Cooper Faces a Pivotal Choice | 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.

    In what direction will North Carolina go under a Democratic governor-elect, Roy Cooper, and a Republican General Assembly? There are three possibilities.

    The least likely scenario - but the one that progressives in North Carolina desperately hope to engineer - is a U-turn. They want to see Cooper wage years of unremitting ideological warfare. They want constant protests, lawsuits, vetoes, and personal attacks on GOP politicians and conservative leaders.

    They believe these tactics destroyed Pat McCrory and hounded him out of office. They now believe more of the same will destroy their other enemies and hound them out of office, so the Left can reverse the conservative fiscal, regulatory, education, and other policies enacted over the past six years.

    I think these progressives are about to be disappointed. Cooper and his team can read election results and polls just as well as the rest of us. They recognize that his edge over McCrory was just two-tenths of a percent. They can see that in the same election cycle, Republicans won the presidential and Senate races, got the most votes for legislature (not just more seats because of district maps), and won their first modern majority on the Council of State. They know, in other words, that the sweeping public repudiation of conservative governance the Left hoped for did not happen.

    Another scenario, widely expected among North Carolina politicos, is that state government is about to enter a period of stalemate and stasis. While Cooper will control state agencies and departments and use other powers to exercise policy influence on the margin, his budgets and major initiatives will be dead-on-arrival at the General Assembly. For their part, Republican lawmakers will be able to protect their past gains but will struggle to enact new ones. North Carolina won't reverse course, in this view, but neither will it continue its course of reform.

    This is a more realistic scenario than Progressive Paradise, I admit. Still, I think it ignores the personalities involved. Cooper is a longtime politician with significant experience in the legislature, including instances in which Democrats and Republicans cooperated to elect leaders or enact legislation. As attorney general, he did not join many of the left-wing crusades his Democratic counterparts in other states concocted, although of course his decisions didn't please conservatives, either. In short, left-wing rabble-rouser is not a role that would come easy to Cooper.

    Senate leader Phil Berger, House Speaker Tim Moore, and other legislative leaders also have significant experience. While firmly committed to their conservative accomplishments to date, and hardly intimidated by Cooper's narrow win, they will not assume that every interaction with the new governor needs to be a confrontation. When an opportunity presents itself to enact legislation of mutual interest, they will seize it.

    That leads me to my final - and more hopeful - scenario. It assumes that while the two sides will lock horns on a variety of fiscal and policy matters, they will cooperate on some issues. For example, there appears to be bipartisan interest in building on North Carolina's initial round of criminal-justice reforms, which have saved the taxpayers lots of money without endangering the public. Lawmakers from both parties have also indicated concern about the inequities of our current school-financing system and the excesses of occupational licensing, which keeps some North Carolina workers from changing jobs or starting their own businesses.

    A harder slog would be to reform the way the state regulates medical services. According to a new study by George Mason University's Mercatus Center, North Carolina ranks in the bottom 10 states in health care openness and access. We overly restrict competition among hospitals and innovation in service delivery. Virginia (#13) might be a good model to emulate here, although special-interest groups will fight such reforms tooth-and-nail.

    Roy Cooper's election gave Democrats around the country a rare piece of good news during an otherwise dismal showing. But it doesn't signal a leftward lurch in public policy or the North Carolina electorate. If Cooper assumes otherwise, he'll get himself in trouble very quickly.