Hunt troubled by Moore's ads

And now we know who Governor Hunt want for his newest surrogate, making it unnecessary for him to actually live in the Mansion.

Valdimir Putin comes to mind.

And STILL, just as expected, the Father of CORRUPTION in NC refuses to endorse either of the sketchy democrackkks for 'governor'...

Does he endorse Hitlery or Obakarama?

The Democratic gubernatorial primary has developed into the classic pattern of an eventual Republican victory in November: strong, progressive Democratic candidates scrapping too hard in the primary for too narrow a strip of the political philosophical spectrum like a football team which spends too much of the game between the 30-yard lines on offense. Beverly Perdue and Richard Moore are just as strong and effective advocates for progressive policies in North Carolina state government in 2008 as were Skipper Bowles and Pat Taylor in 1972 and Rufus Edmisten and Eddie Knox in 1984.

Of course, the eventual winners in the 1972 and 1984 general elections were the visionary and practical-minded Republicans Jim Holshouser and Jim Martin though the Holshouser-Bowles contest was an especially close race.

Democrats, do you want to know how you can lose elections despite being clearly forward-looking and progressive? The reason is, you get into a pitched battle within the party in which you leave out too many moderate and conservative Democratic voters in the middle. And the reason this happens every now and then in gubernatorial elections in this state goes back to the landmark 1960 campaign, when a liberal Terry Sanford successfully withstood a conservative challenge by I. Beverly Lake in what was then known as a primary runoff election.

But the first 1960 Democratic primary for governor was a four-way race and not a three-way race, with not one but two moderate-to-conservative candidates splitting a rather large vote from the middle of the spectrum yet with neither of them winning enough votes to make it to what in those days was the occasional second or runoff primary.

The Sanford-Hunt wing of the Democratic Party became dominant in statewide Tar Heel Democratic politics from the 1960s and 1970s forward to this decade, but at times like the present 2008 campaign, the leading Democrats are so eager to win or hold the loyalties of the more progressive (Sanford-Hunt) wing of the party in their camps that they increasingly leave out the concerns of more conservative Democrats, who finally must reflect on whether they really have a place in the Democratic Party at the gubernatorial level.

Probably not many Raleigh politicos or pundits will agree with this analysis, but this is the picture which emerges as the Democratic Party seems to forget the basic, loyal, but sometimes more conservative Democratic voters who are willing to share the party platform with more liberal activists but do not wish to be excluded altogether.

Gov. Hunt should recognize that the Perdue cmapaign started all the real trouble by lashing out at North Carolina's standing as the leading Southeastern state in banking and finance not only within the region of the South but also in the New York financial markets as well. The Perdue campaign rushed out with some good populist Georgia and Florida politics, but this affront to the business center of North Carolina politics may not cut it in the former "Progressive Plutocracy."

Then the Moore campaign contributed some mistakes and poor judgment of its own, especially in slighting the descendents of many North Carolinians who served militarily under harsh conditions in the Confederacy. Now what you have is two campaigns turning farther and farther away from the old conservative-progressive coalitions (Luther Hodges, Dan Moore, Bob Scott) which have held up the center of the Democratic Party for decades and often made it possible for the Terry Sanfords, the Jim Hunts and the Mike Easleys to step out on very important social, educational and environmental issues with progressive or even liberal positions of leadership initiative.

But when the Democratic Party leaves the box cars, gondolas and flat cars on the side tracks in order to enjoy a more glamorous ride for the dignitaries in the caboose, then the engine that drives the train may have a lighter load to pull, but it ultimately becomes unable to "deliver the goods" to the people of North Carolina in the fall campaign.

This isn't just "textbook politics"--it's self-evident to many candidates at the state and local level of voter outreach.

David McKnight