“Hunt criticized the Democratic controlled General Assembly for raising taxes in 1991 during the recession, saying the budgetary shortfall was ‘sheer government mismanagement.’”[i] Rob Christensen, News & Observer, The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics Twenty-five years ago, in Washington DC, U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, a North Carolina Republican, was beginning his third term in the
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“Hunt criticized the Democratic controlled General Assembly for raising taxes in 1991 during the recession, saying the budgetary shortfall was ‘sheer government mismanagement.’”[i] Rob Christensen, News & Observer, The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics
Twenty-five years ago, in Washington DC, U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, a North Carolina Republican, was beginning his third term in the world’s greatest deliberative body.
In Raleigh, former two-term Governor Jim Hunt, a Democrat, was returning to the practice of law. He had lost to Helms in the 1984 epic battle of political titans in the US Senate race. Hunt was all washed up; a mere single-entry footnote in the annals of state political history. Wrong.
Jim Hunt, today’s patriarch of the North Carolina Democratic Party, went on to serve a third and fourth term as Governor, a first since 1776. He achieved an extraordinary and unprecedented list of accomplishments … not the least of which was the exalted partisan political triumph of becoming the state Republican Party’s worst nightmare of the past two-and-a-half decades.
As News & Observer political writer Rob Christensen pointed out in his book, The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics, “Hunt kept the Democratic Party from going under during a Republican tide by his political skills, ideological nimbleness, and the fact that he never stopped working.”[ii]
Jim Hunt has become the Michael Jordan, the David Thompson, and the Christian Laettner of modern-day North Carolina politics … that player that is simply better than everyone else on the court. You know the one … the one with the most wins.
This report examines the teachable personal qualities of Jim Hunt, such as “ideological nimbleness” and work ethic, along with the political skills that have made Jim Hunt the extraordinary winner that he has become. What if Hunt had gone to Washington DC in 1985 and Helms had stayed in North Carolina? Is there a Republican Jim Hunt?
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There was a drowning man, 50 feet from shore. A 50 foot rope lay on the beach. A Republican came along and seeing the man struggling threw him 25 feet of rope and said, “If you’ll swim half way I’ll pull you on in.” A Democrat came along and seeing the man struggling threw him
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There was a drowning man, 50 feet from shore. A 50 foot rope lay on the beach. A Republican came along and seeing the man struggling threw him 25 feet of rope and said, “If you’ll swim half way I’ll pull you on in.” A Democrat came along and seeing the man struggling threw him 50 feet of rope, then dropped the rope and went off to do another good deed. The man drowned.
As we begin the 2010 election year, all indicators are pointing favorably towards Republicans. We saw in Virginia and New Jersey last year that President Obama’s base is a mile wide and an inch deep. They didn’t vote. Obama’s liberal notions are beginning to raise doubts about his leadership in a nation where 8 out of 10 voters are either conservative or moderate.1 In our state, Democrats are rocked by scandal, a budget crisis and the fall of the Basnight/Rand Empire.
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