4-19-2005

As seen in the April edition of The North Carolina Conservative:

A recent editorial in the Wilmington newspaper the Star-News started with
an eye-opening sentence: “The smartest bill of the legislative session
already might have been introduced.” Being optimistic, you start rapidly
conjuring up possibilities. Reducing the burden of high taxation on
working families, shrinking the size of the state budget by cutting waste,
lessening government regulation to help in areas such as job creation.

But those thoughts were quickly annihilated by the headline, ‘Stop us
before we vote again’. That alone had an ominous pretense to it, but it
was the second sentence that dramatically lowered the boom. “It [the bill]
would let the governor choose the bosses of state departments that voters
know little or nothing about - including the departments of agriculture
and public instruction.”

Okay. If you don’t have goose bumps yet, then you’re not paying attention.

The bill was introduced by Duplin Democrat Senator Charlie Albertson and
it perfectly exemplifies that no matter how often Democrats assert their
conservatism during the election campaign, liberalism is alive and well in
North Carolina.

This Democrat and several editorial boards across the state seem to think
that North Carolinians just aren’t smart enough to elect our state
department representatives. Senator Albertson reportedly decided that
because so many people had to inquire from him who was running for
multiple offices in the Council of State it would be easier for voters if
an amendment were passed to limit half of the ten offices to appointment
status.

Those five would include: secretary of state, superintendent of public
instruction, and commissioners of labor, insurance, and agriculture. The
Charlotte Observer thinks this is a ‘rational plan’ because it ‘would trim
long list of North Carolina elected officials’ making it easier for the
uninformed masses to do a better job in future elections than they did in
the last one where agriculture and public instruction took months to get
settled.

But that’s not really the fault of the voters. Both of those offices would
have been seated already if the state board of elections wasn’t playing
partisan politics with the election results. Besides, the idea of the bill
seems politically motivated just from the fact that of the five seats
intended to be ‘appointed’, Republicans won two and possibly all three of
them depending on how you feel about the illegal out-of-precinct votes
that were allowed by the state elections board.

Not to mention the fact that the liberal editorial board of The Charlotte
Observer thinks North Carolinian voters are ‘uninformed masses’ because a
Republican won the agriculture office and possibly the office of public
instruction. They can’t deny that a voting machine malfunction in Carteret
County caused the problem in the agriculture race, not ‘uninformed masses’
of voters.

If it’s not politically motivated, how then is the commissioner of labor
or agriculture any less visible than the attorney general, auditor, or
treasurer? Couldn’t Senator Albertson’s legislation just as easily
targeted those offices? An even more poignant question is, if partisan
politics isn’t fueling this, why is it now suddenly important for
Democrats to make this change? Is it because they are starting to see a
fissure in what has mostly been a monolithic hierarchy in the state
government?

Even the Charlotte Observer admitted that Democrats ‘long benefited from
the long ballot’, but thinks it needs to change because it ‘leaves many
inattentive voters ignorant of who is running for a number of offices.
Many wind up choosing candidates by political party, not a candidates
merit’.

Strange... how exactly did Republicans fare as well as they did in the
election if voters chose a party rather than a candidate? Democrats
intentionally separated the presidential voter choice from the straight
party ticket, because the state carries a Republican president more often
than not and the combination of the two would generate more Republican
victories at the state level. For Republicans to have won in any of the
state office races, they had to have gotten votes outside their political
party’s constituency.

In other words, voters didn’t just vote a straight party ticket or as the
Observer tried to imply, ‘choosing candidates by political party’, they
had to have voted for individual offices or Democrats would have won every
race based on the overall outcome of the election.

Besides, if the intention of this legislation is to assist ‘inattentive
voters ignorant of who is running for a number of offices’, how exactly
does it not ‘disenfranchise’ the rest of us who are very ‘attentive’ to
who is running for what office? Or how does it not dilute the original
intention of the current election law which makes our elected state
officials at every level more accountable to the voters locally?

Democrats in this state have to realize once and for all, that the very
mandate of empowering government to take away our freedoms by controlling
every aspect of our lives through indoctrination of the ideology that we
are not smart enough to make decisions for ourselves is the basic
foundation of liberalism.

And it lives and breathes throughout the Democrat Party, even in the red
state of North Carolina.

Lee P Butler