- Hi, I'm Marc Rotterman.

Coming up on Front Row, Putin takes center stage in the Republican primary for US Senate, Governor Cooper outlines his plan for a post COVID North Carolina, and 70% of Americans disapprove of President Biden's handling of inflation, next.

- [Narrator] Major funding for Front Row is provided by Robert L. Luddy.

Additional funding provided by Patricia and Koo Yuen through the Yuen Foundation, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And by.

Funding for the lightning round provided by Boddie-Noell Foundation, NC Realtors, Mary Louis and John Burress, Rifenburg Construction, and Helen Laughery.

A complete list of funders can be found at PBSnc.org/front row.

[dramatic music] ♪ - Welcome back.

Joining the conversation, Mitch Kokai with the John Locke Foundation, Morgan Jackson, chief political strategist for Roy Cooper, political analyst Joe Stewart, and Republican State Senator Jim Burgin.

Mitch let's begin with the latest developments in the Republican primary for US Senate.

- Well, Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine is of course the top international story.

And now it is playing a role in North Carolina's Senate primary, the Republican primary for the 2022 US Senate seat.

And the main reason is Ted Budd, the Congressman who is running in the race, one of the major contenders, he has the endorsement from President Trump and while that's good news for him, in terms of reaching some of the Republican primary electorate, it also means that he's getting tied to some extent, to some of the questionable statements the former President has made about Russia and about Putin.

We saw that one of the other primary contenders in this race, former Governor Pat McCrory, his first television ad in the race blasts Ted Budd on the issue of Russia and statements he's made, implying that he's saying that Putin is this smart guy and very intelligent, well, The Club For Growth which also backs Budd, has responded with an ad saying that McCrory's ad took Budd's comments out of context, that yes, he said he was smart, but... - Sliced and diced.

- Yes, that he said he was smart, but also in the next breath said he's evil.

And at the end of that ad, Club For Growth called McCrory a lying liberal.

Now all of this is taking place of course, as a very hotly contested race between Budd and McCrory, along with the wild card of former Congressman Mark Walker whose participation in this race means that we haven't seen a clear 50% plus one favorite.

It's gonna be very interesting to see where this goes.

- Morgan, don't you just love this.

- Nothing warms my heart like a nasty Republican primary.

I gotta be honest with you.

[laughs] I think a couple, one of the more fascinating things and Mitch alluded to this, is that when this conflict started, you had President Trump praising sort of Putin as a genius.

You had the Russian propaganda machine pushing out clips of Tucker Carlson every night praising Russia and criticizing Ukraine.

And what has happened is public opinion massively has turned in the way, I say not even flipped, but massively in support of Ukraine.

And so it is allowed Russia to become a political issue as Mitch talked about rather than just, it is an international issue.

It is an issue that everybody's focused on right now.

- Let me ask you about these ads, which one will cut through you think?

- So that's a really key point, Marc.

So for folks who pay attention to the mechanics of politics, the McCrory campaign's been running on cable, which means it has an audience, but a smaller audience.

The Club For Growth is running this on broadcast, on your new nightly news on all the big channels.

And so the wattage is about 10 to one.

And I gotta tell you, I think The Club For Growth ad, people are gonna see that one because of the amount of money they're spending before they ever see the attack ad which, to a certain extent, mutes the attack ad itself, effectiveness of it.

- Well at this point, some part of the Republican primary for the US Senate seat is about the candidates trying to get name recognition among probable Republican primary voters.

And interestingly enough, I think we'll see in all likelihood, a disproportionate number of unaffiliated voters wanna vote in the Republican primary because the US Senate Republican primary is the hot race this year.

It'll be interesting to see how these issues cut among that cohort of likely primary voters.

But, I think at the end of the day, they just need to build name recognition.

What they're saying, content wise, may or may not be moving voters, but it's probably just as important that the ads include the words Budd and McCrory as any other thing.

- Jim, can the former President Trump close the deal for Budd?

- I think he can.

I think he's still got a huge voice out there.

And a lot of people want to hear what he says.

And as far as... - [Marc] You expect he'll come in here for Budd?

- I think he will.

- [Marc] Do you?

- I think he will.

And as far as evil, and I've talked to a bunch of psychiatrists and they say some of the most evil people they know are some of the smartest people they know.

So, I don't disagree.

He's evil, but I think he is smart, but in a bad way.

- Wrap this up in about 30 seconds, my friend.

- I think one of the tough things for Ted Budd on this is he would love to be running ads saying, I'm the endorsed candidate of Donald Trump.

And if he's dealing with these Russia issues, that takes away from his opportunity to say that I'm the Trump candidate vote for me.

- Morgan, just quickly.

We got a little bit of time before we have to wrap here, but do you think McCrory has a ceiling?

- I do.

I think what's been very clear about this is McCrory has a very high name ID, which Budd does not.

And Budd has not been on the stage as long as McCrory.

And so it is harder, your shoes begin to fill with cement at some point as somebody who has high name ID, you only have a very small amount to grow.

Budd has a lot of room to grow and I think Jim's exactly right.

Trump's gonna come in here and I think that's gonna seal the deal.

- Okay, I'm coming right back to, you talked about the Governor's plans for a post-COVID North Carolina.

- So yesterday or Thursday the Governor had a press conference detailing sort of his plan for a path forward from COVID.

It's been a really challenging two years for North Carolinians up and down, all across.

It doesn't matter where you are, and society's been disrupted by COVID and tragically, we've lost 24,000 lives in North Carolina, but the Governor's point yesterday was vaccines, readily available.

They're free and readily available.

Over 75% of North Carolinians have had at least one shot.

And so what that means is it's time to move forward and it means a time of personal responsibility, preparedness, and prosperity.

And the governor spent a lot of time yesterday talking about the path to prosperity, and frankly, the good news is in North Carolina, we're already on that path.

Last year in 2021, North Carolina had 167,000 new jobs created, the most in history.

We've already got over 25,000 created this year.

And so what the Governor's focus is on as we move out of this is how do we win the war for talent?

And so the Department of Commerce has branded an initiative called First In Talent.

And it's really about how do we develop the most skilled workforce.

We've learned things in the pandemic.

- You can have a crisis but we have to be prepared for the future.

This is about education for cradle to career, it's about childcare, we have to provide affordable childcare so we get parents back to work.

And the last thing is more degrees, more skills and more degrees.

- Jim, you have the floor.

- You know, I think we're gonna have a cloud over this state as long as we have this emergency order.

And I wish the governor would go ahead and just remove that.

Still work with the legislature, with the department of health and services with, with Kody Kinsley.

We've talked about a lot of these different things but we need to go ahead and move on.

There's too many people that are still hesitant to go about their lives and to get back to work.

- Joe.

- Well, I think there is in our society, in our culture tremendous fatigue with all of the difficulties that we faced as a result of COVID.

The back and forth on a political basis about shutdowns and mass mandates and vaccines and those sorts of things.

My sense of it is people are ready to move on.

They wanna feel as though we've gotten past this enough, that some sense of normalcy is restored.

I think the governor is smart to say, "We're still optimistically cautious that the prospects for the future are good.

We're gonna measure things that matter to make sure that we don't have a resurgence."

But I think to Morgan's point again, the most important part of this is what are the lessons we've learned and what are the things we can do better going forward the next time we have an event, maybe not a pandemic but a natural disaster or the shutdown of a large employer.

The things that we've learned from COVID have application in a lot of other regards.

- Mitch.

- Two things that strike me as of interest one is I think that to some extent this news conference talking about the future responds to this idea of ending the emergency order.

The governor's not gonna do it, he wants to have that emergency order in his back pocket, but this is a way to kind of address that issue saying, look, we're gonna be moving in another direction although I'm gonna keep these emergency issues to the side if I need them again.

The second thing that strikes me is one of the changes that's going to be a change in the way data are presented to the people.

And I think that's a sign that some of these things that we've been tracking for so long really aren't that useful anymore if they ever were.

- Okay, great conversation, I wanna move on.

Biden's getting very bad reviews from American public for his handling of the economy and inflation.

- Yeah, ABC news just released a poll.

The good news is that the president's favorable ratings relative to his handling of COVID have gone up slightly since January, and people were more or less evenly split on his handling of the war with Ukraine.

Four or five of the folks in this poll said that they blamed Vladimir Putin for the war.

So the president's got some good news to that regard.

But every rose has its thorns unfortunately, the president's numbers are really bad in terms of his handling of the economy, the sense of of managing the issues of inflation.

But this is the one that's interesting to me, 70% of the respondents were unfavorable in the president's hailing of the increase in prices of gas, but 77% responded favorably to the president's shutting down of Russian imports of fuel.

So it is kind of an odd contradiction there.

People support the president's position that kinda ultimately led to higher prices and at the gas pump, but they support what he's done overall.

What we'll see as the war continues on and if the president's handling it in an appropriate way, I think maybe some of these other numbers will slightly improve.

But at the end of the day, I think the voters in this election cycle are gonna be laser focused on economic issues.

- Morgan is the president losing market share with Hispanics and African and Americans?

- Listen, I would say that a way to look at this is reality.

When you have inflation, no time in modern history does inflation go up that the president approval rates don't go down, that's a real thing.

The president wears the jacket as we say in the business on the economy, the buck stops with the president.

I do think Joe made some really good points about people are beginning to blame Putin for the rise in inflation, especially in gas prices.

And I think you're gonna see is that - Was that the Democratic Party blaming Putin?

- I will say the numbers with 77% of America that I'd love for, 77 for America should be democratic, I don't understand.

[laughs] I think that would be a great thing.

It'd be easier in my business.

Maybe less need from me, but they'd be easier.

- Not as much job security.

- Not as job security, that's right.

- But I will say, listen, it is about the economy stupid, is always been about the economy.

We've learned that for in modern history and I think the key is getting the economy turned around.

Listen, the fascinating thing about the economy, the economy's doing great except for inflation.

Unemployment's at all time lows.

- Well, there's pent-up demand.

- It is, but it is the supply chain and inflation are what are hurting people in their pocketbook.

And until those issues get addressed, the presence proof reign will still suffer.

- Mitch, doesn't this come down to Biden's energy policies.

Some of this is self inflicted, isn't it?

- Yeah, some of it's the energy policies, because if you had a more open energy policy that got the government out of the way and let entrepreneurs do what they do we would have a better situation on gas.

- Cash track leases - Exactly, not using the government to shut down pipelines or to block new innovation.

That's the type of thing that's going to be a long term problem plus pumping trillions of dollars into the economy.

Some of it perhaps necessary, but certainly much more than we are accustomed to, that factors into inflation.

And I'm pleasantly surprised to see that some people are connecting those dots, that lots more money in the economy, new inflation, the two go together.

- Jim, what are your constituents telling you?

- They're telling me that everything is going up.

I had an electrician tell me yesterday, he can't get meters for new houses he's working on.

And everything is double sometimes triple what it was before if they can even get it.

It's not sustainable and unless... - Talk a bit about the friend you had that has a big rig.

- Yeah, he was just saying, it's cost him a thousand more dollars to fill this thing up.

And all of these contractors are faced with this.

I had another company call me the other day and they said they had two people quit because they were driving 30 miles each way to work, and said they just couldn't afford to buy the gas being over double - Joe.

- Well, and it is gonna hit the pocket books of American consumers if we continue to see the activity in Ukraine and if further complication of relations between United States and Europe, and now China has been brought into this.

We could see some really bad stuff happen to our economy even worse than it is now if the war is not contained.

And so that's gotta be what the president's primary goal is, to get this conflict ended.

- But we had inflation going way up way before the war, right?

- Yeah, it really started before the war and that goes back to my point of you pump tons more money into the economy and you don't have an increase in supply, you're gonna end up with inflation.

Economists will tell you that.

- Okay, I wanna move on.

Talk to us Jim, about Beth Woods audit of our unemployment system.

- Well, I'll give it to Beth Wood, she is an equal opportunity auditor.

She goes after Republicans and Democrats equally and I like her.

She had, I dealings with her through the community college.

She does our audit for Central Carolina.

We always have a perfect audit, but I respect what she does.

I'm not gonna go back and criticize what happened, because none of us knew how this was gonna play out.

You know, I went back and looked at some notes that I had made when we first started looking at whether we were gonna have our businesses open or shut, and how we were gonna deal with finances, for pay roll and everything else.

PPE helped a lot of folks.

But I do think we have to do, and Joe mentioned this, we have to do a better job of getting people together and planning before catastrophes.

In the insurance business, we have a book that's on our shelf that talks about emergency procedures.

I think a lot of the departments have those.

I don't think we had one for the state, and I hope that future administrations will pull folks together, especially the council estate, and we have this new thing in the budget that says in 2023, there's a new way to do emergency orders and everything.

So I think it's gonna be better going forward, but hindsight is never a good...

I don't wanna try to go back and blame somebody for things that none of us knew how they were gonna shake out.

- Mitch, is this a structural problem though, inside the bureaucracy?

- It seems to be, because this is not something that just came about because of the pandemic.

There have been problems with the unemployment system, getting the checks out to people on time.

You've had clogged help systems, long waits to get enrolled.

There was a really bad website for people who use their smart phone to try to deal with this.

This is something that has been a long time coming.

We know that back in May of 2020, the issue was such for Governor Cooper that he looked at the situation and said, "Let me get someone in here who has a history "of dealing with the mess of government," prior Gibson, and so this is something that's been seen for a while as a need to do something about this.

But I think one of the issues is that this is the first time with this audit for Bethwood that we see an actual number tied to problems we've known about for a while.

She said something like 438 million dollars worth of delayed payments because of all these issues.

- Morgan?

- So I think the panel sort of made some really great points, you know.

It's important to note, and as Jim absolutely said, is we start out pre-pandemic in early March, you had 3,000 claims a week.

A week.

3,000 claims a week they were processing.

They went to 20,000 a day.

And just imagine the ability to scale.

You know, this agency has been starved for cash for a decade.

It has been a dumping ground for a lot of things, different administrations, different legislatures.

And I will tell you that what you find out with that is, when this pandemic hit, there were too few employees, you had antiquated, Mitch talked about antiquated technology.

Antiquated systems that couldn't scale up and process these amount of claims this fast.

- So what are the lessons learned and how do we fix it?

- So the lessons learned, as Mitch said, the first thing, the Governor said up front, this is unacceptable, we have to make changes.

And he made changes to the leadership of Department of Employment Security.

The Department of Commerce, which oversees DES, and Michelle Sanders, the secretary, said in this audit, "Listen, we welcome this audit, "and we agree with the audit.

"These are things, we've been working a lot of these issues, "and the issues that are outlined, "we look forward to working on those, "because we have to live in a world "that we don't find ourselves in this position again."

There are definite lessons to be learned, and part of that is you can't take an antiquated system and times it times a hundred over night.

It's not gonna work.

It takes too long to scale up and train employees.

- All right, Joe, wrap this up in about 30 seconds.

- Yeah, Morgan touched on what I think is the quintessential issue here, and it is true throughout state government, the application of technology to make systems ready to go from zero to 60 in a timely fashion.

My tenure, tour of duty in state government, bringing in technology, getting the legislature to approve the appropriations necessary to adapt what the private sector already knows well about technological systems, making it more efficient and effective, is just not something state government does well.

- Great conversation.

I wanna go to the most under-reported story of the week.

Mitch.

- March 18th marks the 75th anniversary of North Carolina's right to work law.

And this is a law that bans the closed shop, it bans the union shop, it bans mandatory collection of union dues through payroll deduction.

Right to work status has helped North Carolina over the years in competing for new economic opportunities, but it continues to face attacks from the political left, and we know, and people around this table know that state senators put in a bill last year that would put the right to work provisions within the state constitution.

And everyone who is interested in this issue should know that the beginning of the law says, the right to live includes the right to work.

- Morgan?

- So I wanna go back to gas prices.

We've talked a lot about gas prices.

And I'll tell you, one of the things that I've been following is that the price of oil continues to drop.

The price of oil, by the way, is the same for a barrel of crude oil, is the same as it was in early February.

- What's it about $112 today?

- That's right, but here's the deal.

- It was $40 a year ago.

- But listen to me.

[all laugh] In February, it was the same price of crude oil barrel that it is today, but yet a gallon of gas is 80 cent higher.

Okay?

80 cent higher.

And consumers wanna know, why is this happening?

Why is it that oil is dropping, and gas prices are still going up?

And you compound this with oil companies and gas companies making record profits right now, I think you're gonna see action in Congress on this.

- Okay.

- Just a friendly reminder to everyone, your taxes are due, April 18th.

It's a different day than 15th, because that's a holiday this year.

Reminder to do it early.

There's already a 23 million return backlog at the IRS, as a result of some staffing shortfalls.

They're giving people the heads up because of stimulus payments, or child tax credit vouchers.

There was more information that a return might need to include.

So don't waste until the last minute this time.

File your taxes in a timely fashion.

- Jim, under reported, my friend?

- The number of children, or people in general, but children that are being involuntary committed to our hospitals.

Last year, 42,000 were committed, not children, total, but that's just 69 reporting units.

We have over a hundred hospitals, plus other places that receive involuntary commitments, and the other thing is I just had a child, I talked to the CEO of my hospital today, a 13 year old girl, she's been there 94...

They just got her moved, she's been there 94 days.

94 days in the emergency room, not getting to go outside, and not going to school, not interacting with other kids.

We've gotta fix this.

- What is the solution, my friend?

Are you working on a solution?

- Yes, sir.

More facilities.

We're working with hospitals about doing facilities on site, so that people are not going through the emergency room, because, well the CEO also told me this morning that he had seven adults and four children in his emergency room this morning for involuntary commitments.

- Will you get bi-partisan support on that?

- Yes, sir, I think so.

Everybody wants to fix mental health, especially for children.

- Will the Governor be on board with that?

- Yeah, absolutely.

- We need mental health reform, absolutely.

- Okay, let's go to lightning round.

Who's up and who's down this week, Mitch?

- Up this week, opponents of red light cameras the North Carolina Court of Appeals struck down Greenville's red light camera program because they say not enough of the money goes to schools cuz fines and forfeiture money, almost all, but 90% or more in most cases, needs to go to schools.

This all also threatens Fayetteville's program which has the exact same rules.

Who's down?

Sarah Bloom Raskin, former Obama-era treasury employee, who was a nominee for a big position in the Federal Reserve, vice chair known as the Wall Street Watchdog or the banking cop.

She withdrew her nomination after she came under fire because she believes the Fed should do more to fight climate change.

- And Manchin was involved in that, right?

Senator Manchin from West Virginia?

He kind of killed that nomination - He certainly was.

He was not gonna go for it and so she saw the handwriting on the wall.

- And her husband happens to be a Congressman, Jamie from Maryland.

Okay.

- Up this week, I'm talk about an incredible act of courage.

The Russian state TV employee, that editor, who in the middle of a newscast, a live newscast, held up a sign and accused Putin of lying, exposed him as lying about the war in Russia and the attacks on Ukraine.

She risked her life and limb and- - She might get 15 years.

- And will she come outta alive?

I don't know.

You know, it is a very frightening thing but what an incredible act of courage.

We've seen a lot of that in this war, but I was really impressed by her.

Down this week, former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, having another bad week.

Last week, there was an article about him potentially registering to vote and voting illegally.

This week, it comes out that the state bureau investigations have launched an actual investigation into voter fraud.

- So will you and Meadows be exchanging Christmas cards?

Okay, go ahead.

[men laughing] - Who's up?

The time is up for the Bradford pear tree.

A bounty has now been established in North Carolina.

If you kill five of these things, you get five new trees.

Treebountync.com, a program of NC State University.

I checked the website this morning.

They've actually suspended the registration temporarily.

So many people have applied to get these replacement trees.

Bradford is an invasive species of tree from Asia.

If you've ever seen one of these in the spring, they have a white flower, it smells terrible.

And I'm glad they're trying to get rid of these in North Carolina.

Talk about maybe expanding the program if this initial one works well.

Down, the size of microchips.

Chinese researchers announced that they had been able to theoretically create a transistor that would go on a chip that had materials that was one atom thick.

Now Moore's Law, the famous law is that every two years or so, you'll double the computing capacity of microchips.

It's been a little slower this time, but if we get something down to an atom thick, I don't know how we make it thinner than that.

[men chuckling] - Jim.

- Medicaid expansion discussions.

There's been three Medicaid meetings about Medicaid expansion.

Just this last week, had folks from Indiana, Ohio, Michigan talking about it.

- Former governor Kasich from Ohio.

- And I wanna talk about him.

You know, he's still got it.

When he said that when we're met at the pearl gates by St. Peter, he's not gonna ask us if we had a balanced budget, he's gonna ask what we did for the least among us.

- Okay.

Down?

- Down, portion size and packaging, shrinkflation.

And Anne Bergen is pretty upset because in 2011, of when they did this before, companies reduced the size of the contents in their packages.

Well, she does a lot of baking and everything so it changed all of her recipes.

So a lot of the folks that do baking are thinking, "We're gonna go through this again, and we're gonna have the same problem."

- Is Medicaid expansion on the table in the short session?

- I think we're gonna have discussions right on and on through it.

Whether we actually get it out there, I think depends on some more information that's coming out, but it is a big topic among everybody, especially all of us health folks.

- Mitch, headline next week?

- US Supreme Court here's case dealing with North Carolina voter ID.

- There's what?

Three cases?

- There are three total cases.

The one in front of the US Supreme Court is about whether legislators are going to be able to get involved in the federal case.

- Quickly, headline?

- I think you're gonna see United States announce more aid to Ukraine.

I think president Zelensky met with Congress this week Via Zoom, very passionate case to make.

You have a discussion going on in Congress right now.

Are there ways to get more weapons, more supplies to them.

- Quickly, headline next week.

- Joe Stewart's barber says, "You're a victim of shrinkflation."

[men laughing] - Headline next week.

- Governor Cooper lifts state of emergency.

- Great job, gents.

We're outta time.

Thanks for watching.

Hope to see you next week on "Front Row."

Have a great weekend.

[dramatic music] - [Announcer] Major funding for "Front Row" was provided by Robert L. Luddy.

Additional funding provided by Patricia and Koo Yuen through the Yuen Foundation, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And by... Funding for the Lightning Round provided by Boddie-Noell Foundation, NC realtors, Mary Louis and John Burress, Rifenburg Construction and Helen Laughery.

A complete list of funders can be found at PBSnc.org/frontrow.

[dramatic music] ♪