She wanted to be governor

You may not remember Ruby Hooper, but a generation ago the Burke County Republican aimed to become the first woman to be governor of North Caorlina.
Democrat Bev Perdue, the state’s first woman to be lieutenant governor, is hoping to finally do in 2008 what Hooper hoped to do in the 1984 election.
Hooper picked a hard year to run – in the '84 GOP primary against then-U.S. Rep. Jim Martin, the former Mecklenburg commissioner who would win the election and go on to serve two terms (1985-1993). She didn’t have a chance, but that didn’t seem to discourage her.
Ruby Hooper died recently at age 83 and the N&O had a good article on her place in North Carolina politics. Here’s a link.
Hooper’s campaigns for governor in 1984 and again in 1992 didn’t work out, but Martin hired her as a deputy secretary of administration during his two terms. I remember her days in office. She always had a positive thought, which may be one reason why after her final political campaign, she was chosen as “North Carolina State Mother” by a group called American Mothers, according to a 1993 report by my colleague Jim Morrill.
And Greg Trevor, a former Observer reporter, wrote about Hooper during her 1992 campaign against Jim Gardner for the Republican nomination that year.
She was running pretty much a one-woman campaign, but she would have agreed with Gov. Mike Easley on the lottery. “From what I`ve heard, the people want the right to vote on that. And if they decided a lottery`s what they want, I would propose that the funds that are generated be designated for education.``
She also told Trevor that after 16 years of Gov. Jim Hunt and Gov. Jim Martin, the state needed a change: “Some people say we`ve had too many Jims as governor. We need a gem - a Ruby.”`

Leslie Winner: growing up in segregated South

Former Charlotte lawyer and state senator Leslie Winner joins the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation as executive director in January, taking one of the most influential public policy jobs in the state. The foundation, which works exclusively within North Carolina, unlike many other institutions with a broader scope, has had an enormous impact on state policy here – public policy as well as that of private non-profit agencies, educational institutions and community initiatives. It’s a good bet the foundation will build on that record with Winner’s leadership.
She has a finely tuned sense of right and wrong, shaped by the discrimination she saw around her while growing up in the South.
Mary Giunca of the Winston-Salem Journal had an interesting piece on Winner and the influences that shaped her thinking in today’s paper. Read it here.

Capital concerns: growth, parks

Tuesday’s election in Wake County showed a couple of interesting things in a fast-growing area that’s the state’s second-largest county and contains the state’s second-largest city, the state Capital. Voters in Raleigh and Cary municipal elections generally backed candidates seeking more controls on growth and, in the case of Raleigh, higher impact fees from developers.
This is particularly interesting because the issue really wasn’t whether to increase impact fees to help pay for growth-related services. The Raleigh city council had already approved 72 percent higher impact fees, but not as high an increase as many believe are needed to cope with the dramatic increase in population and an accompanying demand for more schools and other essential services.
What also struck me as particularly interesting was the fate of four bond issues totaling $275 million: All four passed. Wake voters approved three bond issues totaling $187 million for Wake Tech, the county library system and the purchase of open space by roughly 70 percent; and voters in the city of Raleigh approved an $89 million parks bond issue by 72 percent. This is significant because many folks thought Wake County voters would be fed up with more bond issues after approving a $970 million school bonds issue in 2006. Evidently voters want the county to keep on making improvements.
This is generalizing, but it seems to fit neatly with the observation by political analyst John Davis of the pro-business organization N.C. FREE and others that the influx of newcomers to this area, even though many of them are registered Republicans, support and expect good schools, good parks and other services because that’s what they were used to in areas of the Northeast and Midwest where they resided before moving here.
A final note: turnout wasn’t good: 10.8 percent, according to the Wake County Board of Elections.

Do real political issues count for much anymore?

Opposition research has been a vital part of many political campaigns since the crust of the earth hardened. It involves an investigation of the opponent’s record – public and political as well as personal and private – and the careful distribution of the results during the campaign to discredit an opponent. Sometimes it’s ugly work, because it means digging up unsavory stuff to make the other person look bad – and by contrast, make your own candidate look better. It’s not about to go away.
And it is, of course, the sort of thing that news reporters thrive on: finding out stuff, sorting through it and putting it in the paper, on the air and in the Ethernet. That’s what we’re about. Sometimes it's little stuff. Sometimes it's big.
That’s one reason we’re hearing a lot about the public records of Democratic gubernatorial candidates Beverly Perdue, the state’s lieutenant governor, and her main opponent, Richard Moore, the state treasurer. They’re both forward-looking Democrats with an interest in education, health care and economic development, among other things. They probably agree on quite a lot.
But their staffs are not fond of one another – or at least the way they’re going about digging up whatever dirt they can find on one another. The Moore campaign has been merrily pointing out some imprecisions in Perdue’s resume in the past, though the Moore campaign attaches more importance to it than I expect most voters would. And the Perdue campaign has fired back a few shots at Moore for, among other things, an arcane vote on the highway trust fund.
In Sunday’s column I wrote, “This kind of push and shove makes their campaigns seem preoccupied with pointing out each other’s flaws, as if the public were mostly interested in unwavering devotion to rigid consistency rather than figuring out what’s best for the public interest and pushing new ideas.”
I think it also makes folks tired of politics sooner than they ought to be. But by some perverse law of political thermodynamics, resume errors and old voting records often get more heat-and-light coverage than serious issues. Ask Bob Orr, the former Supreme Court associate justice who’s running for the Republican nomination for governor. He unveiled a substantive proposal for stopping the increasingly costly arms race on economic incentives for landing new plants the other day, and after a brief round of news reports, the issue faded a bit.
Is the message the media send that real issues don’t count for much?

Wake County gets law school again

The big news in Raleigh today is Campbell University’s announcement that it is moving its school of law to Raleigh. The university’s Norman A. Wiggins School of Law will move from the Campbell campus at Buies Creek in Harnett County to a brick building in downtown Raleigh on Hillsborough Street just a couple blocks west of the Capitol.
It’s a coup for Raleigh, of course, but it’s also a big story for Wake County. The move returns a law school to Wake County for the first time in more than half a century. The old Wake Forest College School of Law in Wake Forest, N.C. moved to Winston-Salem in 1956 when the college packed up and took up quarters on a beautiful new campus in Forsyth County, thanks to a generous offer from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.
There’s some symmetry to this current move: Norman Wiggins, for whom the Campbell law school is named, graduated from Campbell College when it was a two-year school, then earned his bachelor’s degree at Wake Forest College and a law degree from its law school – when the college was still in Wake Forest.
After earning a master’s degree and doctorate in law at Columbia, Wiggins returned as a law professor and general counsel at the new Wake Forest campus in Winston-Salem. In 1967 he became president of Campbell College, driving its growth, its name change to a university and creation of the law school, which was named for him in 1977. Wiggins died this summer, but discussions about a move to Raleigh had long been underway. Perhaps it’s appropriate that the name Norman Wiggins has accompanied the planned move of a law school to Wake County where Wiggins first got his legal training.

Speaker Liston Ramsey a hero? Probably not

Liston Ramsey a hero?
State Treasurer Richard Moore has proposed the N.C. Democratic Party change the name of its annual fall dinner held in Asheville, after Republicans raised questions about a racist connotation in the annual “Vance Aycock Dinner.”
He proposes instead such party “heroes” as Charlotte architect Harvey Gantt, former speaker pro tem Marie Colton of Asheville and the late N.C. Speaker of the House Liston Ramsey. Gantt and Colton certainly would be excellent candidates for honors.
I’m not sure what Moore was thinking, but he might get a quibble about Ramsey, whose lieutenants maintained ironclad control of the House and perfected the discredited supersub system of the 1980s. They ran a rigid pork-barrel system that so disturbed both Democrats and Republicans that a coalition threw him out of office in 1989 and installed Democrat Josephus Mavretic in his place.
While Ramsey was well-regarded by many of his loyal allies, I don’t think Moore can make the argument that he’s the logical choice to replace either Aycock or Vance as the name of a big to-do.
He might have been better off suggesting other western North Carolinians, say, the late state Sen. Herbert Hyde, who claimed some Cherokee heritage, or the late U.S. Sen. Sam Ervin, whose investigation of President Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection committee unraveled the Watergate affair and led to Nixon’s resignation. But Ervin might meet opposition as well, because he strongly opposed some civil rights legislation and efforts to remove racial barriers earlier in his U.S. Senate career. The late state Sen. Jim Richardson of Charlotte would be another good choice.
It’s complicated, of course. Gov. Charles B. Aycock was a leader in the White Supremacy movement at the turn of the last century and helped whip up fervor for the bloody coup that turned out a legally elected government of Republicans and black people in Wilmington in 1898. He later was responsible for the universal education movement that provided formal schooling for black citizens.
A group of Republicans calling themselves the Carolina Stompers raised the question about changing the name of the Vance Aycock Dinner, but after Moore called for the name change, the Stompers dropped plans to protest at the dinner and said they’d refocus on correcting the history books.
Zebulon Vance was a Civil War governor who would have prolonged slavery if his efforts had led to a Confederate victory. There have been no complaints I’m aware of about his name, but if there are arguments to get rid of Aycock’s name, then arguments to get rid of Vance can’t be far behind.
Addendum: Former Supreme Court Associate Justice Bob Orr, a Republican running for governor, sent along a suggestion. While he wasn't trying to help out Democrats, "why not Henry Frye and Susie Sharpe The Sharpe/Frye dinner), both were hugely important to the process of opening up opportunities and while they are jurists, it’s still a great way to honor a couple of special people."

The book on Southern food

The book on Southern food
We professional Southerners are apt to applaud when folks who write about the South get things right. The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, co-edited by Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris in 1989, was a monumental work about the South – and a monument by weight. You’ll get a hernia if you tote one around for long.
The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture,like the original published by UNC Press, takes a different form – individual volumes devoted to single topics -- religion, geography, history and so on. The seventh in the series has just come out: Foodways, and its writing include several pieces by the Observer’s food writer, Kathleen Purvis, in my book one of the best in the business. She writes on funeral food and Carolinas barbecue. Talk about culture!
These are the kinds of books you can pick up and read all you need to know about a topic in just a couple minutes. The entry on moonshining was especially informative – with a short tangent about the proof of moonshine (“Proof originally denoted a spirit’s ability to dampen gunpowder yet sustain a flame.” I didn’t know that).
It also knotes that moonshine’s reputation for quality “suffered a ruinous decline during the national prohibition against alcohol (1920-33) when artisan distillers putting out small-batch spirits for steady local markets were displaced by novice opportunist distillers making bad hooch, by scurrilous bootleggers selling outright poison, and, finally, by interstate whisky syndicates that introduced sugar as a major ingredient to cash in on a sustained liquor-guzzling frenzy.”
Whew! My head is spinning already.
I also liked the section on deviled eggs and the need of every Southern woman to have a supply of deviled egg plates (I think my sister had eight or nine of them at one time).
And I appreciated the mention in the section on pimento cheese of the Mouli grater. It noted that modern pimento cheese makers probably use a food processor or a fork to blend their cheese, but not in our household. My wife makes the world’s best pimento cheese – absolutely the best – and it starts with sharp cheddar run through the handheld Mouli grater.
Sure, you can grate it in a food processor or mash it with a fork, but that risks bruising the cheese. Wouldn’t want that to happen, now would we?