Michael Whatley is no son of North Carolina

Michael Whatley is the softest tough-on-crime person in the world. Standing next to a convicted felon, who happens to be president of the United States, the soft-faced, dull-mannered Republican candidate applauded as Trump called North Carolina “one of the worst in the whole nation.” Most people would recoil at hearing such a derogatory thing said about any state. For example, if Trump had said, “XYZ State in the Lower South is one of the worst in the whole nation,” I would wince and think the man was a venomous bully. Which he is. But Whatley was not averting his eyes from rudeness aimed at South Carolinians, or Mississippians, or people from Uranus. He welcomed Trump’s invective when it was directed at the state he claims nurtured him and made him into the “man,” if that is what he is, he is.

Whatley likes to call himself as “son of North Carolina.” He derides Roy Cooper as an exponent of alien, big-city values while he stands proudly as the champion of the callous-handed tobacco farmers and lintheads. [In case Whatley doesn’t know, “linthead” was a nickname given to people who toiled in atrocious working conditions in textile mills.] This is an effort to appropriate a key trope of populist authoritarianism. The populist, the hard man, gives voice to the true soul of the people. His enemy, the alien, stands for grotesque, foreign values.

Whatley’s effort to pose as a tribune of the humble Tar Heel was clumsy. It was also a fraud. Whatley’s biography does not establish him as a “son” of North Carolina. He has spent much of his life in other parts of the country doing the bidding of the national Republican Party. He was born and spent most of his childhood in Michigan. His childhood memories probably include more snowstorms than hurricanes and his accent still bears a trace of Midwestern flatness. He got degrees at UNC-Charlotte and Wake Forest before returning the Midwest to study at Notre Dame. That’s quite a tuition bill. But he’s a regular Joe.

What has he done with his law degree? He’s not Atticus Finch. Instead of working the courtrooms of rural North Carolina, he spent most of his professional career sparring with liberals as an operative for the national Republican Party. He helped George W. Bush’s infamous election-recount team in 2000 and received a patronage appointment to W’s Department of Energy. He then multiplied his income by many factors on K Street as a lobbyist for the oil industry. He dipped his toe into North Carolina politics as Elizabeth Dole’s (Congressional) chief of staff. Then, at last, he put down roots in his supposed home state by moving to the Charlotte exurbs and becoming chairman of the NCGOP.

This is not a man with roots in North Carolina. This is an amoral partisan hack with few regional roots who has devoted his life to the Republican Party. He is not rooted in a “native patch of land,” as the Victorian novelist George Eliot evocatively put it. He is rooted in the seedy world of partisan politics and his spirit is devoted to that world’s emperor, Donald J. Trump. Nodding along while the president denigrated us is the sort of scummy, undignified greasy-pole hackery Whatley has spent his life performing.

North Carolina values. Whatley says he stands for “North Carolina values.” Well, one Southern value is definitely a prickly sensitivity to condescension from northeastern elites. We’ve taken plenty of it down here. “Tar Heel” was a classist slur meant to denigrate people (most enslaved Black people or very poor whites) who worked in the dirty business of tar boiling. Walt Whitman snidely used the epithet. Walt Whitman was a cultural snob but one of America’s greatest poets. Donald Trump is America’s only dictator. This louche, greedy New York real estate schmuck trashed us virulently, and Michael Whatley stood with him.

I wonder how it would go down in Washington, where Whatley's heart is.

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