“Is HB2 the worst self-inflicted wound in the history of North Carolina politics?”

That’s what a young whippersnapper asked at breakfast the other day. (When you’re my age, you get a lot of questions about history.)

I couldn’t think of a worse one.

Terry Sanford’s food tax? It hurt him politically, but Sanford didn’t push for the food tax because he thought it was popular. He knew it wasn’t popular, but he thought it was right.

Republicans thought HB2 would be popular.

Oops.

The Speaker Ban Law, maybe. But nobody lost an election over it, as best I recall. The ban was repealed because it was hurting North Carolina.

HB2 is doing worse damage to North Carolina, and that’s why it’s doing so much political damage to Governor McCrory and the legislators who supported it, especially those who are beating a hasty retreat weeks before the election.

Suddenly, they want to “stop playing politics.” After playing politics with the issue since April.

They say they want to “revisit” HB2 and “replace” it with something “just about bathrooms.”

No. They just need to get out of the bathrooms. There is no problem that needs solving here. It’s illegal now for men to go into a women’s bathroom (or men’s, for that matter) and peep or harass or molest or assault somebody.

HB2 was about politics from the beginning. Republicans thought they could gin up a wedge issue. They did. But they got caught on the wrong side of the wedge.

They thought they could use a vulnerable group of people as a political target. It backfired.