In his terse, clipped way, Bert Bennett once summed up perfectly why we’re Democrats and why he helped elect Terry Sanford and Jim Hunt:

“Sanford and Hunt had the right attitude: human dignity, based on ethics and work and not color or background or money.”

Rob Christensen’s N&O profile today caught the essence of Bert, who died Monday at 97. Rob wrote that for 40 years Bert “was North Carolina’s most important Democratic Party power broker, helping shape the state’s reputation for moderation.”

Bert was a tough businessman from Winston-Salem’s upper crust. That formula didn’t produce a lot of liberals back in the 60s, 70s and 80s. But Bert had strong feelings about race. He had eight children, and he saw race through a father’s eyes:

“How would you like to be a parent going down the road, and your child had to go to the bathroom, but you couldn’t go to the bathroom? It was just hard to believe what you’d see. The lynchings, the attitude, what they (African-Americans) were called. Well, that wasn’t my nature. I just had Democratic principles.”

Bert helped give North Carolina Governors Sanford and Hunt, and almost Preyer. He helped give America President Kennedy, and almost Humphrey instead of Nixon.

As Bert would say, it was a hell of a gift.