Hunt, Easley and Edwards
November 2, 2009 - by
Jack Betts wrote Sunday about the contrast between Mike Easley being grilled by the Board of Elections and Jim Hunt breaking ground for the new Hunt Library:
“It was hard not to draw comparisons between Hunt’s visionary rhetoric and Easley’s labored accounts about the past.”
What accounts for the difference? Why did Hunt end up being celebrated and Easley – and John Edwards, too – castigated?
I have a theory.
Hunt’s rise was far different from Easley’s and Edwards’s. Hunt worked his way up through campus politics, Young Democrats and the state Democratic Party. He organized college students for Terry Sanford in 1960 and Rich Preyer in 1964. He spent two years as national college director of the national Democratic Party under JFK. By the time he was elected governor in 1976, he had spent almost 10 years travelling across the state, meeting people face to face and building a statewide organization.
He earned people’s trust in a way Easley and Edwards never did.
Edwards had $6 million to spend putting himself on TV. And he was good on TV. So was Easley, and Easley had a way of getting his friends to do the dirty work like raising money. He avoided Hunt’s style of personal campaigning.
Easley and Edwards never had to pass the test of being sized up by a tag-team of Sanford
If Easley and Edwards had, they might have learned something. Or we might have learned something more about them.
Unfortunately, the politics of the future looks more like the politics of Easley and Edwards than the politics of Jim Hunt.
Posted in General, North Carolina - Democrats
Hunt, Easley and Edwards
November 2, 2009/
Jack Betts wrote Sunday about the contrast between Mike Easley being grilled by the Board of Elections and Jim Hunt breaking ground for the new Hunt Library:
“It was hard not to draw comparisons between Hunt’s visionary rhetoric and Easley’s labored accounts about the past.”
What accounts for the difference? Why did Hunt end up being celebrated and Easley – and John Edwards, too – castigated?
I have a theory.
Hunt’s rise was far different from Easley’s and Edwards’s. Hunt worked his way up through campus politics, Young Democrats and the state Democratic Party. He organized college students for Terry Sanford in 1960 and Rich Preyer in 1964. He spent two years as national college director of the national Democratic Party under JFK. By the time he was elected governor in 1976, he had spent almost 10 years travelling across the state, meeting people face to face and building a statewide organization.
He earned people’s trust in a way Easley and Edwards never did.
Edwards had $6 million to spend putting himself on TV. And he was good on TV. So was Easley, and Easley had a way of getting his friends to do the dirty work like raising money. He avoided Hunt’s style of personal campaigning.
Easley and Edwards never had to pass the test of being sized up by a tag-team of Sanford
If Easley and Edwards had, they might have learned something. Or we might have learned something more about them.
Unfortunately, the politics of the future looks more like the politics of Easley and Edwards than the politics of Jim Hunt.
Posted in General, North Carolina - Democrats