How will Roy Cooper vote? We don't know (but can guess) | Hour 3

I was not intending to spend all of this time talking about my good friend Ray. Roy cut them loose Cooper. Um, I was going to run through the audio that, uh, came from the CNN, uh, uh, report by Manu Raju. And then I was going to move on and I had all these other topics set up. But then at the beginning of the last hour, Jackie called and we had a, uh, a spirited discussion and, um, Well, let's just say the reaction on the text line does not indicate Jackie acquitted himself very well. Just said he gets a feeling about Roy Cooper. And he didn't know the positions. He didn't know what Roy Cooper was going to do. And I asked him a bunch of things like the border and the electoral college and the Supreme Court packing and all of that. And he didn't know. But that's okay. Cause the feels vibes. It's got the vibes vibing for Ray. So now I will get back to the, uh, the audio because Roy Cooper says some things in this interview. And again, like I am on the hunt whenever there's, I see anything with Roy Cooper, like somebody actually gets to ask him a couple of questions. I'm always curious. Like, first off, well, what are the questions they're asking him? Is it about like who his favorite hurricanes players are? what is his prediction on March Madness or something? Or is it substantive about, you know, the job he is interviewing. For, right? That he wants us to hire him to do. And one of the things. That people say, oh, you know, Whatley is just going to be a puppet for Donald Trump. Okay, if that's the standard, you're worried about North Carolina's U S Senator being a, a rubber stamp for whatever. His, his party leaders want him to vote for. Okay. That's a fair criticism. It's something you should be on guard for with all politicians that go up to Washington, DC that go to the swamp, right? Totally fair. Okay. So let's, let's, Take that as a given. Okay? Michael Watley is a rubber stamp for Donald Trump. Let's assume that's true. Okay, let's apply that standard. To Roy Cooper. Who's he a rubber stamp for? Do you know? Hmm. It's a brain buster, isn't it? He wouldn't answer in the question that he was asked whether he'd support Chuck Schumer. He wouldn't answer that. So who's he rubber stamping for? Or he's going to be independent. You're going to give him a different standard. You're going to just assume that he's not going to fall in line with all of the Democrat leadership. And that like that would not be historically congruent. Right. You just look at the way Roy Cooper has governed. He runs a campaign as a moderate and then he governs as a lefty. That's what he showed us in eight years as governor. And I ran through all of this stuff with the HB2 boycotts, right? He vetoed more legislation than every other North Carolina governor combined. Yet he now says he can work across the aisle. And you know what his example is? You know what he cites as the reason why you should believe him that he can work across the aisle with Republicans on stuff? You know what that is? It's because he signed Medicaid expansion. But that was the Republicans. They did that over my objections. Like I, I was highly critical of the Republican leadership for doing this. North Carolina was one of the few States, the remaining holdout States that would not expand Medicaid under the Obamacare. And lo and behold, we're seeing the impacts of them doing that. So, um, that really wasn't Roy Cooper working with the Republicans. That was just the Republicans working with the hospital industry. And the insurance industry. That's what that was. That wasn't about Roy Cooper. Roy Cooper was a footnote to that. He did nothing to convince Republicans. The Republicans worked with the industry because the industry wanted it. That's why I was critical of him. At any rate, who is Roy Cooper going to be the puppet for? Chuck Schumer as leader? Well, what if Chuck Schumer gets challenged for the leadership post inside the U.S. Senate. Who might that challenge come from? Could it be Elizabeth Warren? Could she try to be the Senate leader? Because she's of the more progressive wing, you know. Maybe she knocks off Roy Cooper or Chuck Schumer. Who does Roy want to vote for there? Who is Roy lining up behind? He won't answer. He won't say. but when asked about the rise of the lefties, the commies inside of the Democrat party, he says, Oh, I can work with anybody. I'll work with everyone. He said the other day in the undercover audio, um, when asked about this at a campaign event by somebody that was recording and he said, um, we're a big tent basically. He wants, Oh, we don't want to kick anybody out of the big tent. Okay. So that indicates that he has, um, Let's say he's commie curious, right? He's willing to entertain some of their ideas because, you know, we're a big tent. So who is he going to vote for? So if the DSA is ascendant, if the Marxists are ascendant inside the Democrat Party and they win control of the U.S. Senate, does he fall in line with them? All indications are yes. Once again, he refused to sign the promise to America pledge, which was the moderate Democrats. They've only gotten like, I. Think there's only like 20, 20 Democrats that have signed this thing. And they're like, half of them are elected. The other half are just like, like James Carville. So where does he, where, where does he come down on that? Just going to keep going forward. The other thing is, um, This is a six-year term. So even if I give you, for the sake of argument, that Whatley is a rubber stamp for Donald Trump, Donald Trump is gone in two years. And then he's in office. Whatley would be in office for another four. And we don't know who the next president would be. What if the next president is a Democrat? Does Roy Cooper become a rubber stamp for that Democrat? I bet he does. Does your standard apply then? Yeah, see, this is not the standard by which you should be basing your vote. In fact, you should be probably more concerned with the fact that the Medicare and the Social Security trust funds will be out of money. They'll be paying out more than they take in in the year 2032. We covered this. A couple weeks ago. 2032 is six years away. So the people that we elect to this Senate term they will be in office deciding on how to address this catastrophe as it's, as it's coming down the tracks at us. What do you think Roy Cooper is going to do? Ooh, Ooh, Ooh. I know, I know. Pick me, pick me. I know. But he raises taxes, right? Cause that's been his philosophy for 40 years in state government. See a penny, spend a penny. Standard operating procedure. So maybe do more thinking and less feeling, you know? All right. 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All right, so CNN's Manu Raju, he gets a one-on-one with Roy Cooper, and Manu Raju asks him some questions and asks him about the primary focus, the centerpiece of the campaign targeting Roy Cooper by Michael Watley is all about the criminals that Roy Cooper released from prison during COVID. And Cooper is saying, they're lying on me, lying, lie, lie, lie. Now, remember, Roy Cooper, Roy Cooper fought in court for about a decade for his right to lie about his political opponents on the campaign trail. And his successor, Josh Stein, a.k.a. Mini Cooper, he also fought in court for the right to lie about his opponent in his run. For office. Okay. So we know that Cooper knows how to fight in court, how to make appeals, how to do all of that. Okay. And we know that he prefers to be able to lie. So this isn't some ethical stance he is taking. In fact, he lost his case. He had to apologize to his political opponent. I mean, he beat the guy running for attorney general. He beat him, but he had to apologize for that, for the campaign ads. I mean, he still got to keep his job and voters didn't punish him, but whatever. So this isn't an ethical position like, oh, they're lying, that's wrong. No, no, no. Because he's totally comfortable lying about his opponents and fought in court many, many years for the right to do so. And so when he's saying, oh, they're lying about all of the criminals, like the court ordered me to do it, that's not exactly true. He entered into the collusive agreement With the plaintiffs, he was the defendant, and they sued him. They went into a court, and the left-wing activist judge said, I really like this lawsuit. I think that the plaintiffs are going to win. And Roy Cooper's like, oh, well, I guess we got to let everybody loose. That was it. There was no fighting. There were no appeals, nothing. Okay. He went along with it. They entered into a collusive agreement, just like they did during COVID when they were sued by their Democrat allies over the election law changes. Remember that? Yeah. And they cut a deal and they cut out the legislative defendants, the Republican lawmakers that were also part of that litigation. They were excluded. From the negotiations to arrive at a collusive agreement. Okay, so what of this centerpiece of the Whatley campaign being the release of the criminals? Here's what Cooper said. This was something that we wanted to do to make sure we worked to protect the public. By releasing 4,000 inmates, yes. Public safety officers made decisions about this. They followed the lead of President Trump's team. President Trump released 13,000 prisoners at least. during this COVID era. He signed a bill to do that. And what's the problem here is that they are lying about all of these cases that they're trying to connect to this. They're not actually lying about the cases. They said the one case that they're making the most hay off of is the Logan Federico murder. She was from Union County. She was murdered though in South Carolina. And so because of that, they're saying Roy Cooper's hands are clean on all of this. But what Logan Federico's father says in the ad is that his daughter was the victim of an agenda, which is the decarceration, cashless bail, all of the stuff that was recommended for implementation by Roy Cooper's Racial Equity Justice Task Force. That's the agenda. Roy Cooper's on board with it. So that's not a lie. Wasn't a lie. He said she was the victim of the agenda, Roy Cooper's, uh, agenda. It's the same agenda. And the trail of lies is long when in fact, uh, I'm the one who's actually prosecuted violent criminals and put them behind bars. Michael Whatley actually appointed a convicted child molester who served six years in prison on the sex offender registry. Uh, above the objections to many Republicans in his party, to a position that would have access to children and teenagers. That's what we need to be talking about. Because some of those who were released did end up committing murders afterwards. Well, I'm not sure about that. Really? But what I do know is that they made the decisions that they could at the time. Most of the people were, toward the very end of their term, who would have been out very soon anyway. So the governor, who released all of these thousands of inmates, he is unaware that the crop of inmates he released, somewhere around half of them, have gone on to re-offend, including 18 murders. He's unaware of that. I don't know that. I don't know about that. Don't you think you should know about that? You released them. Maybe you should look into that. Maybe you should have a better answer than, I don't know anything about that. This is, after all, the centerpiece of the Watley campaign. Why would you not have looked into their their attack ads? All right, I have one more soundbite here from the CNN report by Manu Raju. He got a one on one interview briefly, it appears, with Roy Cooper. Who had. I mean the CNN headline is can a Democrat flip a seat in North Carolina? Roy Cooper has a warning for his party. And so to summarize it is that, yeah, we can win and yeah, we're leading, but it's getting tighter, but we totally expected that. So that's the nature. So yeah, I mean, Democrats are very confident that Roy Cooper is going to win this race. And I, I hypothesized a couple of weeks ago, um, Whether or not, like when Roy Cooper announced that he was going to run or when the rumor started that Roy Cooper was going to run for U.S. Senate, would he have run against Tom Tillis? Probably. Tillis was wounded. His popularity was low. And so Roy Cooper gets into the race. Tillis, maybe he knew that Roy Cooper would beat him or believed he would get beaten. So that prompted him to announce he wasn't running again. So now North Carolina, you can't just write off the state because that means all of the money that Roy Cooper's been raising could then be funneled into other races. So you have to make the Democrats spend their money in North Carolina. You've got to keep them honest. Well, I mean, as honest as you can keep them. But you've got to make them run a race. You can't just let Roy Cooper do what he did as Attorney General and run unopposed. So you have to have somebody. So is it possible that you know, you don't want to burn a candidate, a Republican candidate that, you know, has been toiling away in various races for years. And they've, you know, hope to, um, to run for us Senate, uh, in another six years from now or something. I don't know. Like, do you, do you not want to, to burn somebody like that? So who do you get to run? Maybe that somebody was Michael Watley. I don't know. I don't know. Um, he has no name recognition. And when Lara Trump said she wasn't going to do it, she went over to Fox news instead. So yeah, I don't know. Like I, I can, I can see this from a couple of different, uh, uh, different angles. So in this interview with CNN, you notice what Roy Cooper does there, right? He says not his fault about the release of all the inmates. Trump did it too. Um, and Harvey West. Now, at the end of the last hour, I went through the Harvey West story, and surprise, surprise, Roy Cooper's not being honest with you about Harvey West and the role that Michael Watley, I was say, did not play in Harvey West's rise in the Republican Party down east. And to Manu Raju's credit there, he did not allow Roy to pivot away. Right. Roy's like, well, we should be talking about is this pedophile guy, blah, blah, blah. And Manu Raju just did not. He didn't take the bait. He he then hit him with a follow up question about the crime and the people that have been rearrested. It's about half of them. And Roy Cooper claims ignorance, which to me, it's a bit of a problem. If you're not even aware that half of the people you release, thousands of these inmates, they've now reoffended and you're completely unaware of the impact of your decision. That's a problem. Cooper has found a response, attacking Whatley. For appointing a man who pleaded guilty to sex crimes to a position in the North Carolina Republican Party. Roy Cooper's going after you about Harvey West, the appointment of him for the North Carolina GOP. He's, of course, a convicted sex offender. What do you say to him? And do you regret how that was handled? Well, I didn't hire the guy. Absolutely did not hire the guy. He was a volunteer with the party beforehand. But I think when we talk about crime, Roy Cooper is the one with the record. Roy Cooper is the one who let 4,200 criminals out. You want Trump to campaign for you here? All right, so notice what Manu Raju asked the question about Harvey West and Wadley said what I outlined earlier. Harvey West's rise in the Republican District 1 territory, that was because of the people in that district, the Republicans in that party, in that district that named him and elected him to be their chairman of that district. Michael Wadley doesn't have any control over that. They did that. Um, all right. So now, uh, so that was at a campaign event. Uh, Watley was doing a, uh, Q and a with the media and, uh, Raju then throws that question. Watley's already out the door. To win over Trump supporters. Cooper has to make sure his party doesn't bring him down. How much of this has to do with the democratic brand? How damaged is the democratic brand here? No, I think that there are enough people in North Carolina who are skeptical of national Democrats and, And that's why we have more success in electing Democrats as governor and attorney general and secretary of state than we do sending them to Washington. Wait, hang on a second. They're skeptical of national Democrats, but not North Carolina Democrats. Why are they skeptical of the national Democrats, Roy? Why would people have some level of skepticism about national Democrats? And you know that if you were to win a U.S. Senate seat, you are now a national Democrat. You realize that, right? You're asking to be a part of the national Democrats. You'd be at the national level, the federal level there. So what prompts the skepticism? Is there something about Democrats at the national level, maybe party platform or something that makes people concerned about electing a Democrat at the national level. I would have loved to have gotten a follow-up on that, but we did not. 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And so if you want to make a donation, we're trying to raise, with the team, we're trying to raise. $ 5, 000. So if you have a heart and this is a cause that you believe in, it's a great organization. I've been working with them for over 20 years. I've been supporting them for over 20 years. They also provide, you know, programs and support services for the caregivers because it's brutal on caregivers. I know that firsthand from growing up with my grandfather. Who had it. So go to ALZ.org and make a donation and or sign up with Pete's Pack. And then we'll see you at Ramir Bearden Park on the 24th. That's a Saturday morning. All right, let me get to the last bit of the sound here from the CNN report. Roy Cooper talking to Manu Raju, where he was asked, hey, like, what's the deal with the national brand? You think that's going to be a problem for you? And he's like, oh, you know, there's some skepticism about national Democrats, but that's why we have success here statewide. And I actually don't follow that train of thought. I don't know why, if you have a problem with the national brand, why that would mean that at the state level, you don't have a problem with the national brand. So it's like a non-answer. Notice in your stump speech right now, you really didn't go after President Trump in the way that a lot of Democrats do. A lot of Democrats want to go talk about. Investigating the president, maybe even impeaching the president. When you hear calls from that within your own party, what do you say? So Michael Watley. says that his agenda is the president's agenda. So I'm able to run against Michael Whatley and all of those things are there. Michael Whatley supports the tariffs. He supports the war in Iran. Has he done anything worthy of impeachment in your view? Well, I think, you know, the Senate operates as the trier of fact and that kind of thing. So I don't think that's something that I would want to get into right now. All right. So that's a yes. That's a yes. He's not telling you. He's just not saying it. Right. I don't he say I don't have to attack Donald Trump because I can just attack Michael Watley because Watley is Trump's puppet. So I'll just attack Watley. Also I'm up in the polls. So like, I don't have to alienate Trump voters. I don't have to activate them by agitating them, you know? So I can just hammer Michael Watley, keep raising all my money, keep running all of my ads. And when it comes to impeachment, I'm not telling you how I'm going to vote because I'm going to be the trier of facts. So I don't want to say, please, please, Roy, we like, if the Democrats impeach Donald Trump, which I assume they will for something, I mean, they already showed us that and there's already so many of them saying this. So of course they're going to impeach Trump and then you will fall in line because that is what you have done as governor. You fall in line with whatever the national Democrats want you to do. So when you say there's skepticism of the national Democrats and you fall in line with the national Democrats, then I have to assume that, that you will also vote for impeachment. You will vote to abolish ICE. You will vote to reopen the border. If you even get a vote on that after, you know, Trump is out of office, you will probably be okay with removing the electoral college through the interstate compact, right? You will do these things. And then on the DSA shift to. The left, particularly this election cycle, these democratic socialist candidates winning in a number of primaries. Does that concern you? Well, I can work within the party and across the aisle with the other party. And that's what I've had to do here in North Carolina. There you go. So he won't even distance himself from the DSA. He's going to work with the DSA. Thank you for that. All right. That'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. 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