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Inauspicious campaign debut

Posted on January 23, 2008 by Staff

Chris Fitzsimon

The pundits and press are still weighing in about the latest gubernatorial debate: a discussion between the four Republican candidates moderated by WRAL-TV’s David Crabtree.

The debate covered the usual ground, education, immigration, transportation, taxes, leadership and not much news was made with one notable exception. It was the first appearance of Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory in a televised debate.

McCrory officially entered the race earlier in the week, talking about transportation, crime and immigration in his campaign kickoff, themes he repeatedly stressed in his debate debut.

Raleigh’s political punditry gave McCrory fairly high marks for his performance. One columnist said that McCrory’s argument that his record and his political base makes him electable in November’s general election makes sense.

One news story about the debate carried a headline that “McCrory livens up state race.”

Another headline declared that McCrory added spice to the contest. One reporter’s blog about the debate said McCrory “was really well-prepared” and looked “experienced, calm and ready to lead.”

That seemed to be the consensus, that McCrory’s 12 years as mayor of the state’s biggest city gave him a professionalism and confidence that stood out in the Republican field.

The positive reviews came only days after McCrory’s campaign announcement in his hometown of Jamestown was marred by interesting comments from campaign manager Victoria Smith in her attempts to explain why a press release misspelled governor as “governer.”

Smith told reporters that the typo was the work of a computer hacker who somehow got into the campaign’s computer system.  Another campaign staffer said it was simply a mistake by the person who designed the logo and it was corrected. But Smith would have nothing of that explanation and claimed it was indeed a hacker, who then apparently hacked back into the computer and corrected the error.

McCrory himself ended all the speculation about the spellchecking hacker and confirmed the honest mistake. The story lingered on blogs and talks shows until the positive reviews of McCrory’s debate performance started coming in.

But then The Charlotte Observer weighed in with a story that raises far bigger questions than who misspelled a word on a press release. The Observer tried to verify two claims McCrory made about immigration in the first week of his candidacy, that 20 percent of the inmates in the Mecklenburg County Jail are illegal immigrants who have committed a crime and that more than half the babies born at the Carolinas Medical Center are Latino.

Turns out that neither the Sheriff’s department nor the hospital can attest to the accuracy of McCrory’s claims because they don’t keep those kinds of records.  McCrory told The Observer that a hospital official, whom he declined to identify, gave him the information about the births and that the former Sheriff was the source of his claim about the nationality of the inmates.

But neither place keeps those numbers, so there is no way for McCrory or to anyone else to know them. McCrory did say that he might update his numbers and told The Observer that it’s all part of the problem with the immigration issue, that “estimates are often wrong.”

A much bigger problem is politicians who use numbers they seem to pull out of thin air to scare and mislead voters. McCrory should update the statistics he uses if he can find any meaningful numbers. It seems like the least he could do. It might also be time to revise all those reviews about his performance so far in the governors’ race.

Chris Fitzsimon is the director of N.C. Policy Watch.

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