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Yes - For Want of a Subclause: Or, Goin' to Carolina in my Time(line)
For Want of a Subclause: Or, Goin' to Carolina in my Time(line)
Gov. James T. "Terry" Sanford 1973-77
def. James Holshouser
When the great 1969 rewrite of the North Carolina State Constitution (one of a series of state constitutions under review across the country at that time) added a grandfather clause that would permit past governors to join new ones in running for a second term, people began to wonder. When "Skipper" Bowles himself, seemingly the prohibitive favorite for the run in the fall, came to the President of Duke University in private in January of 1972, people wondered even more. They need have wondered no longer. North Carolina's famous reformer was making a return to politics, and in the fall he managed to squeak past moderate Republican Jim Holshouser, in part by tactical voting from people whose preferred candidates that year were George Wallace and Jesse Helms, and were willing to vote for the liberal Sanford in the short term to force moderates like Holshouser out of power in the NCGOP, leaving it open to Helms' coterie. Sanford did indeed manage, mostly, to cut against the economic grain of the stagflated early Seventies, made substantial new investments in the state's university system, and issued a nationally-noted formal, public apology for the programs of publicly-mandated sterilization that had survived past his first term in office in the early Sixties. Sanford rolled it all into a CV that set him up for his run in the 1976 presidential primaries, which was respectable if not successful (hey, he won two states and did well on delegates for a second-tier candidate, and Secretary of Education was not a bad thing to get out of it...)
Gov. James B. "Jim" Hunt 1977-85
def. James C. Gardner 1976, I. Beverly Lake Jr. 1980
One of the state's most ambitious and politically savvy governors, Jim Hunt was a curious creature, a son of the Tobacco Belt who'd managed his family's farming business while he gained a law degree, who had apprenticed as Lieutenant Governor to Sanford's second term representing the mostly conservative East of the state, but who was himself an economic and even a social liberal. Hunt projected an image of being tough on law and order, and aggressive in his support of North Carolina's farming and fishing interests, while at the same time he started a state-level complement to the Head Start program called Smart Start, revamped the community college system, campaigned furiously to try and pass the Equal Rights Amendment, and supported a statewide rural community investment program that, despite anger in the State House, gave a fair share of funding to historically-black communities founded by sharecroppers. Effective at steering legislation for a governor with no veto power, Hunt was generally popular within the state and used that popularity to tilt at the windmill of unseating the godfather of North Carolina reactionary politics, Jesse Helms, from his Senate seat in 1984. The bitter contest, decided by just a few thousand votes, left Hunt with little taste for more politics but he remained actively involved in developing research centers for agriculture, education, and public policy in the University of North Carolina system, and set up a Hunt Foundation for research into early childhood education.
Gov. John Porter East 1985-88
def. James "Jimmy" Green 1984
Referred to by wags in the press as "Helms on Wheels," John East was Jesse Helms' political lieutenant, ideological confidant, and electoral protégé. The hard-right, wheelchair-bound political science professor had made a run at a U.S. Senate seat in 1980, losing by a very narrow margin to Terry Sanford, returned from his Cabinet position in DC. It had taken all of Sanford's own political clout, and an advertising campaign making East look as or more extreme than Helms, to stop him then. Now, with favorable GOP headwinds, a mobilized base of Christian fundamentalists and party-swapping, older white-backlash voters, and faced with a fractious Democratic primary between Rufus Edmisten and Jimmy Green, both of whom had faced corruption charges they'd dodged in court, East plowed ahead. In the end his margin was not as large as he would have liked, as undecideds began to draw back against him at the end of the race, but it was enough. He came into office empowered to make significant budget cuts, drafting plans for the closure of several of the smallest campuses in the UNC system (particularly those that served rural and "minority-majority" communities), tougher mandatory sentencing standards for drug crimes, and a series of restrictions on access to birth control counseling and abortion two of which became federal court cases. East was a workaholic as well, driving his way through paperwork and showing a remarkable command of small legislative details. It was that command that helped him band together a "conservative caucus" of tory Democrats and new-generation New Right Republicans to pass much of his legislative agenda. But the personal toll was high; far higher than anyone at the time imagined. With his health rocky, and in the early stages of the primary campaign for his reelection bid, East returned to his family home in Greenville to deal with what he called personal business affairs. Leaving the governor who liked his privacy to himself for a bit, his security detail did not realize the governor had locked himself in the house's garage, fatally gassing himself with carbon monoxide, until it was too late. The tragedy splashed across national news and North Carolina faced its first emergency gubernatorial succession.
Gov. James C. "Jim" Gardner, 1988-93
def. Robert Jordan III 1988
Jim Gardner was a Republican of the old school, an active and elected member of the party as far back as the Sixties when it was a distinct and comparatively moderate minority presence caught amid the civil war between liberals and segregationists that was tearing the state's Democratic Party in two. He had run for governor before and lost, paid his dues, served in a number of other offices, withstood and worked with the development of the mighty fundraising and patronage machine that developed around that arch neo-Confederate Jesse Helms, and secured for himself the Lieutenant Governor's nomination in 1984, riding the tide with John East into office. Now, suddenly, the big prize had fallen in his lap in the worst circumstances. Gardner rallied the state and the party around him, showed continued support for East's agenda whether he approved of all of it or not both out of respect for the dead and to ensure there was no serious primary challenge from his right. In more good circumstances for North Carolina Republicans, projecting an image of quieter, more thoughtful conservatism than East, he powered by dull Democratic moderate Bob Jordan to a term in his own right. Now he could concentrate on the commercial and financial issues that concerned him most, easing regulations and developing tax and development incentives for outside investment in the state, while leaving most of the culture-war hot topics off to one side. This would cost him in the end; a larger, national recession took hold at the worst time for his reelection prospect, and a feeling that he had not done enough lately to justify the crucial fundraising support of Helms' network of PACs hurt the structural capabilities of his campaign. In a race towards the middle to claim the votes of anxious suburbanites tied to the state's tech-and-biomedicine boom, left Gardner up short against his opponent in 1992...
Gov. Erskine B. Bowles, 1993-97
def. James C. Gardner 1992
Erskine Bowles was part of a curious new breed, although in many ways that "new breed" was the well-educated, financially-inclined offspring of old Southern Democratic moderates, men who'd made successes of themselves and liked to truck with money, but disliked the hateful certainty of the old-line segregationists and knew the votes they needed belonged to anxious, ordinary folk who wanted a steady hand at the wheel. Erskine Bowles learned that first hand from his father: "Skipper" Bowles was one of the state's best-known and most successful Democratic Party operatives of the Sixties and Seventies, a man who kept the peace between the liberal and moderate factions (as the segregationists peeled away to Wallace or the GOP) while making a tidy sum for himself in the process. Erskine had gone into business instead, a successful financial firm in Charlotte, before he was talked into running for Congress in the anti-GOP midterms of 1986. Three terms in Congress had whetted his appetite for politics, and with a weak field emerging in 1992 when Jim Hunt announced he would make no triumphal return to state politics, Bowles threw his hat in the gubernatorial primary. With slick advertising, meticulous campaign advisers, and the Helms machine's suspicious of Jim Gardner, Bowles "micro-targeted" key stretches of suburbs across the state and appealed to them saying that he, a successful financier with a social conscience, would lead the state and those suburban voters out of recession in ways that didn't make them feel bad about themselves. The sales pitch worked. And for several years Bowles benefited from fair economic winds, even chancing such liberal notions as a major infrastructure investment in state highways and commuter routes, the development of a light rail project for the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Triangle, more money for community colleges to retrain cigarette and textile workers whose jobs were disappearing, and so on. But Bowles' resume -- his years in finance -- came back to bite him, with charges of improper transactions and insider trading tied to work he'd done during the real-estate boom in Charlotte in the early 1980s. Added were a charge of mail fraud and questions asked about gifts he'd received while governor, and while the charges kept failing to stick they tainted Bowles, already tolerated rather than loved by white liberals and minorities, and left him vulnerable to a well-crafted challenge in 1996.
Gov. Walter B. Jones, Jr. 1997-2001
def. Erskine Bowles 1996
Walter Jones Jr. was, to his detractors and even to some more neutral observers, something like the Chauncey Gardner of North Carolina politics. He was a vessel into which the ideas and desires of everyone to the right of Erskine Bowles could be poured, and in his public pronouncements and gymnastics over policy, he showed what seemed a mix of unthinking but ingratiating self-contradiction, and the furious hustle of a man whose only proper goal was his own success scrambling to reassure everyone, even enemies of one another, that he really was on all their sides. The son of a conservative Democrat who had held North Carolina's 1st Congressional District for decades, Jones Jr. had switched parties and run as a zealous New Right convert for the state legislature, holding a seat that covered Seymour Johnson Air Force Base for eight years before he joined the 1996 Republican gubernatorial primary. He benefitted from sheer good luck too when Helms' fair-haired boy David Funderburk was involved in a nasty car crash that raised questions of DUI, collapsing the strongest opposing campaign. Jones, who could sound enough like East for Tobacco Belt reactionaries and "exurban" white-flighters, and enough like Gardner to make the state Chamber of Commerce happy, moved ahead, smiling his broad, nervous smile the whole time, and quite ready to invest in the negative advertising needed to drive Bowles' favorable through the floor. Once he had won the election, however, the trouble began. Jones was outstandingly quick on his feet in getting a crowd to like him, but lacked a similar deftness managing the tactical demands of policy making. In practice he was a Chamber of Commerce man more than a Citizens' Committee one, and his inability to stop liberal filibusters of culture-war bills that defunded services in heavily minority areas or the arts or women's health made him look ineffective. His zealous efforts to help both Charlotte and Winston-Salem become significant financial-services centers carried the same price as it had for Bowles: not every bag man was honest, and not every state representative above board, and as several modest-sized corruption scandals erupted Jones' efforts to keep himself separated from them mobilized Democratic partisans while at the same time telling the Chamber of Commerce he was not willing to stand up and fight and make their little legal problems go away for. And just as it seemed fate had smiled again and handed him a natural advantage as he faced reelection, he turned out to be wrong about that too...
Gov. Harvey B. Gantt 2001-09
def. Walter B. Jones Jr. 2000 Richard Vinroot 2004
Harvey Gantt was one of North Carolina's more remarkable political characters. A tall, graceful, highly-educated black man in a lily-white political culture, mayor of the city that had fundamentally rebalanced the political, cultural, and economic geography of the state with its breakneck growth, a man who had desegregated Clemson University in South Carolina by showing up to school in the Sixties, then gained advanced degrees in architecture from MIT and served three two-year terms as Charlotte mayor through the go-go Eighties, Gantt was the very substance of something new in state politics. Though he lost his 1990 bid to unseat Jesse Helms his campaign did surprisingly well and mobilized black political activists around the country. He went on to serve in President Mabus' Cabinet as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and was ranked one of the most effective cabinet officers throughout his tenure. After he returned to North Carolina he became involved in a series of civil rights and urban renewal organizations, and tested the waters for a run at the governorship. After beating out State Attorney General Mike Easley on the strength of urban and minority votes, he found himself toe to toe with Walter Jones Jr. Rather than emphasize the emergent financial scandals in the legislature, he emphasized his work in urban development and renewal and jobs creation just as another recession loomed. He also commissioned what became a legendary series of advertisements staged as conversations with North Carolina's favorite celebrity son (or at least tied with Michael Jordan and Richard Petty), Andy Griffith, who was himself a big Gantt supporter. The normalizing, encouraging conversations of those pieces were credited with swinging key undecided votes in Gantt's favor, while he concentrated on not making the mistakes of 1990 and starting a massive voter registration and mobilization base across the state's cities and in minority-heavy areas, including significant outreach to the growing Latino community in North Carolina's farm belts. Once governor he became involved first in mitigating the recession, then in developing new strategies for bringing high-tech investment into the state, instituting "pay to play" fees on financial institutions after a bitter legislative fight, finally acquiring veto power for the North Carolina governorship, investing in biotech research to develop new crops and uses for crops to revitalize the state's sagging farm belts, and managed a comprehensive budget reconciliation process for state income tax to cut the famous sales tax on food (used to fund community colleges) by half. That and a buoyant real estate marked helped Gantt survive a strong challenge from one of his successors as mayor of Charlotte, moderate Republican Richard Vinroot who had vaulted to his party's nomination with the late Jesse Helms' machine in disarray. Gantt's survival was narrow but he emerged still in office, devoted now to the recommendations of Jim Hunt's blue-ribbon commission for a comprehensive system of preschool in the state, for which he sought to build a partnership of public and private investments to extend the reach of Smart Start and begin providing resources for part-day preschool in trial districts of the public schools. As one of the nation's most powerful African American politicians, and a broadly successful governor, he now decided, as his term drew towards an end in 2008, to throw himself and his resources in the direction of higher things....
Gov. David E. Price 2009-13
def. David Funderburk 2008
For David Price, the North Carolina governorship was both a bequest and a reward. The decades-long liberal congressman from North Carolina's college-town enclave around Chapel Hill and Durham, Price was asked personally by Harvey Gantt if he would enter the race, at a moment made favorable by Gantt's own presidential campaign and to open the seat up to one of Gantt's state legislative allies. Neither Gantt nor Price expected a win in a landslide; Price instead concentrated on mobilizing core Democratic turnout, and on giving one of the comeback stories of North Carolina politics, now-Congressman David Funderburk, an heir to the remains of the Helms machine, enough ideological rope to hang himself with comfortable suburbanites who didn't want to identify themselves with bigotry. In that moment it was a success. And as governor Price was true to his word and to himself, taking in many ways more overtly liberal positions than Gantt did, dressed up less in outreach to private interests and calls to bring people together in common prosperity. There were still terrible inequalities of income, race, and sex in the state and Price decided he had been handed the opportunity to tackle them. This was not always easy, and it became nigh impossible with Republican control of the state legislature after midterms. But price fought on. Some measures, particularly in rural poverty relief and equitable funding for historically black colleges in the UNC system, showed surprising success. But many others became targets of right-wing advertising, and Price's consistent veto battles with the budgets set by the Republican-controlled lege towards the end of his term took a toll on his strength but endeared him to liberals. Out of that came one agreement developing a permanent funding line for North Carolina Public Broadcasting; a small thing against abortion restrictions and structural racism but still a candle lit. Perhaps Price's greatest quality was his almost serene ability to get on with the job, unafraid of his electoral fortunes. That was just as well...
Gov. Daniel Forest 2013-
def. David Price 2012
To look at him, Dan Forest was every lesson drawn from the NCGOP's experience with Walter Jones Jr. made flesh and fully operational. Relatively young, handsome, son of Sue Myrick a NCGOP stalwart who had succeeded Gantt as mayor of Charlotte, a corporate success story in his own right, who could talk business and investment policy with intelligence and soft-pedal social conservatism with a smile, Forest put a vibrant, young, forward-looking face on what was essentially, in demographic terms, pure backlash by the aging, conservative eastern and west-central portions of the state against the cities and minorities, bringing along enough affluent suburban voters who wanted a market turned loose to flourish to seal the deal. Forest did indeed clash with the cultural right of his party, not over end goals, but over how fast and openly they could move against the cultural liberalism of Charlotte and the Triangle, but provided enough business opportunities, tax cuts, and development incentives for finance, energy, and agriculture to soothe tempers. A surprisingly deft manager of legislators, Forest was able successfully to set policy from the governor's mansion again in ways no Republican had since Jim Gardner, perhaps since John East. He also knew how to talk to suburban North Carolinians, offering a language of opportunity and rising fortunes to justify legislative backsheesh and deregulation. Whether Forest's formulas would see the state into greater prosperity, whether he would successfully be able to take the turn towards voter suppression tactics and gerrymandering demanded by his party's right, and whether that would all pass muster with the voters, remained to be seen. But Forest was smart, ambitious, and buoyed by his own success to give it a try....
ETA: On a personal note, the first political rally I ever attended as a knowing and attentive participant (Mom had taken me to a couple of Mo Udall rallies in Ohio in '76 as preschooler) was during Jim Hunt's OTL campaign against Helms in '84. My mother was actually hired to replace John East on the faculty of his old school when he won his Senate seat; the department was on the ground floor and his old office was by one of the exit doors for the sake of his wheelchair in pre-ADA days. Later, when he decided to retire after one Senate term, during the summer of '86 my dad (as a university administrator) and the chair of Mom's department met with East in a Greenville restaurant to discuss an emeritus position after he left the Senate. He concluded the meeting, then went home and did exactly as described here minus the inattentive bodyguards; besides his more obviously physical ailments East had fought a lifelong battle with near-crippling major depression that made that outcome likelier "when" not "if" -- indeed a bolder POD would be him actually mastering his suicidation and carrying on because that was a less likely outcome. It was summer vacation, and I still remember my mother getting the call (we were visiting family in Florida at the time, she and I) and my father saying the police reckoned he and the dept. chair were the last non-family members to see East alive.
Gov. James T. "Terry" Sanford 1973-77
def. James Holshouser
When the great 1969 rewrite of the North Carolina State Constitution (one of a series of state constitutions under review across the country at that time) added a grandfather clause that would permit past governors to join new ones in running for a second term, people began to wonder. When "Skipper" Bowles himself, seemingly the prohibitive favorite for the run in the fall, came to the President of Duke University in private in January of 1972, people wondered even more. They need have wondered no longer. North Carolina's famous reformer was making a return to politics, and in the fall he managed to squeak past moderate Republican Jim Holshouser, in part by tactical voting from people whose preferred candidates that year were George Wallace and Jesse Helms, and were willing to vote for the liberal Sanford in the short term to force moderates like Holshouser out of power in the NCGOP, leaving it open to Helms' coterie. Sanford did indeed manage, mostly, to cut against the economic grain of the stagflated early Seventies, made substantial new investments in the state's university system, and issued a nationally-noted formal, public apology for the programs of publicly-mandated sterilization that had survived past his first term in office in the early Sixties. Sanford rolled it all into a CV that set him up for his run in the 1976 presidential primaries, which was respectable if not successful (hey, he won two states and did well on delegates for a second-tier candidate, and Secretary of Education was not a bad thing to get out of it...)
Gov. James B. "Jim" Hunt 1977-85
def. James C. Gardner 1976, I. Beverly Lake Jr. 1980
One of the state's most ambitious and politically savvy governors, Jim Hunt was a curious creature, a son of the Tobacco Belt who'd managed his family's farming business while he gained a law degree, who had apprenticed as Lieutenant Governor to Sanford's second term representing the mostly conservative East of the state, but who was himself an economic and even a social liberal. Hunt projected an image of being tough on law and order, and aggressive in his support of North Carolina's farming and fishing interests, while at the same time he started a state-level complement to the Head Start program called Smart Start, revamped the community college system, campaigned furiously to try and pass the Equal Rights Amendment, and supported a statewide rural community investment program that, despite anger in the State House, gave a fair share of funding to historically-black communities founded by sharecroppers. Effective at steering legislation for a governor with no veto power, Hunt was generally popular within the state and used that popularity to tilt at the windmill of unseating the godfather of North Carolina reactionary politics, Jesse Helms, from his Senate seat in 1984. The bitter contest, decided by just a few thousand votes, left Hunt with little taste for more politics but he remained actively involved in developing research centers for agriculture, education, and public policy in the University of North Carolina system, and set up a Hunt Foundation for research into early childhood education.
Gov. John Porter East 1985-88
def. James "Jimmy" Green 1984
Referred to by wags in the press as "Helms on Wheels," John East was Jesse Helms' political lieutenant, ideological confidant, and electoral protégé. The hard-right, wheelchair-bound political science professor had made a run at a U.S. Senate seat in 1980, losing by a very narrow margin to Terry Sanford, returned from his Cabinet position in DC. It had taken all of Sanford's own political clout, and an advertising campaign making East look as or more extreme than Helms, to stop him then. Now, with favorable GOP headwinds, a mobilized base of Christian fundamentalists and party-swapping, older white-backlash voters, and faced with a fractious Democratic primary between Rufus Edmisten and Jimmy Green, both of whom had faced corruption charges they'd dodged in court, East plowed ahead. In the end his margin was not as large as he would have liked, as undecideds began to draw back against him at the end of the race, but it was enough. He came into office empowered to make significant budget cuts, drafting plans for the closure of several of the smallest campuses in the UNC system (particularly those that served rural and "minority-majority" communities), tougher mandatory sentencing standards for drug crimes, and a series of restrictions on access to birth control counseling and abortion two of which became federal court cases. East was a workaholic as well, driving his way through paperwork and showing a remarkable command of small legislative details. It was that command that helped him band together a "conservative caucus" of tory Democrats and new-generation New Right Republicans to pass much of his legislative agenda. But the personal toll was high; far higher than anyone at the time imagined. With his health rocky, and in the early stages of the primary campaign for his reelection bid, East returned to his family home in Greenville to deal with what he called personal business affairs. Leaving the governor who liked his privacy to himself for a bit, his security detail did not realize the governor had locked himself in the house's garage, fatally gassing himself with carbon monoxide, until it was too late. The tragedy splashed across national news and North Carolina faced its first emergency gubernatorial succession.
Gov. James C. "Jim" Gardner, 1988-93
def. Robert Jordan III 1988
Jim Gardner was a Republican of the old school, an active and elected member of the party as far back as the Sixties when it was a distinct and comparatively moderate minority presence caught amid the civil war between liberals and segregationists that was tearing the state's Democratic Party in two. He had run for governor before and lost, paid his dues, served in a number of other offices, withstood and worked with the development of the mighty fundraising and patronage machine that developed around that arch neo-Confederate Jesse Helms, and secured for himself the Lieutenant Governor's nomination in 1984, riding the tide with John East into office. Now, suddenly, the big prize had fallen in his lap in the worst circumstances. Gardner rallied the state and the party around him, showed continued support for East's agenda whether he approved of all of it or not both out of respect for the dead and to ensure there was no serious primary challenge from his right. In more good circumstances for North Carolina Republicans, projecting an image of quieter, more thoughtful conservatism than East, he powered by dull Democratic moderate Bob Jordan to a term in his own right. Now he could concentrate on the commercial and financial issues that concerned him most, easing regulations and developing tax and development incentives for outside investment in the state, while leaving most of the culture-war hot topics off to one side. This would cost him in the end; a larger, national recession took hold at the worst time for his reelection prospect, and a feeling that he had not done enough lately to justify the crucial fundraising support of Helms' network of PACs hurt the structural capabilities of his campaign. In a race towards the middle to claim the votes of anxious suburbanites tied to the state's tech-and-biomedicine boom, left Gardner up short against his opponent in 1992...
Gov. Erskine B. Bowles, 1993-97
def. James C. Gardner 1992
Erskine Bowles was part of a curious new breed, although in many ways that "new breed" was the well-educated, financially-inclined offspring of old Southern Democratic moderates, men who'd made successes of themselves and liked to truck with money, but disliked the hateful certainty of the old-line segregationists and knew the votes they needed belonged to anxious, ordinary folk who wanted a steady hand at the wheel. Erskine Bowles learned that first hand from his father: "Skipper" Bowles was one of the state's best-known and most successful Democratic Party operatives of the Sixties and Seventies, a man who kept the peace between the liberal and moderate factions (as the segregationists peeled away to Wallace or the GOP) while making a tidy sum for himself in the process. Erskine had gone into business instead, a successful financial firm in Charlotte, before he was talked into running for Congress in the anti-GOP midterms of 1986. Three terms in Congress had whetted his appetite for politics, and with a weak field emerging in 1992 when Jim Hunt announced he would make no triumphal return to state politics, Bowles threw his hat in the gubernatorial primary. With slick advertising, meticulous campaign advisers, and the Helms machine's suspicious of Jim Gardner, Bowles "micro-targeted" key stretches of suburbs across the state and appealed to them saying that he, a successful financier with a social conscience, would lead the state and those suburban voters out of recession in ways that didn't make them feel bad about themselves. The sales pitch worked. And for several years Bowles benefited from fair economic winds, even chancing such liberal notions as a major infrastructure investment in state highways and commuter routes, the development of a light rail project for the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Triangle, more money for community colleges to retrain cigarette and textile workers whose jobs were disappearing, and so on. But Bowles' resume -- his years in finance -- came back to bite him, with charges of improper transactions and insider trading tied to work he'd done during the real-estate boom in Charlotte in the early 1980s. Added were a charge of mail fraud and questions asked about gifts he'd received while governor, and while the charges kept failing to stick they tainted Bowles, already tolerated rather than loved by white liberals and minorities, and left him vulnerable to a well-crafted challenge in 1996.
Gov. Walter B. Jones, Jr. 1997-2001
def. Erskine Bowles 1996
Walter Jones Jr. was, to his detractors and even to some more neutral observers, something like the Chauncey Gardner of North Carolina politics. He was a vessel into which the ideas and desires of everyone to the right of Erskine Bowles could be poured, and in his public pronouncements and gymnastics over policy, he showed what seemed a mix of unthinking but ingratiating self-contradiction, and the furious hustle of a man whose only proper goal was his own success scrambling to reassure everyone, even enemies of one another, that he really was on all their sides. The son of a conservative Democrat who had held North Carolina's 1st Congressional District for decades, Jones Jr. had switched parties and run as a zealous New Right convert for the state legislature, holding a seat that covered Seymour Johnson Air Force Base for eight years before he joined the 1996 Republican gubernatorial primary. He benefitted from sheer good luck too when Helms' fair-haired boy David Funderburk was involved in a nasty car crash that raised questions of DUI, collapsing the strongest opposing campaign. Jones, who could sound enough like East for Tobacco Belt reactionaries and "exurban" white-flighters, and enough like Gardner to make the state Chamber of Commerce happy, moved ahead, smiling his broad, nervous smile the whole time, and quite ready to invest in the negative advertising needed to drive Bowles' favorable through the floor. Once he had won the election, however, the trouble began. Jones was outstandingly quick on his feet in getting a crowd to like him, but lacked a similar deftness managing the tactical demands of policy making. In practice he was a Chamber of Commerce man more than a Citizens' Committee one, and his inability to stop liberal filibusters of culture-war bills that defunded services in heavily minority areas or the arts or women's health made him look ineffective. His zealous efforts to help both Charlotte and Winston-Salem become significant financial-services centers carried the same price as it had for Bowles: not every bag man was honest, and not every state representative above board, and as several modest-sized corruption scandals erupted Jones' efforts to keep himself separated from them mobilized Democratic partisans while at the same time telling the Chamber of Commerce he was not willing to stand up and fight and make their little legal problems go away for. And just as it seemed fate had smiled again and handed him a natural advantage as he faced reelection, he turned out to be wrong about that too...
Gov. Harvey B. Gantt 2001-09
def. Walter B. Jones Jr. 2000 Richard Vinroot 2004
Harvey Gantt was one of North Carolina's more remarkable political characters. A tall, graceful, highly-educated black man in a lily-white political culture, mayor of the city that had fundamentally rebalanced the political, cultural, and economic geography of the state with its breakneck growth, a man who had desegregated Clemson University in South Carolina by showing up to school in the Sixties, then gained advanced degrees in architecture from MIT and served three two-year terms as Charlotte mayor through the go-go Eighties, Gantt was the very substance of something new in state politics. Though he lost his 1990 bid to unseat Jesse Helms his campaign did surprisingly well and mobilized black political activists around the country. He went on to serve in President Mabus' Cabinet as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and was ranked one of the most effective cabinet officers throughout his tenure. After he returned to North Carolina he became involved in a series of civil rights and urban renewal organizations, and tested the waters for a run at the governorship. After beating out State Attorney General Mike Easley on the strength of urban and minority votes, he found himself toe to toe with Walter Jones Jr. Rather than emphasize the emergent financial scandals in the legislature, he emphasized his work in urban development and renewal and jobs creation just as another recession loomed. He also commissioned what became a legendary series of advertisements staged as conversations with North Carolina's favorite celebrity son (or at least tied with Michael Jordan and Richard Petty), Andy Griffith, who was himself a big Gantt supporter. The normalizing, encouraging conversations of those pieces were credited with swinging key undecided votes in Gantt's favor, while he concentrated on not making the mistakes of 1990 and starting a massive voter registration and mobilization base across the state's cities and in minority-heavy areas, including significant outreach to the growing Latino community in North Carolina's farm belts. Once governor he became involved first in mitigating the recession, then in developing new strategies for bringing high-tech investment into the state, instituting "pay to play" fees on financial institutions after a bitter legislative fight, finally acquiring veto power for the North Carolina governorship, investing in biotech research to develop new crops and uses for crops to revitalize the state's sagging farm belts, and managed a comprehensive budget reconciliation process for state income tax to cut the famous sales tax on food (used to fund community colleges) by half. That and a buoyant real estate marked helped Gantt survive a strong challenge from one of his successors as mayor of Charlotte, moderate Republican Richard Vinroot who had vaulted to his party's nomination with the late Jesse Helms' machine in disarray. Gantt's survival was narrow but he emerged still in office, devoted now to the recommendations of Jim Hunt's blue-ribbon commission for a comprehensive system of preschool in the state, for which he sought to build a partnership of public and private investments to extend the reach of Smart Start and begin providing resources for part-day preschool in trial districts of the public schools. As one of the nation's most powerful African American politicians, and a broadly successful governor, he now decided, as his term drew towards an end in 2008, to throw himself and his resources in the direction of higher things....
Gov. David E. Price 2009-13
def. David Funderburk 2008
For David Price, the North Carolina governorship was both a bequest and a reward. The decades-long liberal congressman from North Carolina's college-town enclave around Chapel Hill and Durham, Price was asked personally by Harvey Gantt if he would enter the race, at a moment made favorable by Gantt's own presidential campaign and to open the seat up to one of Gantt's state legislative allies. Neither Gantt nor Price expected a win in a landslide; Price instead concentrated on mobilizing core Democratic turnout, and on giving one of the comeback stories of North Carolina politics, now-Congressman David Funderburk, an heir to the remains of the Helms machine, enough ideological rope to hang himself with comfortable suburbanites who didn't want to identify themselves with bigotry. In that moment it was a success. And as governor Price was true to his word and to himself, taking in many ways more overtly liberal positions than Gantt did, dressed up less in outreach to private interests and calls to bring people together in common prosperity. There were still terrible inequalities of income, race, and sex in the state and Price decided he had been handed the opportunity to tackle them. This was not always easy, and it became nigh impossible with Republican control of the state legislature after midterms. But price fought on. Some measures, particularly in rural poverty relief and equitable funding for historically black colleges in the UNC system, showed surprising success. But many others became targets of right-wing advertising, and Price's consistent veto battles with the budgets set by the Republican-controlled lege towards the end of his term took a toll on his strength but endeared him to liberals. Out of that came one agreement developing a permanent funding line for North Carolina Public Broadcasting; a small thing against abortion restrictions and structural racism but still a candle lit. Perhaps Price's greatest quality was his almost serene ability to get on with the job, unafraid of his electoral fortunes. That was just as well...
Gov. Daniel Forest 2013-
def. David Price 2012
To look at him, Dan Forest was every lesson drawn from the NCGOP's experience with Walter Jones Jr. made flesh and fully operational. Relatively young, handsome, son of Sue Myrick a NCGOP stalwart who had succeeded Gantt as mayor of Charlotte, a corporate success story in his own right, who could talk business and investment policy with intelligence and soft-pedal social conservatism with a smile, Forest put a vibrant, young, forward-looking face on what was essentially, in demographic terms, pure backlash by the aging, conservative eastern and west-central portions of the state against the cities and minorities, bringing along enough affluent suburban voters who wanted a market turned loose to flourish to seal the deal. Forest did indeed clash with the cultural right of his party, not over end goals, but over how fast and openly they could move against the cultural liberalism of Charlotte and the Triangle, but provided enough business opportunities, tax cuts, and development incentives for finance, energy, and agriculture to soothe tempers. A surprisingly deft manager of legislators, Forest was able successfully to set policy from the governor's mansion again in ways no Republican had since Jim Gardner, perhaps since John East. He also knew how to talk to suburban North Carolinians, offering a language of opportunity and rising fortunes to justify legislative backsheesh and deregulation. Whether Forest's formulas would see the state into greater prosperity, whether he would successfully be able to take the turn towards voter suppression tactics and gerrymandering demanded by his party's right, and whether that would all pass muster with the voters, remained to be seen. But Forest was smart, ambitious, and buoyed by his own success to give it a try....
ETA: On a personal note, the first political rally I ever attended as a knowing and attentive participant (Mom had taken me to a couple of Mo Udall rallies in Ohio in '76 as preschooler) was during Jim Hunt's OTL campaign against Helms in '84. My mother was actually hired to replace John East on the faculty of his old school when he won his Senate seat; the department was on the ground floor and his old office was by one of the exit doors for the sake of his wheelchair in pre-ADA days. Later, when he decided to retire after one Senate term, during the summer of '86 my dad (as a university administrator) and the chair of Mom's department met with East in a Greenville restaurant to discuss an emeritus position after he left the Senate. He concluded the meeting, then went home and did exactly as described here minus the inattentive bodyguards; besides his more obviously physical ailments East had fought a lifelong battle with near-crippling major depression that made that outcome likelier "when" not "if" -- indeed a bolder POD would be him actually mastering his suicidation and carrying on because that was a less likely outcome. It was summer vacation, and I still remember my mother getting the call (we were visiting family in Florida at the time, she and I) and my father saying the police reckoned he and the dept. chair were the last non-family members to see East alive.
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