LOD: High Road, Low Road

Here are two NC stories of groups setting out to exert power – one taking the hard road of community organizing and grassroots democracy, the other using their big-money connections to buy an election. The first story describes how and why Stokes County neighbors came together to wage an impressive campaign against the prospect of natural gas fracking in the backyards. Many of them had won an earlier Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) fight and they knew the importance of persistence, facts, emotion, strategy, and public support. They eventually forced their all-Republican county commission to oppose fracking and then won over their conservative state legislator, who bucked his GOP leaders by voting to uphold Gov. Perdue’s veto of the fracking legislation – truly remarkable. There are many lessons in this story, down to the last part about the group’s new interest in local electoral politics. Meanwhile, the other story is about a new Super PAC setting out to pick the winner of the NC Supreme Court election for you. The group is led by the curious team of former state Republican chair Tom Fetzer (who was burned by a Democrat-backed independent group in the 2006 judicial election) and Democratic former Chief Justice Burley Mitchell. There are lessons in this story, too, plus this lingering question: Will the candidate benefiting from this Super PAC (Justice Paul Newby) publicly scold these powerbrokers for undermining a fair election?