Taking Back Our State?

    News reports say former governor Jim Hunt has convened a group to discuss "an alternative vision" for North Carolina. Let's hope they'll want to counteract the serial disgrace that began with the election of Gov. Pat McCrory and legislators widely beholden to a wealthy, right-wing ideologue.
    Charlotte Mayor McCrory was a thoughtful and even-handed public servant. Governor McCrory has baffled his friends, appalled his critics and saddened both. His political style has been long on parroting doctrinaire slogans. As the state's chief executive, he has displayed a startling capacity for connivance and double-talk.
    Treated early in his tenure to vocal dismay, McCrory lashed out. He decried "scare tactics" from "the extreme left."  Welcome to today's North Carolina. If you exercise a citizen's right to speak up, your own governor gives you the back of his hand.
    Meanwhile, under iron control by Republicans, the legislature indulged the notion that might makes right. Lawmakers whooped through abortion restrictions and a high-tech poll tax. They have tainted the state's distinguished university with partisan politics.
    The list of dismal particulars goes on.  And while we might disagree on this specific or that one, they are alike in the spirit of their affront to principled governance: They are fundamentally out of tune with the long manifest public temperament of this state.
    North Carolina has comfortably hosted conservative political ideas and progressive ones, too.  Our best leaders have honored a sleeves up, pragmatic ethic of tending to essential knitting in the broad public interest.
    The offense of our current leaders is regrettably simple. In imposing a stark, partisan lockstep on North Carolina, the governor and the legislature have functioned in  contempt of their obligation to serve all the people.
    Possibly, they have produced an especially significant result. They may have coalesced in the public mind the sort of resonating idea that supports a successful brand. In ironic justice, the brand would belong to their opponents.
    Attorney General Roy Cooper embraced it as he put his own hat in the gubernatorial ring:
    "North Carolina is better than this."