Ferrel Guillory figures GOP Sen. Richard Burr ought to get crackin’ now for his own re-election bid in 2010, saying this week that Democrats will be infused with new energy with the wins of both Barack Obama and Kay Hagan, who defeated incumbent Sen. Elizabeth Dole on Tuesday, Barb Barrett reports.

"Kay Hagan winning certainly will send a signal that Sen. Burr is going to have a strong Democratic opponent," said Guillory, a longtime political reporter now at UNC-Chapel Hill. "Sen. Burr will be on notice the next two years that he’s got his work in front of him, both to be a productive senator and a good campaigner. Certainly he’ll learn some lessons from Sen. Dole too."

Among those lessons, he said, is to come back in North Carolina on a regular basis. That shouldn’t be as much a concern for Burr, who returns home to Winston-Salem most weekends to be with his wife. Dole lives in the Watergate apartments in Washington with her husband, former Sen. Bob Dole.

Carter Wrenn says 527s are the latest chapter in "an old story."

The longtime Republican political consultant says that attempts to keep major donors from influencing campaigns have just led to new ways of soliciting money.

After Watergate, Congress passed campaign finance reform that limited direct contributions to candidates, so donors began giving to political action committees. Then money went to segregated funds run by the national parties. 

Now, it goes to so-called 527 organizations, which can't explicitly call for the defeat of candidates, but can run ads attacking their positions or their records, but cannot coordinate with opponents' campaigns.

Wrenn said the legal restrictions on coordination are much looser than they used to be. When he ran the Congressional Club, he had to take care not to hire the same pollsters or consultants as Ronald Reagan, whose candidacy he was promoting.

Despite the ban on coordination, independent ads are often closely in sync with campaigns.

"You have people who have come out of the same political school, so they tend to look at things the same way," Wrenn said. "Still, you always sort of suspect that maybe in the back rooms in the dead of night there's a little bit of communication going on."

Over the past century, North Carolina has rarely been a battleground.

Since 1908, the average margin of victory in the presidential race here has been 18 percentage points, and the median has been 12.4 points.

The closest race out of those 25 elections was Bill Clinton's challenge to incumbent President George H.W. Bush in 1992. As a Southern governor running on the economy, Clinton campaigned heavily in the state, but he was helped by a strong third-party showing by Ross Perot.

Bush only won by 0.79 percentage points, beating Clinton 43.4 to 42.7 percent. (Perot got 13.9 percent of the vote, the third-best showing for a third-party candidate in North Carolina after George Wallace in 1968 and Teddy Roosevelt in 1912.)

The next closest race was 1956, when Democrat Adlai Stevenson edged Dwight Eisenhower by 1.32 percentage points despite losing the national election.

In third place was Ronald Reagan's 2.12 point win over Jimmy Carter in 1980. In fourth place, John Kennedy's 4.22 point win over Richard Nixon in 1960. And in fifth place, Bob Dole's 4.69 point win over Clinton in 1996 despite losing the national election.

Otherwise, North Carolina was reliably Democratic from 1908 to 1964, and reliably Republican from 1968 to 2004 (with the exception of Carter's post-Watergate win in 1976.)

A Hollywood screenwriter says he'd like Peter Coyote to play U.S. Rep. Walter Jones.

Richard Lasser is trying to recruit top Hollywood talent for a play about the fictional impeachment trial of President Bush over the Iraq war.

He told Dome that he would like to cast Coyote, a character actor best known for his role as the prosecutor in "The Jagged Edge." But if TV and movie stars aren't available, he'd look for local talent in Washington, D.C.

The play is currently scheduled to premiere at a theater on the campus of George Washington University in January, shortly after the Congressional recess.

Lasser said he and co-writer Bruce Fein wrote the Jones character to be a strong advocate for truth. He compared his role in the play to U.S. Sen. Howard Baker during Watergate, who famously asked what the president knew and when he knew it.

"Having a Walter Jones is about as close as I think we're going to get in this day and age," he said.

One prominent Watergate veteran didn't make Rufus Edmisten's party on Friday.

Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, who served as Republican counsel to the Senate Watergate committee, attended the 20th anniversary bash in Washington, D.C., said Edmisten, a former North Carolina attorney general and secretary of state.

But Thompson did not come to the 35th anniversary, perhaps because he's busy laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign of his own.

Edmisten, a Democrat, said he may yet show to one of his parties.

"Maybe we'll get him to come over to the 40th anniversary — as president," he said, adding that he's a fan of Thompson's political style. "If I was a Republican, I'd vote for him."

(Photo of Fred Thompson from Edmisten's personal collection.)

Rufus Edmisten celebrated the anniversary of Watergate with a few friends Friday.

About 100 people came to the former state attorney general's office in downtown Raleigh, including a dozen or so veterans from U.S. Sen. Sam Ervin's Senate Watergate committee.

Edmisten, who was chief deputy counsel on the committee, said he began the tradition in 1992, on the 20th anniversary of the June 17 break-in that led to President Nixon's resignation. The group has met every five years since, with a bartender in a Nixon mask serving a secret Watergate drink.

"We're all getting older now," said Edmisten, who is 65. "A lot of them brought their kids, who are teen-agers now and entering college." 

He said the conversation occasionally drifted to comparisons with the Duke lacrosse scandal, though he tried to keep down any mention of the current administration.

"I run a nonpartisan shop here," said Edmisten, a Democrat.

Is Bob Orr the next Sam Ervin?

Greensboro News & Record editorial writer Doug Clark argues that there are some parallels between the two North Carolinians, though not quite in the "Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy" league.

Orr, a former state Supreme Court justice running for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, is "wise and folksy" like Ervin, the former judge and U.S. Senator.

Unlike Ervin, Orr would be an underdog against a strong Democrat, Clark says.

Ervin was also rightly famous for his handling of Watergate. Though Clark doesn't make the parallel explicit, he brings up some recent state scandals:

Orr hopes his record as a judge earns credibility with voters at a time when political scandals have sent several North Carolina politicians to federal prison. Other leaders, like the current governor, haven't had much to say about the erosion of the state's reputation for honest government.

"It's disheartening that we haven't heard more," Orr said Monday.