Gov. Mike Easley faced a sea of journalists in a Chapel Hill auditorium Thursday night, and it brought to mind a story.
He recalled working with Judge Pou Bailey, who was known for his gruff demeanor in court, especially when dealing with lawyers.
Why, Easley once asked Bailey, was he so rough on attorneys all the time?
“Well, it’s like the sea,” Easley imitated Bailey responding in a deep, slow cadence. “Some men fear the sea, some men respect the sea.
“Either way, they’re pretty careful.”
Easley was pretty careful with the North Carolina press Thursday night, charming them with accolades for their public service. He had a message to get across about the state’s financial situation and his growing call for a state-sponsored lottery. But first he made a point of praising the state’s smaller papers, slightly at the expense of the big metro dailies.
In the days after the November election, Easley said, he took a vacation at Bald Head Island. On the ferry ride between mainland and island, he spotted a copy of the Wilmington paper. No offense to anyone, he said, but all he did was glance at the front page and make sure his own name wasn’t mentioned in any negative sense.
But then he noticed the captain sitting on a copy of the State Port Pilot, the weekly newspaper from Southport, where Easley has had a home for many years. He asked if he could read it, and found it full of news about people and places familiar to him. He read it for the duration of the trip, and asked the captain if he could take it with him when he reached shore.
No, the captain told the new governor. He wasn’t finished with it yet.
Easley praised smaller papers for promoting a sense of community and “that sense of what North Carolina is all about — it’s all about people.”
Having thereby won the attention and hearts of the majority of the audience, Easley then proceeded to be all about public schools and the one means he sees for the state to reach its education goals — a lottery.
The state is facing a substantial financial challenge, the governor said. He projected a $500 million deficit this year, the same for 2001-2002 and an even bleaker situation in the year after that.
“You might want to congratulate me on picking a great time to be governor,” Easley quipped.
The state has been through slow times before, but not in quite this environment, he said. In the past when North Carolina had to freeze salaries and hunker down, other states were in the same situation. This time the slowdown is not yet nationwide, Easley said. If North Carolina chooses, for example, to freeze the salaries of faculty members in the university system, other universities might snatch them up. So the state has to worry about competitiveness.
The state also cannot afford to sit still, Easley said. North Carolina must continue to make progress on the one front that most people agree is most important: education. We have the best university system in the nation and one of the best community college systems, he said. Smart Start has gained the state a reputation for premier preschool initiatives.
But there’s a missing link: the kindergarten through 12th-grade programs in the public schools. Easley said he found it amazing that North Carolina had not been able to do better in the public schools yet, since so much attention had been focused there. But that may signal the need for a new approach. You can’t test students into excellence, he said. You can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results.
“You can’t make the hog heavier by just weighing the pig every year,” Easley said. You have to feed him more.
How can the state feed more education into its children? Easley presented the same three-pronged approach he used in his campaign: teacher quality, a pre-kindergarten program for 4-year-olds, and a reduction in class size, especially in grades K-3. Achievement goes up and discipline problems go down when students have classes of 18 and below, Easley said.
Why doesn’t the state do that? Right now it doesn’t have the money. But Easley made a promise: “You’re going to hear a lot about the lottery.”
He acknowledged that most editorial boards across the state were opposed to a lottery. (That includes the Salisbury Post’s.) But he quickly laid out the logic in favor of it: “We’re the only state that plays the lottery and leaves the money on the table,” he said, referring to the $125 million that North Carolinians already put into the Virginia lottery and the $85 million going into the Georgia lottery. Soon, those folks will have a South Carolina lottery to take advantage of — or vice versa, depending on your view.
As Easley built his case, it became evident how his work as a prosecutor could benefit him as a politician. He has gathered the evidence, and he knows the art of moral persuasion. He makes no mention of the ills of gambling, of a regressive tax that hurts the poorest most, of a gambling industry that reaps, reaps, reaps.
Easley spoke only of an “education lottery,” and the need to keep North Carolina public schools moving ahead even in these slowing economic times. “We have to be willing to invest in ourselves...”
If you want to reduce crime, educate, he said. If you want to bring better jobs into the state, educate. If you want North Carolinians to enjoy a higher and better quality of life, educate. We must be bold and aggressive, he said.
Mike Easley’s first few weeks in office have not impressed a lot of people. He seemed slow to make top appointments, slow to pull together a map out of this financial mess.
But he showed journalists Thursday night that he is a force to be reckoned with — a cajoling, convincing, committed force. He’s no Jim Hunt — though he did a great, mush-mouthed imitation of Hunt addressing the group as “my special friends.” No, Mike Easley is something altogether different, and nonetheless very powerful. People who think the lottery is dead in North Carolina better delay the post mortem. There’s a new force in Raleigh. You can fear it, or you can respect it. Either way, be careful.
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Elizabeth G. Cook is editor of the Salisbury Post.
Elizabeth G.