Must-Read NC Editorial: Tillis “Flips Like a Fish on a Dock” & “Is Trusted by Neither Moderates nor Conservatives”

Charlotte Observer / Raleigh News & Observer: “Will we get the Thom Tillis who pretends to be a moderate, or the Thom Tillis who pretends to be a conservative? We’re not sure which is real — and North Carolina voters apparently feel the same”

In a searing new editorial today, the Charlotte Observer and Raleigh News & Observer panned Senator Thom Tillis’ desperate lurch to the right as part of his frantic effort to stave off a primary threat. After Tillis flipped “like a fish on a dock” on the emergency declaration that allowed the Trump administration to raid $80 million from North Carolina military installations and sank more than $700,000 of his campaign funds into primary ads, the editorial points out that North Carolinians have no idea where Tillis truly stands on the issues that matter to his constituents. One thing is certain, though — “regardless of what else he pretends to be,” Tillis is first among the ranks of spineless politicians who “value their jobs over their country.”

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Charlotte Observer / Raleigh News & Observer: Editorial: Which Thom Tillis will we get now? We have a hunch

December 4, 2019

Key Points:

• Which Thom Tillis are we about to get now that his Republican primary opponent has dropped out of the 2020 U.S. Senate race in North Carolina?

• Will we get the Thom Tillis who is troubled by at least some of President Donald Trump’s erratic behavior and policies, or will we get the Tillis who is reluctant to say a bad word regardless of what the president says or does — even when that comes at the expense of North Carolinians?

• Will we get the Thom Tillis who pretends to be a moderate, or the Thom Tillis who pretends to be a conservative?

• We’re not sure which is real — and North Carolina voters apparently feel the same, if polls are any indication — but we do know when North Carolina noticed a shift this year. It was right around when Raleigh businessman Garland Tucker entered the U.S. Senate race in May, then tried to run to the right of the incumbent.

• Gone were the moments, however fleeting, when Tillis dared to raise an eyebrow at the latest Trump transgression. Instead, Tillis leapt at opportunities to align himself with the president, appearing regularly on Fox News to call the president a “patriot” or laud Trump’s Iran strategy or, laughably, say the president was prepared to hold Turkey accountable for military action against Syria.

• None of which is politically groundbreaking. For as long as candidates have kissed babies and eaten bad fair food, they’ve made themselves appealing to their party’s base during primaries, then tried to slide back toward the center for general elections. Tillis, however, is uncommonly bad at it. He flips like a fish on a dock, sometimes within weeks, such as when he expressed “grave concerns” in a Februrary op-ed about Trump’s national emergency declaration to fund a wall on the southern border, then voted to support it less than a month later. It was an unusually clumsy reversal, but it was one of several inconsistencies… That’s why polls have shown that Tillis is trusted by neither moderates nor conservatives.

• Which way will he go now? Our guess is that he’ll mostly stay aligned with the president. In part it’s because Tillis has lost many moderates for good with his fuller embrace of Trump. In part it’s because Trump has given Republicans like Tillis little choice. You either express fealty, or you risk a presidential tweet and subsequent backlash from Trump supporters.

• For Republicans who value their jobs over their country, the choice is clear. It’s also clear that Thom Tillis is one of those Republicans, regardless of what else he pretends to be.

Read the full editorial here.

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