Same Whine, Different Squabbles | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: This article appeared on John Hood's daily column in the Carolina Journal, which, because of Author / Publisher Hood, is linked to the John Locke Foundation.

    RALEIGH     "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again," wrote the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes. "There is nothing new under the sun." More than two millennia later, Karl Marx, wrote that history repeated itself "the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."

    Few ideas can boast of more diverse adherents. For more confirmation of it, you need look no further than North Carolina politics.

    Since the election of Gov. Pat McCrory in 2012, Democrats and liberal activists have attacked him and the GOP-led legislature on many grounds. They say the Republicans have cut taxes for the wealthy instead of providing adequate funding for public schools. They demand that North Carolina's average teacher salary be raised to the national average. They accuse McCrory and legislative leaders of being too cozy to special interests, particularly utility companies, and too lax in protecting the environment.

    In increasingly large and strident protests throughout 2013, they even suggested that promoting lower taxes, less regulation, less dependency, and more competition in public services was immoral  -  a betrayal of God's commandments to be kind, generous, and just.

    For their part, Republicans and conservatives have responded to the Left's attacks by arguing that reforming and reducing North Carolina taxes would encourage economic growth, that legitimate concerns about public health and safety should not lead to job-killing overregulation, and that teachers ought to be compensated not simply on the basis of longevity or degrees completed but to a much greater degree on demonstrable success in improving student performance.

    Whatever you think of the merits of these arguments, I hope you aren't under the impression that there is anything particularly novel about them.

    I am in the midst of writing the biography of former North Carolina Gov. Jim Martin. A Republican, he served from 1985 to 1993, during a time of rapid economic and political change in the state. Before that, Martin served 12 years in Congress, six years on the Mecklenburg county commission, and a dozen years as a chemistry professor at Davidson College.

    Here are some major issues that Martin and his political adversaries sparred over during his statewide races and eight years as governor. See if anything sounds familiar to you:

• Martin's gubernatorial campaign in 1984 centered on his proposal to reduce state taxes a means of spurring economic growth. Martin's opponent, Democratic Attorney General Rufus Edmisten, called the plan "tax breaks for the rich" that would produce too little "money for educational excellence."
• Edmisten accused Martin of being too close to Charlotte-based Duke Power. He "jumps 20 feet high every time the utility companies say so," Edmisten once declared. "I jump 100 feet for the ordinary citizen."
• Running against Martin in 1988, Democratic Lt. Gov. Bob Jordan told a religious audience that he had a better record of "doing the Lord's work" than Martin did because Jordan favored higher state spending on education, health care, and public assistance.
• During his administration, Martin championed his "career-ladder" program to raise the pay of public school teachers based on performance. Edmisten, Jordan, and legislative leaders opposed performance pay and argued instead for across-the-board raises to "lift our teacher salaries to the national average," as Jordan put it.

    Jim Martin won both of his statewide campaigns by large margins. After his second term, however, Republicans failed for two decades to replicate his success, losing five straight gubernatorial elections before McCrory succeeded, on his second attempt, in 2012.

    At which point, the two sides seem to have picked up pretty much where they left off when Martin was governor. Only this time, it was the GOP rather than the Democrats who held supermajorities in the General Assembly  -  thanks in part, I would argue, to the diligent work of politicians and strategists who in many cases got their political start working for Martin a generation earlier.

    So if today's political debates in Raleigh puzzle you, take Aristotle's advice: "If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development."