Fitzsimon File

You may not have heard much about it, but there is a heated race for Lieutenant Governor this year between two members of the North Carolina Senate, Democrat Walter Dalton and Republican Robert Pittenger.

The race has many parallels to the battle for governor between Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory and Lieutenant Beverly Perdue. Republicans McCrory and Pittenger are both from Charlotte, both running against the Democratic establishment in Raleigh that includes Perdue and Dalton, both are repeating misleading claims about taxes and waste in government.

Perdue has been Lieutenant Governor for the last eight years and was a Senate budget chair before that. Dalton is currently a Senate budget chair.

Both Democrats are running on the same safe Democratic issues, education, health care, economic development.

Nothing wrong with that, but neither candidate has any bold proposals in those areas.  Both are pandering to voters by refusing to stand up for undocumented students who want to attend North Carolina community colleges.

The races aren’t completely alike. All things being equal, female candidates do better in most races, an advantage Dalton obviously doesn’t have. And while Pittenger and McCrory are both from the same city, they are from different wings of the Republican Party.

Though he is running to the right on many issues, McCrory is more associated with the business community than conservative ideologues and supported raising taxes for mass transit and using public money to build a basketball arena in Charlotte. Pittenger opposed McCrory on both of those local issues and is a hard right Republican with little use for government and is always on the rampage about taxes and spending.

Still, it’s hard not to see the two races as similar and that was clear again Wednesday night when Dalton and Pittenger faced off in a statewide debate in North Carolina Public Television, joined by Libertarian candidate Phillip Rhodes.

Rhodes was predictably perplexing, saying he favored letting undocumented students attend community colleges if they paid out of state tuition and in the next breath saying the state should have no role in providing mental health services.

Pittenger spent most of his time trying to convince us that the North Carolina is an unmitigated disaster, that the schools are failing, taxes are strangling economic development, and “illegals” are overwhelming our jails and hospitals. And that most of it is Dalton’s fault or least the fault of the Democratic leadership club he belongs to.

The problem with that analysis is that most of it is wrong and some of it is offensive. One of the questions posed to the candidates by the moderator was about North Carolina’s dramatic population growth. The question on its own disproves Pittenger’s sky is falling scenario, unless all those people are turning around and leaving as soon as they get here and not telling anybody.

And no matter how he demagogues it, North Carolina taxes are not out of line with other states and the state continues to lead the nation is most economic development measures.

Pittenger does have a point when he attacks the concentration of power in the Senate the closed budget process. Dalton seems to know it, and never responded to Pittenger’s attack on that front.

He spent most of time extolling the state’s successes in recent years, investments in education at all levels, a health care program for children, and success in recruiting new jobs to the state.

All good things that deserve praise, but Dalton, like Perdue, seems to think that improving education can solve every problem facing the state, unless of course you are an undocumented student who wants to go to college.

The candidates were asked about recent U.S. Census Bureau numbers that show poverty on the rise in North Carolina in the last six years. Pittenger says cutting taxes is the answer to reducing poverty. He says it is the solution to everything.

 Dalton says improving schools is the key, neither mentioning that helping poor families will help kids do better in school and help the state’s economy as more people can find a decent job when they have access to child care and a safe, affordable place to live.

But as we know, helping the poor is not a talking point of either party. Dalton does deserve credit for saying he supports more mass transit options in the state.

Both candidates were outraged by the recent death of a patient at Cherry Hospital in Goldsboro, though Pittenger quickly moved to rail about the $400 million that he says was wasted in the community support program, though that’s a disputed figure.

Dalton wants more community crisis services available, though he wrote the Senate budget for the last few years that didn’t provide them.

Overall, it was a predictable debate in which the candidates managed to avoid really answering some questions and ignored some important issues altogether.

But at least we finally got to hear from the people who want to be the state’s second highest elected official with an inside track on being the next governor.

Now if we can just them to put down the talking points and address the state’s real problems.

 

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.