Wake County. “Instead what we have in the budget are some phantom cuts.”

Republicans claim that if Perdue had incorporated some of their ideas for savings, proposed tax increases on tobacco and alcohol would be unnecessary.

“A recession is not the time to be raising taxes,” said Sen. Phil Berger, of Rockingham.

“The people of North Carolina are themselves having to deal with the reality of the economic slowdown,” said Berger. “This budget proposal does not deal with the reality in a way that is productive and in a way that’s going to bring North Carolina out of the recession.”

They also fear the Governor’s budget will lead to more job losses, particularly in the Triad area and in the tobacco industry.

WASHINGTON  – President Barack Obama’s pick to become U.S. ambassador to Iraq is meeting with Republican senators, who are divided over his nomination.

Sen. Richard Lugar, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, was expected to issue a statement in support of Christopher Hill. At the same time, Sen. Jon Kyl, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, has signed onto a letter asking Obama to reconsider his choice.

The Republican pushback makes it difficult for Hill, who would have to be confirmed by 60 votes to overcome procedural hurdles. But Lugar’s support is significant because it could provide other GOP moderates with political cover to support Hill.

WASHINGTON – Senate Democrats are trying to thwart a Republican effort to make lawmakers vote every year on whether or not to give themselves a pay raise.

For the past two decades, lawmakers have been receiving automatic cost-of-living increases each year unless they vote specifically to reject them. In January, they got an automatic increase of $4,700, boosting their annual salary to $174,000.

Republican Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana demanded a vote Tuesday on a measure that would do away with those automatic raises. He argued that they’re inappropriate while the nation is mired in a recession and millions of Americans have lost their jobs. Lawmakers aren’t contradicting that reasoning, but they are accusing Vitter of using the issue to delay a broader bill boosting government spending.

RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina Senate and House Republicans will host a press conference Tuesday, March 3, 2009, in the legislative press conference room at 9:30 a.m. 

At Tuesday’s press conference, Senate Republican Leader Phil Berger (R-Rockingham) and House Republican Leader Paul Stam (R-Wake) will discuss a bill that would save hundreds of millions of dollars on ineligible Medicaid claims.

Senate Republican Leader Phil Berger (R-Rockingham) and House Republican Leader Paul Stam (R-Wake) Wednesday announced plans to oppose “card check” legislation or the “Employee Free Choice Act” to the North Carolina Congressional Delegation. The leaders and a number of other Members who were present stated their intent to send a letter calling on Congress to protect the rights of all workers to use secret ballots for union organizing elections.

The legislation, currently under consideration in the U. S. Congress, would replace the current system of organizing union elections by secret ballot to be replaced with card checks, in which workers publicly sign union cards to organize and join a union.  If enacted, this proposal would force all of a company’s employees to join a union once union organizers collect signed cards from a majority of the workers.

Rep. Stam (R-Wake) and all other Republican House members signed the attached letter and called on his Democratic colleagues to send a similar message to our federal legislators.  He indicated there will be wide acceptance from those supporting workers’ rights as well as those who believe passage of the act would severely harm North Carolina’s already fragile economy.

“We call on all members of the General Assembly, to support a worker’s right to organizing elections that are free from intimidation and harassment.  We strongly believe in a worker’s right to organize unions.  But they must only do so in an environment of free choice,” said Rep. Paul Stam.

“Passage of this legislation would not only represent a loss of the individual right to work, it would also put North Carolina on a path to unionization of state and local workers just as they have in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit and a series of other places people are leaving in order to live here,” said Senator Berger. “We don’t need garbage worker strikes, police and fire department strikes or teacher strikes in North Carolina.”

“North Carolina enjoys an economic advantage over many other states in its ability to recruit new industries and create needed jobs,” said Senator Bob Rucho (R- Mecklenburg).  “The only reason for Congress to pass card check legislation is to expand union influence into the right to work states.  This action will negatively impact the North Carolina economy and eliminate our competitive edge.  We all recognize what the unions did to cripple the American auto industry and to Detroit, Michigan, but we surely can’t allow unions to do the same to North Carolina business.”

“Most of my constituents don’t care about politics or the national agendas of Big Labor,” said Rep. Thom Tillis (R-Mecklenburg). “They want to support local businesses and have the right to choose whether to join a local union. Those who hold jobs want their employers to do well enough so their jobs are more secure; and those who are looking for jobs want to attract new businesses to North Carolina so they can get back to work.”

(The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 2/15/09, Editorial)

The past week has confirmed — among many things — this: that as John McCain warned repeatedly, Barack Obama consists of leftist essence pure.

We are not talking Republican/ Democratic partisan politics here so much as conservative/liberal ideology, though ideology greatly informs partisanship. Both parties used to be big-tent operations, with liberals and conservatives in both. Now liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats are endangered species — just about extinct.

Democrats shun the terms leftist and liberal, coveting moderate and centrist as ever so much more seductive and marketable. (Obama has been heard from time to time to reference himself as a progressive.) Liberals usually deploy conservative in a pejorative sense — connoting a set of rigid values or Neanderthal beliefs with which they deeply disagree.

AND SO:
The past weeks saw various Obama selectees for high administration posts stumble or fall primarily because they hadn’t paid their taxes. The week also offered the possibility of the administration’s “stimulus” package failing to win congressional approval. The president declared he “screwed up” regarding the nominees.

Members of his vetting team said they were well aware of the tax problems yet deemed the flawed selectees dwellers of thin-aired Olympian realms far above the law.

The stimulus? No more Mr. Nice-Guy for Barack Obama. He shelved the “bipartisanship” theme on which he campaigned, and set to ripping not the Democrats who hold lopsided margins in both houses — but the Republicans. Never mind that the Democrats could pass practically any stimulus package their hearts desired without a single Republican vote (as the House Democrats did), the threats to passage were almost entirely the Republicans’ fault.

Republican complaints about the stimulus package were (and are) essentially that it provides too few tax cuts and too much social spending — and what little genuine stimulus it contains will take years to generate any beneficial effect. It is difficult to see how anyone could construe this as somehow ideologically obstreperous.

YET IN A series of remarks (the quotes indicate his words) Obama said look, he reached out to the Republicans in both houses, engaged them, had conversations with them, listened to them. Still, they had “come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis.”

He said, “Those ideas have been tested, and they have failed. They’ve taken us from surpluses to an annual deficit of over a trillion dollars, and they’ve brought our economy to a halt. And that’s precisely what the election we just had was all about.”

He said the Republicans found the bill to be “full of pet projects. When was the last time that we saw a bill of this magnitude move out with no earmarks in it? Not one.” He said he then got from Republicans “the argument, ‘Well, this is not a stimulus bill, this is a spending bill.’ What do you think a stimulus is? [Spending] is the whole point.” Don’t suggest to me that, contrary to the views of “even conservative economists,” it’s “wasteful spending to stimulate.”

BLASTING the “ideological rigidity and gridlock” of Republicans who prefer to “do nothing,” he said: “Doesn’t it make sense if we’re going to spend this money to solve some of the big problems that have been around for decades?” And: “Y’know, look, [this plan] is not perfect,” but it’s “more than a prescription for short-term spending — it’s a strategy for America’s long-term growth and opportunity in areas such as renewable energy, health care, and education.”

In Obama’s remarks you’ll search in vain for any use of leftist or liberal, and almost in vain for any mention of Democratic objections such as those of Clinton-era economist Alice Rivlin (the current plan needs more focus on short-term job creation) or Sen. Kent Conrad (many of the stimulus package’s provisions fail to meet Obama’s own stipulations for inclusion — that they be temporary, timely, and targeted).

Nor will you see the merest suggestion that Democratic luminaries Chris Dodd and Barney Frank directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to lend vast sums to people who couldn’t pay for houses they didn’t need — Fannie and Freddie thereby becoming principal causes of the mortgage liquidity crisis.

AS WASHINGTON Post columnist David Broder has noted: “Nothing was more central to [Obama's] victory last fall than his claim that he could break the partisan gridlock in Washington. He wants to be like Ronald Reagan, steering his first economic measures through a Democratic House in 1981, not Bill Clinton, passing his first budget in 1993 without a single Republican vote.”

As Obama now has demonstrated, this no longer is a bipartisan hour. Democrats and liberals won the election. Republicans and conservatives are the problem. There’s a conservative ganglion that must be excised so progressive things can happen. The leftist Obama thus has shown himself to be neither the uniter nor the post-partisan healer of his campaign rhetoric, but an ideologized divider.

Yet by going postal, he may have galvanized conservative Republicans and recalled for them the adamant, and effective, liberal Democratic resistance to practically every Bush II initiative. In taking off the rhetorical gloves and delivering some roundhouse blows below the belt, the leftist Obama may have done conservatives a favor — and, for a nation slow to awaken, raised the blinds.