On Monday, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) appeared on Fox News to talk to Neil Cavuto about the firebombing of the Republican Party headquarters in Orange County, North Carolina. Before the interview was over, Cavuto asked the governor about a certain birthday present he received from his political opponents, and McCrory responded with a particularly hypocritical answer.
A group called Writers for a Progress North Carolina took out a full-page ad in Monday’s Raleigh News & Observer which showed a rainbow cake and wished McCrory a happy 60th birthday. “But the real celebration will begin November 8th,” the ad read, “when North Carolina votes to move in a more progressive direction.” It then urged voters to support candidates who champion progressive positions, including the repeal of HB2, North Carolina’s anti-LGBT law that targets transgender people for discrimination.
Cavuto described the ad to McCrory, then asked, “What do you make of all that?”
“I wish they would have saved their money and not spent it on a ridiculous political propaganda and maybe would’ve donated that money to a lot of the homeless people that we have right now that are flooded out of their homes over about a 600 square mile area of North Carolina,” McCrory responded. “That money would have been much better spent helping people who are in shelters at this point in time, from Lumberton, North Carolina all the way to the Tar River area of North Carolina. We’ve got a lot of people that are hurting right now. This is not a time for those types of foolish politics nor a time for this type of violence trying to impact our democratic system.”
As he repeatedly has done in the past, he then claimed that there was a “propaganda campaign brought in from outside North Carolina that sadly the national media bought in to regarding this ridiculous gender debate, which the left started not the right.” Incidentally, among the campaign signs behind him was one defending HB2 with the message, “Keep women & children safe,” a reference to the myth that trans people using bathrooms somehow pose a threat.
NC Gov. McCrory: GOP Office Firebombing ‘An Assault on Our Democratic System’‘Nazi Republicans, Leave Town’: NC GOP Office Firebombed Pirro: If Hillary Picks Justices, ‘No One Will Give a Damn…insider.foxnews.comMcCrory seems to believe that instead of political ads, money should go to support the victims of flooding caused by Hurricane Matthew. But the very day he made those remarks, his campaign was running TV ads across the state, including in Raleigh and Wilmington. It’s unclear how much the McCrory campaign spent on Monday alone, or since Hurricane Matthew hit the state, but through early October, the campaign had spent an estimated $4.5 million on television ads alone. According to the Raleigh News & Observer’s advertising site, the newspaper birthday ad probably cost between $10,000 and $15,000.
Interestingly, McCrory avoided commenting on the $13,000 that a group of Democrats raised to help rebuild the Republican headquarters that was firebombed, money that, by his reasoning, could have also gone to support flood victims. After reaching its fundraising goal (in less than an hour), that group asked those still interesting in contributing to instead donate to a North Carolina school.
ThinkProgress reached out to the McCrory campaign to inquire whether it was planning to follow the governor’s advice and pull its ads and instead dedicate the political funds to flood victims. The campaign did not respond.