You have to credit Raleigh attorney Gene Boyce with the virtue of stick-to-itiveness.

Eight years ago Boyce’s son, Dan, ran for Attorney General against Roy Cooper.

If I remember the facts correctly, during the campaign Cooper ran an ad attacking Dan Boyce (and his father) for their handling of a lawsuit on behalf of state retirees. After the election, Boyce sued Cooper for defamation and, apparently having gotten the facts wrong, Cooper’s lawyers have been dragging the case out ever since – for eight years. But Gene Boyce hasn’t given up.

Now, I’m not sure Boyce can win – under the First Amendment the courts give politicians pretty broad leeway when it comes to lying in their campaigns – so, in the end, even if Cooper’s defense comes down to arguing, Well, what I said wasn’t true but under the Constitution lying about a political opponent is no crime – a judge may agree.

But is Roy Cooper going to want to stand up in court and admit he misled people in a political ad – say, while he’s running for Senate against Richard Burr next year? If Cooper does run he may wish he’d settled the suit years ago – and Gene Boyce’s doggedness may pay off in a way he never imagined.

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I can’t defend Governor Easley’s comments about the N&O not being “nice” to him – and accusing the paper of a “hatchet job.”

In a recent term-ending interview, the Governor said he often avoids public events because he likes to have time to think things out. He should have thought this out better. He sounded small and petulant. I don’t know him well, but I never thought he was small or petulant.

Easley and Seth Effron said the N&O should have noted that the number of probationers who killed dropped 25 percent from the Hunt administration. They may have a good point. Why didn’t they make it before now?

Now that I’m done giving the Governor PR advice, I’ll give some to John Drescher, the N&O’s executive editor.

Drescher might have been better advised to defend the series with the-facts-speak-for-themselves terseness that Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post used during Watergate: “We stand by our story.”

Instead, Drescher said:

"Gov. Easley might be the only person in North Carolina who thinks our probation system is working well and that the state is monitoring probationers as it should. The correction secretary himself has acknowledged the state needs to do a better job."

That sounds like something a politician would say. It makes the argument sound personal and reinforces Easley’s criticism.

Drescher should have stuck by this statement:

"Our job is to dig, and we're going to keep digging. We'll do that in a professional way."

Period, paragraph, end it. Enough said.

The N&O will keep digging during the Perdue Administration. One wonders: What will the Drescher-Perdue relationship be like next January 1?

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People have been dying in our state mental hospitals for lack of care; our parole system is so broken criminals on parole have murdered 580 people – and, now, Governor Easley says, at the end of his term, that it’s a shame the mean ole News and Observer hasn’t treated him ‘nicer.’

The governor puts it this way: “My job,” he says, “Is to be nice to other people and their job is to be nice to me. Just because they're not doing theirs, doesn't mean I shouldn't do mine.”

Alright, let’s grant Governor Easley a surplus of personal politeness and charm – but, that said, his definition of ‘niceness’ seems to have an odd twist. After all, is letting a mental patient die after sitting in a chair for two days without care – ‘nice’?

The governor also says it’s a shame that after 33 years of government service, with three weeks left until his retirement, the News and Observer did a ‘hatchet job’ on his State Correction Secretary, Theodis Beck. One almost feels the governor could have been describing himself. But if we’re gonna define success in governing based on a standard of niceness – well, was the governor and Secretary Beck losing track of thousands of paroles ‘nice’ – or negligent?

N&O editor John Drescher was pretty diplomatic in his response to the governor. He could have simply paraphrased Harry Truman and said, They say we give ‘em hell, but we’re just talking about their records and they think it’s hell.

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The smoke’s clearing from the election and the voter statistics tell a simple straightforward story: Four years ago African-Americans were 19% of the voters – this year they were 25%.

Obama’s campaign said it was going to turn out 250,000 new African-American voters – and darn near did it. Thanks to Obama’s relentless ‘ground game’ this election, for the first time, African-American turnout (at 74%) was higher than ‘white’ turnout (at 69%).

The result: Before the election polls (projecting a slight increase in turnout among African-Americans) showed Obama needed 38% of the so-called ‘white vote’ to win. He successfully increased Black turnout to 25%, which meant he only needed 33% of the ‘white vote’ – he got just a smidgen more and won.

The bottom line: Obama won the old-fashioned way. He got his voters to the polls.

Where does this leave Republicans? I recently had an email from a Republican elected official who asked: Will Black turnout be this high again in 2010? Who knows. But in politics always assume the worst.

The Democrats have (or will have shortly, from the Board of Elections) the name of every African-American who voted in 2008. They’ll even know who voted the first time. And, with Obama in the White House, it stands to reason these new voters aren’t going to suddenly lose their interest in politics. It also stands to reason Democrats are smart enough to do everything (and more) in 2010 to turn out African-Americans – that Obama did in 2008.

To win in 2010 Republicans need a strategy that recognizes that 75% of the African-Americans are going to vote next election – just as they did in the last election.

If we assume otherwise we’re acting like ostriches – and sticking our heads in the sand.

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Carter’s recent post about Obama and Afghanistan reminded me of the remark that earned Bob Dole his hatchet-man reputation. In his 1976 vice presidential debate with Walter Mondale, Dole referred to the casualties America had suffered in “Democrat wars” in the 20^th Century.

As with most controversial remarks, there was truth to what Dole said. World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam all began under Democratic presidents. The only “Republican Wars” were the two Gulf Oil Wars begun by the two Bushes.

Child of Vietnam that I am, I worry that Afghanistan will turn into The Best and the Brightest Part II.

Obama has pledged to send more troops to Afghanistan. Was that a campaign ploy to show he wasn’t too soft? Like LBJ not wanting to be the first American president to lose a war, will the fear of looking soft lead to another losing war?

I had lunch not long ago with David Zucchino, a former N&O reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on South Africa. He’s been a foreign correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times. (“I now work for a bankrupt paper,” he notes.)

Zucchino is based here, but he spends months at a time covering Iraq and Afghanistan. He was embedded in the military spearhead that liberated Baghdad.

He points out a big difference between Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq is now relatively safe, but Afghanistan is wild and lawless. And that is the history of both countries. Iraq had a strong central government, albeit Saddam’s dictatorship. Afghanistan has for years been a roiling series of tribal wars and invasions with no central government.

Does Obama think he can change that with 20,000 more American troops? Is our mission to tame Afghanistan – or simply to cripple Al Qaeda? I’m no foreign policy expert, but I can read history. I hope Vietnam isn’t repeating itself.

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Don’t those words have a startling ring – after all, Democrats loathe wars (and instead, at least, these days in Congress, seem to have fallen in love with bailing out Wall Street billionaires).

But, now, the Democrats have a war of their own – and they’ll own it lock, stock and barrel the moment Obama lifts his hand and takes the oath of office.

I’m not talking about Iraq – but Afghanistan. Because whatever happens in Iraq, Obama has pledged to stand and fight in Afghanistan – and the peace wing of the Democratic Party might ought to have paid closer attention.

Because things in Afghanistan don’t look too good. Right now.

For instance, Obama’s new Secretary of Defense (designee) just returned from Kandahar, promising he’d rush 20,000 more troops to Kabul before any Taliban spring offensive – which will bring the number of American soldiers in Afghanistan to 54,000.

Is Secretary Gates speaking for his old boss – George W. Bush – or his new boss – Barack Obama? Or both?

How far are we from victory? Opium production is higher than ever, the Taliban is stronger than it has been since 2001, air strikes have killed so many civilians even our puppet president – Hamid Karzai – is condemning us and in one week hauling supplies over the Kiber Pass we lost hundreds of trucks.

Obama’s Secretary of Defense to be says victory means a “sustained commitment for some protracted period of time” – then in the next breath compares Afghanistan to the Cold War, which lasted 45 years. Our generalissimo in Afghanistan, David McKiernon, is a little more optimistic. He says it will take – minimum – three or four years to get the Afghan army up to snuff so it can go toe-to-toe with the Taliban.

How will Obama sell that to the antiwar Democrats whose tolerance for fighting any war that lasts longer than a Super Bowl party is non-existent?

If General McKiernon is right we’re still going to be fighting in Afghanistan about the time Obama runs for reelection. Who’d have expected that?

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A group of my friends have been having a more or less ongoing debate between ‘Decliners’ and ‘Optimists.”

The ‘Decliners’ take one look at, for instance, the governor of Illinois and say, You see, look, one more proof virtue is kaput. The country’s headed downhill and there’s no turning back – the American Republic has more or less reached the state of the Roman, Spanish, British and French Empires in their twilight and the question is how long we stagger on until we become, say, the modern day equivalent of Sweden.

The ‘Optimists’ take the exact same view of our current state but steadfastly see a light at the end of the tunnel: To them the nation’s virtue, while in retreat, is still intact and rebirth is imminent.

Of course, since this is essentially a debate among Republican males no one is inclined to see Obama as representing any sort of source of hope;—we see our own, Republican, politicians as little better than snake oil salesmen so you can imagine how we see Obama.

Now I’ve been favoring the Optimists but trying to keep an open mind to the proposition the world is ending and the other night I saw something on TV that said loud and clear the ‘Decliners’ may be right: A promo for a new reality show.

To entertain the American masses Hollywood is putting three hunky bachelors (who look like they may have been ballroom dancing instructors on Dancing with the Stars) and thirty-six babes (who look like they may have been playboy pinups) in a chateau – it’s a seraglio with thirty-six geishas and three caliphs and as the cameras roll they’re going to let nature take its course – the promo ended with a guy and doll in a steamy hot tub blissfully clinking Champaign glasses.

But that’s not what’s shocking.

What’s shocking is the very last scene of the promo – these entertainment wizards have put the girls’ mothers (the hunks’ prospective mothers-in-law) in the castle with them and the last scene shows a prospective mother-in-law who looks like she may be related to Dick Butkins marching grim-faced toward the hot tub, dropping her towel as her daughter is luxuriating with the hunk of the day.

Think of it: A harem of nubile females, a trio of lusting males and a battalion of harridans (mothers-in-law) locked up in a castle to entertain three hundred million Americans – which, I guess, is our modern day equivalent of Nero’s feeding people to the lions to entertain the Roman masses.

We’ve come a long way since All in the Family, just thirty years ago. And, oh, yes, the next promo I saw was for a program called Wife Swap.

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Well, the parole system is broken and according to the News and Observer all kinds of parolees have been running around unsupervised and literally killing people – so which political party is howling bloody murder and up in arms to solve the problem?

The Democrats.

Senate Leader Marc Basnight, it turns out, is about the only major elected official who’s lifted a finger to do anything.

After reading yesterday’s newspaper, I called a state legislator and asked, How did the Department of Crime Control get in this mess? He said, Well, the problem is that, basically, the people running the Department are all chosen for politics.

In other words, they get their jobs because of politics. They’re holding a political sinecure – not a real job. And it’s the politics that matter – not their performance. If the system’s broken, so what – it’s not their efficiency at keeping track of dangerous parolees that determines their continued employment; it’s their adroitness at politics.

Until, to their surprise, the News and Observer put them on the front page of the newspaper. Then they all started pointing fingers at their subordinates. So, where does the buck stop? Well, on the desk of our absentee-missing-in-action Governor Mike Easley.

Which leads to a troubling question – why are Democrats doing all the howling? Where are the Republicans? Why are they missing in action too?

We’re watching another government meltdown ultimately caused by the mistakes of a Democratic administration and legislature – so why aren’t Republican leaders holding them accountable – instead of talking about how building offshore drilling rigs are going to attract tourists?

As odd as it sounds when it comes to cleaning up the mess and getting dangerous parolees off the streets it’s not Republicans in the legislature who’re offering solutions – it’s Marc Basnight.

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Andy Jackson would roll over in his grave.

I just read Jon Meacham’s new biography, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. Meacham shows how Jackson saw himself not just as the executive head of government, but as the true voice of the people. He, not Congress, would chart the nation’s course.

What would Jackson make of this morning’s News & Observer, which reported state leaders’ reaction to revelations the probation system lost track of 14,000 criminals.

The lead quotes were from Marc Basnight. Coming in second was Governor-elect Perdue. Missing – again – was Governor Easley, who promised the N&O a phone call but didn’t dial in.

Maybe it was because Basnight’s quotes were pithier. He may not be a college graduate, but he knows how to express outrage: "a rotten performance." "They have failed all of North Carolina." "Who in the hell did that?"

The words North Carolinians want to hear from their elected leaders.

Perdue wasn’t nearly as colorful: "The whole system is in need of repair…. There is a disconnect that has to be fixed, and I'm going to fix it."

It could be that, after eight years of Easley’s laid-back style, the media looks first to the legislature as the center of action.

Will Perdue change that?

When Jim Hunt was governor, he was always the lead in the story. But, when he returned to the office in 1993, he faced a Democratic legislature that had become accustomed to being in charge with a veto-less Republican in the governor’s office.

Like Jackson, Hunt saw his role as being the primary person who could speak for all North Carolinians.

On issues like probations reform, everybody will be pulling in the same direction. The real test comes when there is something unpopular to be done – like, say, raising taxes. Hunt had to take the lead in 1981 when he raised the gas tax. Easley, Basnight and Jim Black joined hands in 1993.

Bev Perdue is the first true creature of the legislature to be elected governor since Jim Holshouser in 1972. Being the first Republican governor since the Stone Age, he did not have a happy experience with the legislative branch of government.

What approach will Perdue take?

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After I read Gary’s blog yesterday I called and asked for a copy of the article where Rep. House Republican Leader Paul Stam declared offshore oil derricks would be tourist attractions; it turns out Gary gave a speech to a Chamber of Commerce group Stam also spoke to – so Gary heard it with his own ears.

So within days of his unanimous reelection as Republican leader, ‘Skip’ Stam has announced he favors building offshore oil derricks to attract tourists – what will Republicans come up with next? The party of Lincoln’s ‘soaring new birth of freedom’ and Reagan’s ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall’ has become the party advocating oil wells as tourist attractions.

Yesterday an elected official sat down in my office and said, You know, I’ve been a Republican thirty years but I’ve got to admit I’m pretty discouraged about the state of my own party. I’m sure Skip meant well and, in all likelihood, just slipped and got his lips moving before his brain clicked into gear – which we’ve all done.

Democrats are riding pretty high these days with Obama filling his cabinet with a Team of Rivals – maybe he ought to consider Skip for his press spokesperson.

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