Here’s an unusual political twist: Ten weeks before the Democratic primary the North Carolina State Employees Association, a politically powerful, mostly-Democratic group spent $30,000 on a newspaper ads attacking State Treasurer Richard Moore – a Democratic candidate for Governor.

SEANC has a bone to pick with Treasurer Moore – who manages their $75 billion pension fund. They say he won’t let them ‘see the books’ – which, by the way, are public records. And they’ve become so aggravated they’ve sued him.

Moore didn’t take all this lying down. He didn’t say much about the lawsuit. But he’s said plenty about the ads. In fact he opened his State Treasurers check-book and wrote a check – at taxpayers expense – to pay for his own ads. (As a result SEANC’s out $30,000, taxpayers are probably out an equivalent $30,000, and Moore’s campaign for Governor is out $0).

In Moore’s ad he quotes the Attorney General’s office as saying – at least as far as the lawsuit goes – he’s innocent as a lamb. Which sounds fine until you consider this is the same Attorney General who obliged Governor Easley by creating a loophole in ethics laws so the Governor’s appointees to the Board of Transportation don’t have to report how much they raised for his campaign.

Beyond proclaiming his innocence Moore seems to be saying this about the lawsuit:

SEANC is so dumb it’s gotten what it wants and doesn’t know it.

Now, let’s go out on a limb and speculate SEANC is not dumb as Moore infers.

So, is the only purpose of the lawsuit to help elect Moore’s opponent Beverly Perdue? That could be. But, on the other hand, if SEANC wants to elect Lt. Governor Perdue surely it could find better ways to help her get votes than by paying lawyers to file a lawsuit virtually no one ever heard of or read.

So, what is it the SEANC really after?

One of the other candidates for State Treasurer speculated that it may have to do with the collapse of the sub-prime lending market. The candidate’s theory went like this:

After Moore convinced the legislature to let him invest pension funds in riskier instruments like hedge funds, the sub-prime market collapsed and Moore’s investments tanked. The State Treasurer may be sitting on a lot of losses.

That explanation fits one piece of the puzzle. Normally, you’d think the last thing Moore would want before an election is to be sued. But he might prefer a lawsuit to having voters know he’s lost several hundred million dollars.

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