Republican gubernatorial candidate Pat McCrory called his opponent Beverly Perdue “part of the power elite running this state,” and vowed, if elected, that he would abandon a “culture of arrogance and trappings of government” that beset the current state administration.

Thursday, on his first foray into Pamlico County as part of a statewide campaign, McCrory met for slightly more than an hour with approximately 75 party faithful for a breakfast at Brantley’s Village Restaurant in Oriental.

As mayor of North Carolina’s largest city for the past 13 years, McCrory is no newcomer to politics, and his experience showed. He deftly poked good-natured fun at himself after being mistakenly invited to join George Bush in a limo during a Presidential visit to Charlotte.

McCrory used his fleeting “inside the limo” stint as a metaphor for losing touch with the electorate.

“I have to fight that in my current job,” he said bluntly, “and I tell my staff to give me ego-checks.”

He said one of the biggest problems confronting today’s employers is “they cannot find qualified employees.” He took the state’s community college system to task for its “academic elitism,” which assumes that “every child needs a four-year college degree.”

“Isn’t there a disconnect,” he asked, “that we have a 30 percent (high school) dropout rate, and at the same time employers can’t find qualified employees?”

Recalling his high school years at a small town in the piedmont, McCrory said “half the school took shop” and after graduation they could attend “the technical institute across the street, which is what we called them before we changed the titles to community colleges.”

He promised his plan for education “would reward the schools who graduate students and who meet the labor needs of North Carolina.”

He focused on his call to OK oil drilling off the state’s coastline, a policy that “Beverly Perdue is 100 percent against.” Describing himself as both a conservative and an environmentalist, he emphasized that offshore exploration could be done in a “safe and environmentally sound way well off the coast so that you wouldn’t even see it.”

In response to a question from local real estate agent Angie Propst, McCrory pledged to eliminate “the overlap of government agencies. They have no idea what the others are doing.”

And, he suggested limiting the growth of state government so that overall spending would increase no more than that required by the annual cost of living and population growth.

“In Charlotte, the mayor has a veto. I’ve used it 21 times and I would use it as governor, too.”

Traveling with just two assistants -- albeit in separate cars to ensure back-up transportation -- McCrory predicted a tight race for the governorship. He painted his opponent and the state’s Democratic Party “as far to the left as the national party,” and encouraged those in attendance to recruit prospective voters from all walks of life.

“The polls are dead-even right now,” he said, later adding “The R in Republican stands for ‘reach out.’”