The governor gets better at governing

When North Carolinians elected Pat McCrory as governor, many hoped that the self-proclaimed moderate would be a moderating influence on the conservative N.C. legislature.

That didn’t happen, of course. Lawmakers disregarded McCrory while steering the state even more to the right, and on the infrequent occasions the governor did protest, they dismissed him as if he were a junior staffer.

But this week’s N.C. budget agreement, signed by McCrory on Friday, showed a governor who’s a little bolder with his policy positions and a little better at getting his way.

Specifically, it’s not what’s in the budget that’s revealing, but what didn’t make it in – a Senate sales tax redistribution plan that would have given revenue from urban and coastal counties to poorer, rural counties.

McCrory has long been against the plan, but unlike other policies he’s threatened to veto, he spoke early, often and forcefully against redistribution. It helped that House lawmakers – particularly those from counties that would lose under the plan – also voiced their displeasure. Whether they emboldened the governor, or vice versa, is unclear. But a coalition was formed, the plan was ultimately killed, and the governor had himself a meaningful victory.

A caveat: A Redistribution Lite did make its way into the budget. That provision will take new sales tax revenues from services including auto repair and put them in a fund that would benefit poorer counties. It’s a tax that will hurt low-income North Carolinians, and it never should have materialized at the last minute in the budget. But it was not nearly the tax redistribution McCrory threatened to veto.

A good goal for next year: The governor should do more than talk about keeping new policy out of N.C. budgets. As we’ve said earlier, he should veto any budget that changes policy or rewrites state law.

McCrory also enjoyed smaller budget victories, including the retention of N.C. teacher assistants. Still, he was no friend to state teachers who got an insulting one-time $750 bonus instead of raises they deserve.

The governor compounded that mistake with a blunder Friday, releasing a video thanking N.C. employees and declaring next week State Employee Recognition Week. It might be his worst bout with tone-deafness since he delivered cookies to women protesting outside the gates of the governor’s mansion in 2013.

It was a bad way to end McCrory’s not-so-bad budget week, and it showed that while he’s getting a little better at governing, he still has something to learn about leading.

This story was originally published September 18, 2015 at 5:28 PM with the headline "The governor gets better at governing."