I can’t put it in simpler terms. A vote for Democrat Beverly Perdue for governor is a vote against Charlotte. Or, if you are a glass-half-full type of person, a vote for Perdue is a vote for the rural parts of North Carolina at Charlotte’s expense.
The race for governor this year is about a whole lot more than tired Republican versus Democrat partisanship. With Charlotte’s banking industry reeling from the national financial crisis, the race is now about the survival of the nation’s twin economic engines, Raleigh and Charlotte. If those engines falter, so does the state. Perdue and the Democratic regime that currently controls Raleigh either haven’t grasped that, or they have no political interest in doing so.
Here’s why. When most people think “Democrat,” they think liberal. In North Carolina, outside the big cities, it’s more accurate to think rural when you think Democrat. As in good-old boy, shotgun-rack, post-Civil War Democrat. The politicians in the state’s rural areas see Charlotte as a cash cow and our politicians as a threat to their annual pillaging of the state budget, which Charlotte contributes more to than any other regional area.
This is why our urban roads are among the most congested in the nation and our courts are desperately underfunded. It’s why it took more than a decade to get the lights repaired along Interstate 77 and why trash litters the sides of state roads here.
It’s also why Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory, who is running against Perdue, had to organize a caravan to Raleigh to get a measly few million dollars for Charlotte’s justice system while the state doled out $60 million in cash incentives to Bridgestone and Goodyear tire plants in Fayetteville and Wilson in exchange for employing a couple thousand workers.
The attitude in Raleigh is that Charlotte can afford to pay all the state’s bills, plus the tab for the stuff that the state is supposed to fund in Charlotte.
This is why Charlotte politicians have rarely won statewide. Should they gain any real power, the feeding frenzy would end. Democrat Jim Black, the former speaker of the state House of Representatives from Matthews who is now serving a federal jail term, understood this. This is why he was a Mecklenburg man at home, but a “down East” guy in the legislature, throwing Charlotte the occasional bone to shut up the locals while doling the bulk of the goodies to Democrat “down East” counties whose legislators voted for him for speaker because he was adept at raising money for them.
As lieutenant governor, Perdue has been a part of the down East cabal that has dominated the legislature for decades, and she has every intention of leaving things just as they are.
How do we know this? Simple. She refuses to say whether she’ll change the state road funding formula to include safety and congestion as factors that determine where roads are built, even though this would help her win votes in Raleigh and Charlotte. To political insiders, the formula funding issue is a key signal of whose interests you intend to support in the urban versus rural divide.
If Perdue supported factoring congestion into the formula, the flow of road money would reverse itself from rural areas that are stagnant or losing population to areas like Charlotte that are growing. It would signal to rural voters that Perdue no longer intends to raid the state treasury for political payola for rural areas at the expense of urban ones — for roads and in general.
Take the Fayetteville loop for instance. The $300 million interstate project will carry 9,000 automobiles, fewer vehicles than Charlotte’s Scaleybark Road carries, The Charlotte Observer reported. According to the same Observer article, there is no other instance of a loop being built for so few people anywhere along the East Coast.
Meanwhile, the last segment of Interstate 485 in Charlotte, which will carry more than 100,000 vehicles the day it opens, isn’t scheduled for completion for more than a decade.
This sort of neglect by the gang of rural-backed Democrats in Raleigh led to North Carolina being ranked next to California and Minnesota as the three states with the worst urban interstate congestion in the nation in a recent Reason Foundation study.
Perdue’s strategy is clear. Win the governorship with a majority of rural votes and by getting enough Democrat votes in urban areas like Raleigh and Charlotte to pull past McCrory. Most of these voters will have no idea they are voting against their own interests when they cast a vote for her.
This is why Perdue has fought to keep the debate in her race with McCrory focused on non-issues like stem cell research and school vouchers. If she had to answer real questions about her spending priorities, she’d be toast.
With its financial institutions teetering, Charlotte can no longer afford to fund rural pork raids on the treasury that drive up the tax rate without anything to show for it. The state must now compete in an increasingly challenging economic environment.
It’s time we installed someone in the governor’s mansion who understands this. That person is McCrory.
This article appears in Oct 14-21, 2008.
