The National Federation of Independent Businesses endorsed Pat McCrory today.

At a press conference at the Frantz Automotive Shop in Cary, the small-business group announced that its Save America Free Enterprise political action committee was backing the Republican gubernatorial candidate. 

Before 60 onlookers, McCrory spoke about his father's small business. Though Mr. Mac's Concrete Fix eventually was sold at hardware stores such as Lowe's, McCrory said his father struggled to provide health insurance for workers and dealing with regulations. 

"He had a very difficult time," he said. "Our house was mortgaged to the hilt." 

As governor, McCrory said he would expand a tax credit for small businesses providing insurance coverage and work with the NFIB and other groups to create insurance consortiums.

He also said he would make it easier to dismiss lawsuits, saying they represent "almost a blackmail situation" that can "paralyze" a small business owner.

"It's time that state government treated small businesses as a customer, not just another taxpayer," he said.  

Bill Graham filed a 2002 lawsuit against a vaccine manufacturer that drew the ire of advocates for tort reform.

The Republican gubernatorial candidate was the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in John and Jane Doe v. Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics.

The 27-page summary of allegations charges that the company distributed a vaccine containing mercury that led to "severe neurodevelopmental disorders" in the couple's two-year-old son. In 2006, it was dismissed by U.S. District Court Judge Judge James Beaty Jr. for lack of a proper expert witness.

Some parents have blamed mercury-containing thimerosal in vaccines for causing autism, although the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the "weight of scientific evidence" indicates that vaccines are not associated with the disorder.

Lawsuits over vaccines and autism have been criticized by conservative groups calling for tort reform.

"When you look at this Ortho-Doe case, it's precisely the junk science, junk claim that those of us in tort reform have opposed and harshly criticized," said James Copland, director for the Center for Legal Policy at the Manhattan Institute.

But Graham cautioned against making assumptions about the lawsuit.

"We didn't even say the word autism in the complaint," he told Dome. "To say that it had any relationship to autism ... it was never an allegation in the complaint."

Judge Beaty, however, did not shy away from the word, using "autism" or "autistic" 64 times in his 25-page opinion about the vaccine, called RhoGAM.

"Plaintiffs have failed to present sufficient evidence from which a jury could conclude the thimerosal in RhoGAM caused Minor Child Doe's autism," he wrote.

Graham said that he filed a number of subsequent cases regarding the same type of mercury poisoning without mention of autism. One of those plaintiffs, Laura Bono, co-founded the National Autism Association.