The world is falling apart, in the view of Democrats and their fellow travelers at The News & Observer. The dismantling of their universe is not some natural disaster such as a tsunami or an earthquake. It’s losing a couple of elections that they see as proof of Armageddon.
Last year it was the victory of Republicans in the Wake County board of education race that set them atwitter. Teeth were set gnashing at Democratic headquarters and in the ivory towers of the N&O‘s news and editorial precincts. Ink-stained wretches were quickly enlisted to delegitimize the victory and the policies of the victors.
Then came last November and the historic defeat of the century-old Democratic majority in the legislature. Why, this just could not be! The world was tilted upside down! Mere anarchy has been loosed upon the world! Worse, those rascally Republicans who won have had the temerity to actually appoint Republicans to boards that have been dominated by Democrats for decades.
In today’s N&O, the reporters and headline writers worked overtime to make it sound as if the barbarians are at the gates of Raleigh and the borders of North Carolina. “Wake school board denies bias” reads one have-you-quit-beating-your-wife” headline. “House packs UNC board with GOP” reads another apocalyptic header. “Democrats sit out vote, say process was rigged” reads the subhead.
Former House Speaker Joe Hackney of Chapel Hill, trying his best to claim some of the revolutionary fervor of his Democratic counterparts in Wisconsin, led the Democrats in a mini-rebellion that surely made Hackney remember the fun days of the campus unrest of the ’60s:
Rep. Joe Hackney, a Chapel Hill Democrat, said there was no point in Democrats participating in the vote. So they didn’t. Democrats turned in blank ballots, and later voted “no” on a roll call vote on the Republican-approved list.
“They pressured people to withdraw so they wouldn’t be on the ballot and it just made the Board of Governors election a sham … it just wasn’t fair and we wanted to make that point,” Hackney said.
When you’ve finished laughing at the idea of a North Carolina Democrat whining about fairness, after more than a century of treating Republicans like whipped dogs, here’s a little dose of reality from Kings Mountain Republican Tim Moore that the Democrats in the legislature and the Democrats in the state’s newsrooms should heed:
Moore, himself a former UNC board member, pointed out that he lost re-election after one term when the legislature was controlled by Democrats.
“I didn’t cry foul and say it wasn’t fair,” he said. “That’s just the way it was.”
It’s only going to get worse. Already the race-quota-gender card is being played:
Rep. Alma Adams, a Greensboro Democrat, said the makeup of the board is problematic. The 32-member board, which oversees five historically black campuses, will have only four black members.
Expect the pundits, headline writers, editors and reporters to take that ball and run with it, just as they did when the race card was played after Republicans won a majority of the Wake County school board seats.
A responsible media would seek to give readers a view of issues that is somewhere near reality. As President Obama famously said, “Elections have consequences.” Big-boy journalists, in an historic situation such as North Carolina finds itself, should be telling readers the same thing Tim Moore told the N&O. They shouldn’t be trying to undermine legitimate elections and foment unrest and a false sense of outrage with lurid headlines and Demo-centric “news” stories.
