Virginia 'Sly' Foxx boards Dell wagon after the fact

Cliff Notes version? Foxx played sleazy politics as our state senator. Surprise!!! Scott Sexton is a pretty funny — yet seemingly evenhanded — journalist.

As an aside, I fully acknowledge that Dell always knew that W/S would be an ideal PC manufacturing site with or without the all of the $305 million in incentives. I agree with Mike Easley; the new jobs are wonderful, but we just might have been bilked on this one. I'm just nervous that as the next 15 to 20 years tick away, Alliance Science and Technology Park will lose its anchor manufacturer to China and NC is left with 750,000 square feet of commercial space. I hope that's not the case, but as we all know, business is business.

By Scott Sexton in today's Winston-Salem Journal:

For all the hoopla - not to mention the $300 million (give or take a few million) in state and local money - you would think that Temple School and Union Cross roads would be paved with gold. They weren't. I know. I drove on them yesterday when Dell Inc. threw open its doors yesterday for a few hundred officials and dignitaries to tour its new plant on Temple School Road.

...Perhaps the most curious presence was U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-5th. She sat right up on the stage with Dell, Easley and assorted other bigwigs. As a state senator, Foxx opposed corporate raids on the public treasury. She voted against tax breaks for FedEx in 2002 and for R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. in 2003. But she was nowhere to be found when the General Assembly met in special session Nov. 4, 2004, to vote on the Dell incentives. A few days before that session, she cited a prior family commitment as the reason for her planned absence. That's interesting, especially when you consider the fact that she had a congressional election Nov. 2.

When asked before that election where she stood on the Dell package, Foxx ducked the question. "If I saw the legislation, I would answer that," she said in a story published on Election Day 2004. Yet there she was yesterday, smiling along with the rest of the luminaries. When she was asked after the multi-media show if she had changed her views on incentives, she started by talking about the quality work force in the Triad and what a good thing Dell is. Asked another way if she had changed her view, Foxx replied that she "didn't have anything to do with it.... I missed that day. I had previous plans I couldn't change."

But would she have voted in favor? Or at least "paired" her vote with another senator so we would know where she stood? "I don't deal in hypotheticals," she said.