Pat McCrory, Shooting From the Butt

Misstating the facts isn't a style. It's a problem.

“I’m very direct, straightforward and accurate,” says Gov. Pat McCrory.

Me, too. So I’m not going to tap-dance around the obvious: McCrory has a bad habit of talking out of the wrong orifice.

That’s the essential point of John Frank’s Sunday N&O piece about what Frank, constrained by journalistic convention, refers to as McCrory’s “improvisational approach” and “aw-shucks style.”

What he means is that McCrory often doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. It’s no secret. He was Charlotte’s mayor for 14 years. It’s just that the consequences are more severe now.

It’s one thing to screw up a name. But when the governor blames nonexistent teachers’ unions for holding up performance pay, or baselessly accuses manufacturers in High Point of opposing an immigration bill because they want to hire illegal immigrants instead of North Carolinians, he reveals that he’s misinformed, lying, or just making things up on the fly.

Even in the story, Gov. Malaprop stumbles over his own tongue.

“I recognize that sentences can be parceled,” he says. I assume he means “parsed.”

“My strength is concepts and strategy and theory and also facts,” he says (!). “But I’m not real good at pronouncing names or understanding names.”

Understanding names?

One thing McCrory understands in high definition, though, is how to deflect blame. He accuses the media of taking toothless misstatements out of context and blowing them out of proportion — the standard excuses for public figures caught eating their loafers.

“It’s all part of the image McCrory wants to project as the outsider,” Frank writes. Outsider to what? Reality?