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The News & Observer asked four area political pundits -- John Hood, Tom Jensen, Gary Pearce and Carter Wrenn -- to share their reaction about Monday night’s gubernatorial debate. Here are their thoughts:

Tom Jensen, director Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-leaning polling firm based in Raleigh: “Most Democratic voters are undecided in the race for Governor and I don’t think this debate did anything to change that. The frontrunners, Dalton and Etheridge, did little to distinguish themselves from each other. Faison was entertaining but is ultimately irrelevant.”

Gary Pearce, veteran Democratic strategist in Raleigh who blogs at Talking About Politics: “Etheridge won: smiling, at ease and physically dominating the stage. Dalton was too tightly wound; Faison, too combative. No disasters and no knockouts. With minor differences on policy, personality trumps.”

The congressional campaign of former U.S. Attorney George Holding has all the earmarks of a Carter Wrenn-run campaign – find a theme and hammer away on it.

A new radio ad emphasizes Holding's pledge to cut spending – a theme he has stressed in his first TV ad.

“With your support I will go to Congress and do three things – cut spending, and cut spending and cut more spending,” Holding says. “It's time to end politics as usual.

The radio spot also includes an endorsement from Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison.

“Former U.S. Attorney George Holding was a tough prosecutor,” Harrison says. “When George said he would help me crack down on on gangs and violent felons he did. And when George says he will cut spending, he will.”

A leading strategist for Holding is Wrenn, the long-time political advisor for Sen. Jesse Helms and other Republicans, who is known for finding one or two themes and pounding away at them.

Holding is seeking the Republican nomination for the 13th congressional seat, now held by Democratic Rep. Brad Miller. Also seeking the GOP nomination seat is Wake County commissioners Chairman Paul Coble, a former Raleigh mayor; and Wake Forest businessman Bill Randall, the GOP nominee for the seat last time.

Former U.S. Attorney George Holding has hired veteran GOP strategist Carter Wrenn to be his political consultant in his bid to win the 13th District congressional seat held by Democrat Brad Miller.

Wrenn was the long-time strategist for Sen. Jesse Helms and for other candidates backed by the Helms organization, such as Senators John East and Lauch Faircloth.

More recently, Wrenn was the strategist for Richard Vinroot's unsuccessful 2000 gubernatorial campaign, and for Renee Ellmers' upset victory for congress last year.

He is long-time friends with Holding's brother, Robert Holding. The two worked together for years in the Helms operation.

The political optics of the state budget debate are not going the way Republicans would like when conservative strategist and Jesse Helms acolyte Carter Wrenn is writing blog posts that read like they could have been written by, well, a Democrat.

On his Talking About Politics blog earlier this week, Wrenn took Speaker Thom Tillis to task for trying to claim that a fee increase does not equal a tax increase.

Today’s new breed of politicians are a lot more versatile than the old-timers most of us grew up with.

In the old days when Democratic politicians raised ‘fees’ – like the fee you pay for your car registration – they’d argue stubbornly it was not a tax increase and Republican politicians would argue back, 'The money comes out of the taxpayers’ pockets and goes to government and lands in the same bank account as taxes – so how’s that not a tax.'

Last week that old-fashioned clarity vanished in a heartbeat.

Suddenly, in Raleigh Democratic Leader Joe Hackney was arguing for all he’s worth that ‘fee increases’ are tax increases and standing eye to eye with him Republican Speaker Thom Tillis was arguing back, 'No way – saying his plan to raise fees $100 million was absolutely not a tax increase.'

So, in Raleigh, we have Joe Hackney sounding like Jesse Helms and Thom Tillis sounding like Jim Hunt – who’d have thought such versatility was possible?

Today, Wrenn wrote that Gov. Bev Perdue is winning the argument over the GOP's plan to cut thousands of teachers' jobs in order to shave a penny of the sales tax.

Speaker Tillis may be rolling his budget through the State House, flattening Democratic Leader Joe Hackney like Sherman marching through Georgia but Tillis’ real problem isn’t out-voting Hackney it’s out-politikin’ Perdue.

The trial lawyers have hired Carter Wrenn, the long-time political strategist for former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, to help them with the new GOP legislature.

The trial lawyers, now known as the N.C. Advocates for Justice, have long been closely aligned with the Democrats. But with the Republicans taking control of the legislature, the trial lawyers have been seeking to adopt to their new political political environment.

“We have been traditionally been connected with the Democratic leadership of the legislature,” said Dick Taylor, the the CEO of the NC Advocates for Justice. “But the new reality is we want the smartest, most effective thinkers about the Republican majority and what sort of messaging would appeal to them.”

Wrenn, who most recently was the strategist for Tea Party-supported candidate Renee Ellmers (who defeated Democratic Rep. Bob Etheridge), will help the trial lawyers with strategy. The trial lawyers also recently announced they were hiring former Raleigh City Councilman Philip Isley a Republican, to lobby for them.

They are also retaining their Democratic lobbyists, Paul Pulley and Randolph Cloud.

Carter Wrenn said today he wasn’t surprised by the revelation in the New York Times about the national Republicans being behind guerrilla tactics aimed at incumbent Democrats.

Last summer, Wrenn recalled, the National Republican Campaign Committee initially told the Renee Ellmers campaign they didn’t know who the trackers were with the video camera trained on Bob Etheridge in Washington.

That changed once Ellmers posted her own YouTube response. Her video urged Etheridge to apologize to the young men “in person.” After the clip went online, the NRCC called the campaign back and asked Ellmers to change the language, Wrenn recalled. That was when he learned that the committee knew the videographers.

“I’d known they knew it in June,” said Wrenn, who has been a consultant to the Ellmers campaign.

Wrenn said he advised the national committee to tell the press, and warned them that he would be doing exactly that. He called local reporters and told them what he knew.

“You don’t mislead the press,” Carter told reporter Barb Barrett today. “It’s silly.”

After the flap with the NRCC, “they didn’t do anything to help Ellmers,” Carter said.

“We asked them the other day to help with the recount with a contribution,” he said. “I asked, they said 'no,' and I moved on.”

You’re kidding!

The two self-described “students working on a project” who accosted Congressman Bob Etheridge on a Washington, D.C. street in a now-notorious "Who are you?" YouTube video were part of a Republican guerrilla operation to harass Democratic incumbents in hopes they would say or do something embarrassing, according to a New York Times story today.

“Only this week did Republican strategists acknowledge they were behind the episode,” wrote reporters Jim Rutenberg and Jeff Zeleny in a story detailing House Republican leaders’ elaborate planning after the 2008 elections that helped them regain the majority Tuesday.

Etheridge apologized, but the video instantly went viral, lifting challenger Renee Ellmers in the polls and generating donations for her campaign. It also provided fodder for TV attack ads funded by an independent conservative group, reports Jay Price.

The footage was first was released in June on the website “Big Government,” run by Andrew Breitbart, the man who first posted the heavily edited guerilla ACORN videos.

The video put her in touch with the National Republican Congressional Committee, which considered adding her to its “Young Guns” list of contenders. At the same time, both the NRCC and the National Republican Committee said they didn’t have anything to do with the video.

The NRCC subsequently left Ellmers off its contribution list after her consultant, Carter Wrenn, told reporters that the congressional committee knew the men, reported Washington correspondent Barbara Barrett.

“They told me yesterday they know who they are,” Wrenn said back in June. “It wasn't clear whether the students worked for them or not.”

The two young men hit the jackpot after they pointed video cameras at Etheridge and asked if he “fully supported the Obama agenda.” He grabbed one of them by the wrist, ignoring repeated requests to let go, then briefly grabbed the man by the neck and repeatedly asking the pair who they were.

CBS and Google listed the clip of the incident as the top political video of the year, noting that it got nearly 3 million hits. More to the point, Etheridge is behind by such a small margin – fewer than 1700 votes – that many now think his behavior in the video cost him the election.

Ellmers narrowly led Tuesday’s polling in the 2nd Congressional District race, but Etheridge expects to seek a recount after the results become official in a week.

Yesterday's Claims Department post on the new "Victory Mosque" ad from the Renee Ellmers for Congress campaign misidentified one of the mosques.

There are two mosques in Istanbul, Turkey, that look very similar, though they were built more than more than 1,000 years apart.

Carter Wrenn, a political consultant for Ellmers, said the mosque shown in her ad (below) is the Hagia Sophia, built between 532 and 537 A.D. by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian as a Orothdox Christian basilica. That's 917 years before Muslims conquered the city then known as Constantinople in 1454. The Hagia Sophia, which in Greek means "holy wisdom," was then converted to a mosque and added four minarets at the corners of the building.

Dome misidentified the structure as the Blue Mosque, built near the Hagia Sophia between 1609 and 1616. The newer mosque was built based in part on the older building's design. A careful comparison of the two, however shows differences in the design of the domes and the minarets.

Of course, that begs this question: If Wrenn and the Ellmers campaign knew the history of the Hagia Sophia, and that it predates Muslim control of the city by nearly a millenium, then how is it not misleading to present the building to voters as an example of a "victory mosque" built following conquest?

"We could reasonably argue over the difference between transforming a church into a mosque and building a mosque, but isn't it sort of a distinction without a difference?" Wrenn said.

The National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee knows the identity of the two young men who approached Rep. Bob Etheridge, in a highly publicized incident in which the Democratic congressman roughly grabbed one of the men.

That's according to Carter Wrenn, a long-time Republican strategist, who is a consultant to Renee Ellmers, the GOP candidate who hopes to unseat Etheridge in November.

After an Ellmers news conference on Monday, Wrenn told reporters he knew nothing of the identity of the two men who approached Etheridge and neither did the Republican congressional committee, which is tasked with defeating Etheridge.

But after conversations Wednesday with the political director and the executive director of the Washington-based group, Wrenn said today that the congressional committee knows who the young men are.

“They told me yesterday they know who they are,” Wrenn said. “It wasn't clear whether the students worked for them or not.”

The identity of the students has been a mystery because they declined to identify themselves to Etheridge on the video as Etheridge repeatedly demanded: “Who are you?”

The face of one student that is shown on the video is deliberately blurred.