Posts by Carter Wrenn

Gary’s plenty kind to say back in 1984 the folks in Jesse’s campaign ‘were smarter’ than the folks in Hunt’s campaign but I suspect the better term is more experienced – by 1984 we’d been using direct mail to raise money for eight years and airing ‘negative ads’ for four years; Governor Hunt hadn’t but…

Three weeks before the election, driving to work, an ad came on the radio and I heard a woman’s voice say, Did you know Jesse Helms opposes abortion – even if a woman is raped – even in cases of incest? I thought, Oh, my God – because Hunt had just given about every woman…

I think I’ve only spoken to Jim Hunt once in my life – after the fourth debate. Jesse got better in each debate but a slip in the third debate set off a small powder keg: The head of the Veterans for Foreign Wars (VFW) had endorsed Hunt and it rankled Jesse. It got under…

The night after the debate Jesse figured there was no one to blame but himself but, by the next morning, he’d figured out that was wrong. He’d lost, he told me, because of the format (which, he added pointedly, was my and Tom Ellis’s doing). Then, having straightened out who was to blame he rolled…

After a year of reading all our research files on Jim Hunt and watching Hunt on TV I’d come to the conclusion Hunt was kind of political Caspar Milquetoast – a politician who always had his finger to the wind and changed with the breeze. Well, Hunt had his finger to the wind but at…

One thing is like fate in political campaigns: The unexpected always happens. It happened to us three days after we caught Hunt in the polls. Bob Windsor was an aardvark. He must have been a farmer – once – because he wore bibbed overalls like a farmer but he’d decided his real calling was newspaperman…

There comes a moment in a political campaign – if you’re fortunate – when for one moment the stars align and you can see with almost clairvoyant certainty exactly what the campaign is all about and how to win – that moment came for us in December of 1983: We knew Jesse’s campaign was about…

When you start a campaign 25 points behind but have a lot of money you start running ads early and we did – 20 months before the election. Now the folks who worked at the Congressional Club were ideologues. True believers. We saw the world in black and white. Us versus Them. Light versus Darkness.…