Charlotte Observer Editorial

Where’s Bev? All we can say is it’s someplace warm
Last week’s 'jobs governor' is this week’s vacation governor.
Posted: Thursday, Jan. 28, 2010

Gov. Bev Perdue has run off and we don’t blame her a bit. Who wouldn’t want to get away from a growing list of problems – including a worsening state unemployment rate of 11.2 percent, worst in three decades, a projected $250 million hole in Medicaid funding and some festering ethical problems that don’t seem to improve.
Perdue is on a week’s vacation, the News & Observer’s Sarah Ovaska reports, but Perdue wouldn’t say where she was going. All Perdue would say is that she’s “going on a vacation to a nice warm place.”
But Raleigh still might qualify as a nice warm place, given how Republicans have roasted the Democratic governor over the verbal coals over the latest ethical meltdowns for Democrats.
U.S. Attorney George Holding’s office last week released a 51-count indictment of Ruffin Poole, a former key aide to former Gov. Mike Easley. In it, Perdue contributor Lanny Wilson of Wilmington was cited as a key player in the financing of the Cannonsgate development that Poole was an investor in after having shepherded Cannonsgate environmental permits through the Easley administration. Until he resigned in the past few days, Wilson was a member of the State Board of Transportation and the N.C. Turnpike Authority.
But Republicans were raking Perdue over the fires for it nonetheless, driving home the point that for all her attempts to clean up politics in Raleigh and raise ethical standards, Democrats keep getting indicted, cited, or derided for one kind of appalling behavior or another.
The governor recently claimed that she was known as, and would continue to be known as, the “jobs governor.” Maybe so, but we wonder. Her decision to take a week off in a nice warm place in the midst of one of the state’s shakier weeks in modern economic and political history may have been a relief to the governor. But it has more potential to define her image than overwrought claims about jobs. She might want to hurry on back to the hot seat.