RALEIGH ó The one thing that Mike Easley always had working for him, and against him, was that he was a political outsider.
Being a former prosecutor without a keen understanding of the inner workings of the General Assembly and the state bureaucracy hurt Easley at times. It hurt him mustering support for legislation that he wanted. It hurt him as festering problems in state agencies finally blew up into full-fledged crises.
Easley’s disdain for back-slapping and elbow-rubbing with Democratic Party activists also made the former governor unpopular in that set.
But some of those same characteristics made Easley popular with regular folks. He didn’t spend weekends yakking before a crowd of bigwigs to boost his political standing. He spent his time building furniture or duck hunting or even jumping in a race car.
He was engaged in pastimes that a regular Joe could appreciate.
Easley’s detractors insisted that his regular guy attributes were really just a slicker brand of political packaging.
Perhaps. He and his political advisers certainly understood the political value of tooling around Lowe’s Motor Speedway, even if you hit the wall.
Still, you don’t make a sturdy oak table with routed edges and hand-lathed legs using fancy political packaging. You don’t sit in a freezing duck blind on a winter morning because you’re soft and used to creature comforts.
Regular guys, though, don’t fly to the Florida Keys in private jets. No one gives them $30,000 cars.
For Easley, those perks and others flowed in recent years.
Andrew Curliss of the News & Observer of Raleigh reports that Easley flew on a jet owned by NASCAR team owner and car dealership mogul Rick Hendrick to a Florida island home owned by the Hendrick family. The trip was paid for by Hendrick.
Easley’s wife, Mary, has in recent weeks been driving a car owned by a Hendrick Charlotte dealership, the newspaper reported.
Responding to the newspaper’s inquiries about the trip, Easley said that he doesn’t discuss “personal business on personal vacation on personal time.” The car, he says, is a loaner until a new car that the family is buying is delivered.
Just a few problems here: Easley was still governor at the time of the trip. Any business enterprise the size of Hendrick’s, whether his NASCAR team or car dealerships, has significant interests in the policies and laws adopted by state government. It’s against the law for state elected and appointed officials to accept gifts, including trips, that a reasonable person would conclude were for the purposes of lobbying.
Easley probably considers himself a personal friend of Hendrick, so any gifts had nothing to do with policy and lobbying.
But would that friendship exist if Easley had never held elected office?
Easley seems to have avoided asking these kinds of questions of himself in his final years in office, and so failed to draw lines where they should have been drawn.
The perks of power seem mighty powerful indeed, even for regular guys.
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Scott Mooneyham is a Raleigh-based columnist for Capitol Press Association.