Chalk it up to misspent youth?

Winston-Salem City Councilman Dan Besse is running for lieutenant governor in the Democratic primary, but Besse acknowledged Friday he's a convert, Mark Johnson reports.

He registered as a Republican in 1972, when he was 18, and stuck with that party until 1993.

He joined the GOP when the mountain moderate Republican tradition was still alive, he wrote in an e-mail. He hoped to help make the party "an effective moderate alternative to (Democrats') one-party control in the state."

"Well," he wrote, "that didn't work out."

That history might be enough of a problem to explain in a Democratic primary, but there's a little more. While a Republican living in New Bern, Besse gave $1,650 to Phil Walker, the GOP candidate for the state senate in 1990.

Who was Walker's Democratic opponent? That would be now-Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue, who is running for governor and alongside whom Besse would expect to campaign if each won the primary.

Wouldn't that make for interesting conversation on the campaign bus?