Every time I think The Charlotte Observer has reached bottom, the paper digs a little deeper.
Easter Sunday’s story on the transit tax repeal sets a new low. The story’s premise continues down the path that signers of the petition had to be duped. Worse, the paper creates, out of whole cloth, a racial angle to a straight-forward government spending issue.
There are, in the Observer’s opinion, “too many” blacks, women, and Democrats who have signed the petition. The bias inherent in that assumption is staggering and really requires no further comment. Observer bosses just fundamentally refuse to accept that thousands of people in Mecklenburg County might have some issue with the way CATS spends money.
The truly mendacious element, however, is the fact that recently I personally discussed at length with reporter Steve Harrison the potential for the repeal drive to remake and shake-up traditional political fault lines in Charlotte come November. I speculated that with Mayor Pat McCrory tightly bound to the current CATS plan, the way was clear for a Democrat, possibly a black candidate, to short-circuit the city’s power centers.
I specifically mentioned that an anti-train, anti-transit tax Democrat — black or not — could appeal to suburban voters tired of McCrory carrying water for CATS. This, I thought, was an interesting line of speculation about the city’s political future. Little did I suspect that the Observer would take concrete evidence of black Democrat unhappiness with CATS, totally ignore my suddenly rational scenario, and instead spin petition demographics as part of the paper’s delegitimization campaign against the tax repeal effort.
And make no mistake, delegitimization is the Observer’s primary goal. To that end, I would not at all be surprised by some sort of effort to mount a legal challenge to the petition drive. Afterall, somebody wants lots of stories out of the Observer on “deception” and racial “targeting.”
To that end, keep watching the State Board of Elections. There Stan Campbell’s good friend and Jim Black apologist Bob Cordle sits as one of three Democrats on the five-member board.
I can count, too.
