Gov. Roy Cooper’s legacy: He lost battles, but he didn’t lose what was important | Opinion
During a news conference last year, there was an amusing aside during which Gov. Roy Cooper explained how to properly pronounce his last name.
Most say it the common way, but the governor said it should actually be pronounced with an eastern North Carolina lilt that makes it sound almost like “cupper,” but not quite.
There is, however, no confusion about how history will pronounce Roy Cooper: A good man and a good governor.
The term-limited Democrat will leave office Jan. 1 after a remarkable eight-year run that included a global pandemic, devastating hurricanes and floods, Black Lives Matter demonstrations and legal struggles against an assertive Republican-controlled General Assembly. He will leave a legacy built both on what he stood for and what he stood against.
In one respect, Cooper’s record is mostly about battles lost. Republican legislative leaders ignored his budgets, dismissed his bond proposals, curtailed his appointment powers and overrode dozens of his vetoes.
He was powerless to stop the Republicans’ flagrant gerrymandering and voting restrictions. He failed to get lawmakers to support his calls to substantially increase pay for teachers and state employees. When he declared a “state of emergency” over the lack of public school funding and condemned the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars on universal private school vouchers, Republican lawmakers yawned.
Despite all that, Cooper, 67, also had impressive victories, starting with his defeat of incumbent Gov. Pat McCrory in 2016 and his re-election in 2020, even as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump won the state in both years. (Including Cooper’s time in the state legislature and his four-terms as attorney general, he has never lost an election.) The governor has been ranked as the state’s most popular politician.
Cooper is scheduled to give his farewell address today in his home county of Nash. He will have accomplishments to cite. The most significant will be the expansion of Medicaid in 2023 after years of his cajoling the legislature to act. In the year since, Medicaid expansion has provided health insurance for more than 600,000 North Carolinians.
Republican lawmakers claim that their relentless tax cutting has attracted more businesses to North Carolina. Low taxes are part of it, but credit also belongs to the Cooper administration’s success in wooing major corporationsto open operations in the state. Businesses coming to the state or those expanding here have added 640,000 jobs during Cooper’s tenure. CSNBC named North Carolina “America’s Top State for Business” in 2022 and 2023.
But Cooper’s most significant achievements cannot be plainly measured and logged. They are not projects or laws. They are acts of integrity, courage and perseverance.
Cooper assembled a strong and diverse administration that included two appointees who went on to major federal offices: Former Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Michael Regan became EPA administrator and former Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Mandy Cohen now leads the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Over eight years, Cooper oversaw an administration unmarked by scandal or corruption.
During the tense and dangerous first years of the COVID pandemic, Cooper used his emergency powers with clarity and confidence despite resistance to closures, masking and other public health safeguards. North Carolina had one of the nation’s lowest COVID death rates.
When Black Lives Matter protests swept through Raleigh after the police killing of George Floyd, Cooper ordered the removal Confederate monuments from the State Capitol grounds. He said, “Monuments to white supremacy don’t belong in places of allegiance, and it’s past time that these painful memorials be moved in a legal, safe way.”
Rob Christensen, a former News & Observer political columnist and an author of books on the state’s political history, said Cooper is hard to rank among governors because Republicans rejected most of his legislative proposals.
“It’s hard for me to say he would be in a pantheon of great governors,” Christensen said. “And I don’t say that to criticize him. He did a good job.”
Cooper, a rare low-key and self-effacing politician, is not one who worries about his place in history. What he wants is what is best for North Carolina. He argued for it until he was hoarse before Republican lawmakers who chose to be deaf.
That futility draws a line of regret through his legacy. If he had had a cooperative legislature, what great things could have been accomplished for public schools, public health, the environment and the state’s needy? North Carolinians will never know.
But they do know that at a time when radical Republicans drew national attention for bitterly divisive actions – House Bill 2, voter suppression, shameless gerrymandering and neglect of public schools – Roy Cooper stood in the breach and represented to the nation the state’s support for equality, compassion and honesty.
Perhaps that will not earn him a place in the pantheon of great governors, but it has earned him the lasting gratitude of all who seek, as he did, a better North Carolina.
This story was originally published December 18, 2024 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Gov. Roy Cooper’s legacy: He lost battles, but he didn’t lose what was important | Opinion."