Frat Boy | Jim Hughes | Mike Easley: The Last of the Frat Boy Governors

Mike Easley: The Last of the Frat Boy Governors

By Jim Hughes

He wasn’t the kind to break down your door at three in the morning, wailing country songs at the top of his lungs. He wasn’t the kind to hurl beer bottles into the big stone wall in the back yard, or smash his bare fist through the basement windows showing off for his date at a combo party. Mike Easley might have belonged to a fraternity at Chapel Hill, but he was no frat boy hell-raiser.

Easley transferred to Carolina in the fall of 1970 after two years of junior college. He was, like most of the guys in the house back then, a son of Eastern North Carolina. His father owned a tobacco warehouse in Rocky Mount, NC, in the days when tobacco was king Down East. His mother came from a long line of Nash County farmers who happened to be one of the few Roman Catholic families in that part of the world.

He was, like the hero of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, so clearly one of us. He had that clean-cut Joe College look that was just starting to slide out of style. He seemed to come from an earlier era, when frat houses had housemothers and we all wore coats and ties to football games and Sunday dinners and we still believed in the Honor Code. He looked and dressed the part: Wrinkled khakis, crisp white cotton buttondowns, Bass Weejuns with no socks, the obligatory blue blazer. He was nice-looking in a kind of non-threatening way. During rush, we put him in front of the mantel beneath the big oil painting of Zebulon Baird Vance, who founded the chapter in 1846 and served as North Carolina’s Civil War governor, where the top rushees were funneled and only the most impressive brothers were permitted to stand.

Still in all, there was something of the outsider about him, secret and remote and ultimately unreachable, perhaps owing to his growing up Roman Catholic in a big family in that small overwhelmingly Protestant town. He was smart but didn’t flaunt it, and few of us knew back then he was severely dyslexic. He had a quick wit and a biting sense of humor. He was also a notorious tightwad. There is a famous story of a beach weekend in 1971 when he left Chapel Hill with five dollars in his pocket and came back three days later with 10.

His future seemed pre-destined: He’d go home to that little town, get a nice job at the bank, raise a family, play golf on the weekends at Benvenue Country Club, buy a beach house at Nags Head, and turn out the lights every night at 9:30 p.m. Instead, he became the best politician of his generation in North Carolina.

In 1982, just six years out of law school, he won his first election as district attorney for five southeastern counties and began making a name for himself as a tough drug-busting prosecutor. By the mid-1980s, he’d put himself on the Democratic Party radar. After the 1988 elections, he was a rising star.

It was Tony Rand who launched Easley’s political career, plucking him out of that bit role in the sticks and onto the main stage. Rand, a powerful state senator from Fayetteville, was in a heated battle for lieutenant governor that year and was getting killed on crime. He called in Easley to cut some TV commercials to validate his crime-fighting credentials. The young prosecutor turned out to be a natural on TV. Saul Shorr, the Philadelphia media guru and Rand’s chief strategist at the time, told insiders Easley had scored the highest positives he’d ever seen. Rand was buried in the GOP landslide, but Easley was off and running, with Shorr grafted permanently at the hip.

Suddenly, Easley was in a hurry. In 1990, perhaps a bit presumptuously, he made a play for his party’s nomination to challenge Jesse Helms for the US Senate. I remember he delivered one of the great lines in North Carolina politics: “People who vote for Jesse,” he said, “think the moon landing was fake and professional wrestling is real.” He lost a close primary to Harvey Gantt, Charlotte’s African-American mayor — the only election he ever lost. A less skillful politician might have called a runoff, but Easley was already playing long ball. He dropped out of the race, earning the everlasting gratitude and support of black leaders across the state and nation, a decisive advantage in future elections.

Easley made his move two years later, winning a statewide race for attorney general by a narrow margin, thanks largely to the coattails of Jim Hunt, who claimed his third term as governor after eight years on the sidelines. Easley was easily re-elected in 1996 and began eyeing his own run for governor in 2000, when Hunt could not run again under the state constitution. He knocked off Dennis Wicker in the Democratic primary, then beat Richard Vinroot handily in the general election.

In classical tragedy there is a moment the Greeks called peripeteia, a reversal of fortune, when the hero begins to fall from great heights. For Easley, that moment came not long after he took the oath of office in January 2001.

The Easley Administration was crippled from the start. Years of legislative overspending, coupled with a national recession caused by the dot-com blowup, had left a $600 million hole in the state budget. Whatever signature programs Easley had planned had to be severely curtailed or abandoned altogether. The governor seemed to lose interest. He had no stomach for the tiresome legislative quarrels over on Jones Street, nor any patience for the endless minutia of state government. And absolutely no use at all for the Capitol press corps, who had a nasty habit of comparing him, unfavorably, to his predecessor.

Admittedly, Hunt was a tough act to follow. He was perpetually in motion, always heading off on trade missions, convening conferences, creating study commissions, holding seminars, proposing legislation, launching initiatives. And he worked the press better than any governor before or since. Pound-for-pound, the Hunt Administration was the greatest press release machine to ever hit North Carolina. Tom Ellis, Hunt’s arch-nemesis and founder of the Congressional Club, once called him “the ribbon-cuttingest governor in North Carolina history.” In truth, Hunt was a great governor — probably the greatest of the 20th century — and Easley would have been hard-pressed to escape his shadow, even if he’d decided to work at it.

Evidently that was just a little too much to ask. Even in the early days of his administration, the adjective most often used to describe Easley was “disengaged.” I used to joke he was the only man in North Carolina who played more golf than I did. He was the anti-Hunt. He hated those meaningless pre-fabricated events and refused to attend the vast majority of them. You couldn’t get him to an economic development announcement if you baited the field with Jeff Foxworthy. Nobody would say it out loud, but a lot of times he’d be hiding out on the golf course or at his Southport retreat. Sometimes he’d just sit home alone in the mansion indulging his inner redneck watching King of the Hill reruns.

In the end, eight years of Easley went by without much getting done. The record is there for all to see. History gives no mulligans. The question now is will the current controversy tarnish his legacy? And you might ask: What legacy? Championing the lottery, wrecking race cars and accepting free memberships to exclusive golf clubs are no way to make the gubernatorial hall of fame.

And what of the current charges? Is he guilty of malfeasance or abuse of power? Or is he just the victim of a media witch hunt led by a dinosaur newspaper making one last stab at relevance? The courts and history will be the judge of that, but I’m still not convinced he did anything they can convict him of, unless an oversized sense of entitlement and a chronic indifference to the legislative process — not to mention a huge waste of potential — are now against the law.

What bothers me about Easley is how disappointing he turned out to be. We’ve had worse governors, but I don’t know any who accomplished less with more. He was a masterful politician, a cross between Kerr Scott and Luther Hodges, a Jim Hunt with more polish and a better hairstylist and haberdasher. He was blessed with a rare ability to connect with all types of people. I always said he had the potential to be one of the giants of North Carolina history, like the people he and I read about long ago in Hugh T. Lefler’s History 160 class at Chapel Hill. I think deep down he knows he blew it. A few months from now, after all this dies down, he’ll look out from his own private Pomfret Castle and wish he’d aimed higher and worked harder.

Easley used to tell people how much he hated campaigning, that he only got into politics to make a difference for the people of North Carolina. It turns out he was born to run, but not to lead. As it stands now, that is likely to be his political epitaph.