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…

Governor Perdue had the makings of a great speech last night. But she didn’t give it. When she finished, it felt like the old song: Is that all there is? I had predicted she would paint a broad picture rather than fill in details. But she certainly took that approach to the extreme. The platitude…

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…