Towerview: Goodbye, Governor

At the outset of his third campaign for North Carolina's highest seat, Jim Hunt liked to show off the bull called "Governor" on his Tarheel Double H cattle ranch.

In January, Hunt leaves the Executive Mansion. And for a bull, not to mention a long-time governor, "private citizen" just doesn't have the same ring.

Hunt has served four terms as governor of North Carolina, eight years longer than anyone who came before. He is known as the state's chief workaholic, the pressure advocator of the issues near and dear to him, and the modern bulwark of North Carolina's state politics.

"I think he's changed the attitudes of North Carolinians," said Phil Kirk, the governor's chair of the State Board of Education and the president of North Carolina Citizens for Business and Industry. "We used to be content to be a leader among the Southern states. [Hunt] has focused on us being a leader in the country."

That Jim Hunt has navigated the political tides of North Carolina successfully is nearly indisputable. He has established such a reputation that a straight news article in The News and Observer of Raleigh proclaimed last spring, "In essence, Hunt has made his agenda the state's agenda and charted a course for years to come after his departure."

Hunt has built the popularity that has fueled his dynastic rule with measures of political acuity, persuasive power and hard work. "He's very intense and he has surrounded himself with people who are good and savvy," explained Thad Beyle, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "He's a good politician who's developed a good machine around him."

He has also managed to center himself in the state's political spectrum. Ted Arrington, a political science professor at UNC-Charlotte pointed to a famous cartoon that illustrates Hunt's balancing act. The first frame shows Hunt, massive white pompadour parted on the right, saying "Some of my friends say we need help in private schools." In the second, hair parted on the left, the governor says, "Some of my friends say we need help in public schools." Lastly, with his hair parted down the middle, he says, "I agree with my friends."

"That's Jim Hunt," said Arrington. "He agrees with his friends, and he has friends on the left and the right and the middle."

Still today, a majority of the state's most powerful officials-including the lieutenant governor, the attorney general and the secretary of labor-are independently elected, not appointed. And when Hunt entered the office in 1977 for the first time, North Carolina was the only state in the nation that did not empower its governor with the veto; nor did it allow the governor to hold consecutive terms. Hunt lobbied hard to change that. He first gained passage of a constitutional amendment that allowed him, in 1980, to succeed himself in a second term. In 1996, almost 20 years after he outlined it as a priority, he snagged legislative veto-a power he has yet to use.

In his first eight years of office, Hunt made a name for himself as a diligent progressive, especially on education issues. At his initiative, the state established the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics in Durham and the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina in Research Triangle Park, began competency and achievement testing for students and put teachers' aides in elementary school classrooms.

Upholding the Democrats

In 1984, Hunt entered battle with the opposing knight of Tar Heel politics when he ran for the U.S. Senate seat of Republican Jesse Helms, who engaged Hunt in a nasty 18-month TV ad war. At that halfway point of the Reagan years, Hunt lost the bitterly fought campaign.

But if Jim Hunt has altered North Carolina's political landscape in a single most important way, he has upheld the Democratic party in a southeast region that has been trending Republican as early as the '60s, said Arrington. "Like Clinton did in Arkansas and Reuben Askew in Florida, the governor kept the Democratic party from falling through the cracks."

Dan Gurley, political director for North Carolina's Republican party, echoed this observation: "I think the governor may very well have been the savior of the Democratic party in North Carolina."

'A little more conservative'

After his Senate defeat in '84, Hunt lay relatively low on the political radar, although he did help lead two national groups on education. Instead of living in the political limelight, he became the rainmaker for a Raleigh law firm, using the knowledge and connections he had accumulated as governor to counsel and lobby for industry mammoths like American Airlines, Mitsubishi Semiconductor America and Pepsico.

When Hunt left his lucrative stint in corporate law to try for an unprecedented third gubernatorial term, North Carolina industry chiefs, traditionally stock supporters of Republican candidates, allied themselves publicly and financially with Hunt, leaving Republican opponent Robin Hayes with a degraded financial base on which to run his doomed campaign.

Hunt's list of backers included a Who's Who of North Carolina's new economy: Robert Ingram of Glaxo Wellcome, Hugh McColl of NationsBank, John Medlin of Wachovia. "When Hunt came back in '92 and decided to run for governor, it was a definite low point for the GOP in the state," Gurley said.

Back in the governor's office in '93, Hunt was "more attuned to business and a little more conservative," said politics professor Beyle.

"I don't believe in what you'd call government approaches as much as I used to," Hunt told The Charlotte Observer at the time. "Being out in the private sector helped me realize what over-regulation and over-taxation can do."

One of Hunt's great talents as governor has been his ability to read the political writing on the wall-and then outdo his opponents in designing matching agendas.

Just following the conservative house cleaning of the state legislature in 1994, and before the newly Republican-dominated legislature had a chance to convene and discuss a central campaign promise, a $200 million reduction of the state's income tax, Hunt beat them to the punch-he proposed a tax cut twice as large.

The governor also advocated building prisons, streamlining the state's education reform program he had helped form years before, and dismantling the Department of Crime Control and Public Safety, an agency Hunt's aides had fought to save two years before.

Hunt's seeming political conversion caught the eye of The Charlotte Observer, which queried, "Gov. Newt?"

"It was hard sometimes for Republicans to campaign against some of the things he was advocating because essentially he stole Republican positions," Gurley lamented, pointing to the governor's income tax issue heist. "It makes it difficult to claim the credit as Republicans for originating the idea when you have someone like Jim Hunt taking them along."

Smart Start

On Jan. 9, 1993, the rainy day he was sworn into office for the third time, James B. Hunt Jr. made an inaugural speech devoted almost exclusively to one topic: leading "a crusade for the future of our children." The state must help children from troubled backgrounds in the first five years of life, he said.

Since then, the Smart Start program has been Hunt's baby, his brainchild and the centerpiece of his last eight years in office.

The idea, in all its glory, was this: Take the combined professional talent of social workers, church leaders, business executives, day-care operators and educators. In a private-public partnership, charge these local leaders with tailoring plans to improve the health and security of the youngest members in their own communities-those under the age of five.

Conservatives and some church groups rested their cross-hairs on the program, dismayed that tax dollars would be spent on private day-care centers and worried that it would be invasive to parents.

But in 1993, Hunt convinced the General Assembly to fund a 12-county, $20 million pilot program. After the legislative victory, Hunt took his Smart Start gospel to North Carolinians, singing it at town meetings, radio call-in shows and gatherings of businessmen throughout the state. He compared the launching of Smart Start with the creation of the University of North Carolina system 200 years ago. "This is historic," Hunt proclaimed. "There is no state in America doing what we are doing right now."

It is a testament to the governor's sales abilities that when the Republican revolution swept into Raleigh in 1995 and carried with it a mandate to reduce government, public support for expanding Smart Start was so strong at 82 percent that even three out of four Republicans backed its expansion.

Since 1993, Smart Start has grown to be fully funded in all 100 counties. In Durham, whose proposal was crafted with help from Duke and was rewarded $2.8 million-t