Below is my political resume. I was involved in North Carolina statewide and local politics on an on-and-off but more or less continual basis from 1972 until 1990, when I decided to no longer be a publicly-identified political animal. My political resume does not contain every political alliance or allegiance I ever made or have been involved in, only those which by public record or public knowledge which can be attributed to me. By clicking on the anchored titles, you'll be scrolled down to brief commentaries about each resume entry, which follow below. If you have any questions or comments, your feedback is welcome as always.

Political Resume Of
(Also Political Autobiography Of)
H. Kent Craig




1990

May 31, 1990 was the day I decided to quit active political involvement in campaigns, for good. It had been a long, strange, and disappointing trip over the previous eighteen years, a journey as much of self-discovery as discovery about the political process, but one which never the less ended in bitterness, disillusionment, and disappointment.


I had been a "delegate" to the Southern Republican Leadership Convention just the month prior, where I got to meet briefly (15 minutes or so) privately with Newt Gingrich, who was busy laying the groundwork for his Republican Re-Revolution which was to come a few years later, and where I heard my political idol (no jokes, please) Jesse Helms tell a packed audience of about 500 delegates that any child born with AIDS had to be as guilty of sin of some sort as any homosexual man who goes out and gets AIDS by risky consensual homosexual activity.


When Senator Helms said that, my heart just didn't sink, but was ripped out by his words and stomped on by his mean-spiritedness. Certainly, this was not the Senator Helms I had know since 1972 and who had shown nothing to me save a kind and generous spirit, certainly, this meant he had to be in the early stages of Alzhiemer's or similar mentally degenerative condition, certainly, this had to be a speech written for him which he hadn't had a chance to review before speaking it, for certain he couldn't have meant those words which damned an entire generation of innocent babies by the mere accident of their birth. Hoping that there weren't any reporters in the audience undercover, my mind reeled from the beyond bizarre words Senator Helms spake, words I didn't repeat even to my closest friends or family for some months or longer after. But, some years later in an interview with a reporter from The (Raleigh, NC) News & Observer, he repeated those same words, that same incredibly ignorant and hate-filled sentiment.


That, along with continuing reports of malicious rumors about me being whispered behind my back among the Party faithful, about my being African-American, gay, and Jewish, said in the most prejudiced way possible, none of which was/is true but all of which I would have proudly layed claim to if I had been (I think these were started primarily because of my Pro-Choice position on abortion rights), along with in-my-face continuing confrontations from zealots on the right and left within the Party (yes, there is a "left" in the Republican Party, Smile), along with the realization that despite what I had been told for years to contrary that because I couldn't and wouldn't "talk out of my both sides of my mouth" as my father liked to say and therefor had no probable political future in the State Of N.C., collapsed in a heap on my political back, breaking it, my disavowing all things political the result, I even pulled my voter registration at the Wake County (NC) Board Of Elections, pulling a Robert Novak-Cynic's Corner fit and not renewing it or voting for some years to come.


There were some other personal and family motivations and influences in my decision, to be sure, but mainly I quit politics because I couldn't stomach the Party-line meals which were being continually feed to me and which I was being forced to swallow, "or else". In 1972, when I first became involved in (Republican) politics, there were two main factions of the NC GOP, two factions which were so disparate as to effectively have been two different political parties. By 1990, with the first two NC Republican Governors under our belt and the first two Republican US Senators from NC as well, at times it felt like the NC GOP had indeed healed, had indeed been spiritually saved under that "big tent" concept which was such the buzzword back then. But the reality was that the moderate wing of the NC Republican Party had been driven into shunned exile within it's own house. While feverently as anti-Communist as ever, the Russian Bear toppling then but not yet fully fallen flat, while feverently a deficit hawk and fiscally conservative as ever, while as embracing of American patriotism but not jingoism as ever, it was simply stated to me time and time again that if I wanted to take Pro-Choice positions, if I wanted to openly support the rights of gays, minorities, women, and all people regardless of race, creed or color, if I wanted compassionate and not vituperative social policy regarding those less fortunate than most, then I should basically get the hell out of the GOP and move my political home over to the Democrat Party. Knowing that my thoughtful, moderate, center-right stance didn't fit either Party, in my own mind I said "screw them all", and out of lack of centrist political choice, left the political arena to wander in the political desert for my own version of forty days and forty nights where I still reside, where, I suspect, there are millions of my American political cousins nearby but invisible, our mutual and individual camoflague being a lack of real political choice.


In 1990, though, in my own infinitesimally small way on a tiny blip of a local political radar, I did help to make a small difference in shifting the balance of the local GOP more towards the majority center. Hearing about a possible local candidate who was thinking about running for the NC State house who was Pro-Choice, I sought out, found, and convinced Bill Draper that I would make a good campaign manager for his effort. Knowing a couple of staffers at NC-NARAL in passing, and Bill being even more Pro-Choice than I was on some of the more controversial areas such as parental notification and late-term abortions, NARAL broke long-standing tradition and gave hissy-fits to some of their own members by actually endorsing Bill Draper in the Primary race for NC House District #63. As far as I know, this was the first time that NC-NARAL had ever endorsed any North Carolina Republican in a Primary Election, and I don't think there's been one since. Of course, that endorsement all but guaranteed his defeat in the Primary, which happened even worse than predicted, but for one moment in the night sky of NC politics, a blazing meteor of selfless political consciousness in the form of Bill Draper lit a hopeful path for those in the future to follow.


Simultaneous with my effort to manage Bill Draper's campaign, I was also juggling similar self-imposed duties with David Brooks, a lawyer from Cary who, like Bill, was making his first run for political office, running for the Wake County (NC) Board Of Commissioners. David was a most impressive candidate, with impressive credentials; former Chairman of the NC Industrial Commission, he was also a Vietnam War Veteran who had won the Silver Star for bravery (the medal just below the Medal Of Honor in importance), but even more impressive to the alpha-geek side of me, is the only person I've ever met who could write in machine-language-code, the base language that's at the root of all computer languages, without "cheating", without using any reference manuals or materials, just sit at the computer and churn out machine-language-code programs which never needed debugging, 'just blew me away. Keeping in mind this was 1990 and this technology was still primitive at best, to say the least, I witnessed David writing his own program that could scan, read, sort, debug, and re-write mailing lists into databases from "cold" address listings, unbelievable for the time.


Needless to say, David lost (he didn't have Republican primary opposition), as much because (I think) people confused him with a terribly unpopular NC Council Of State Labor Commissioner named John Brooks who lost to a political unknown in his own Party. But Bill and David's efforts helped pave the way for future Republican victories in both their respective arenas just four years down the road, 'helped put a Republican majority in the North Carolina House Of Representatives, and helped put Republicans on the Wake County Board Of Commissioners. David Brooks, BTW, was elected to the Cary (NC) Town Council in 1994, and being the moderate centrist that he is, survived the "no growth" political coup that took over the Cary Town Council in 1998.


1988


Dennis Carter was a friend, a Registered Professional Engineer, and a sometimes part-time employer who taught me as much about mechanical engineering as I taught him about politics. Having the proverbial horse-choking resume, being a former Vice-President of Carolina Power & Light, being active in his church, having an MBA from Duke, being well-spoken and good-looking, Dennis embarked on a quixotic quest to unseat a long-term and popular incumbent on the (supposedly) non-partisan Raleigh City Council, and to make a long story short, he got his butt kicked from noon to Sunday, I think his total vote percent was barely over single digits.


And two of the worse mistakes I ever made in a political campaign I made in Dennis'. Dennis came up with campaign slogan "Engineered Excellence", which didn't ring right, but I didn't fight him on it, which as his campaign manager I should have, since I thought and still think it was a dumb slogan. But the real embarrassment came that first rain after we (mainly I) had put up hundreds of campaign signs on sticks all over Raleigh, and the signs not being made of a heavy, more-rain-resistant paper because we didn't have a large campaign budget (again, I should have been stronger and fought him on it, but...), drooped like so much UN-Engineered Excellence after that first downpour...in fact, those signs became a running political joke against him during the campaign. Lessons learned? That while the candidate is always in charge, if you're a political professional (paid or unpaid), it's your job to keep your candidate from making dumb, ignorant mistakes, if for no other reason because you yourself are somehow usually tarred with that same brush that tars him/her, too. The second big mistake was letting Dennis overrule me (again) about his attending a candidates' forum held by an influential local African-American political affairs committee, which I urged and urged him to attend. Thinking he had no chance for their endorsement, he declined to go, only to find out later that he would have gotten their endorsement, had he merely shown up...they later came out with a "no endorsement" for either he or his opponent.


1978


Joe Felmet and I couldn't have been more different than if we'd have been born on different planets. Politically, he was somewhere to the left of Lenin, a knee-jerk Democrat liberal if there ever was one, while I was somewhere to the right of Barry Goldwater, a knee-jerk country-club Republican centrist if there ever was one (Smile). Yet, I fought tooth-and-nail to get that man elected to the US Senate, and with almost literally no campaign budget (under $5,000.00, I believe we actually spent less than $2,000.00, including an $800.00 filing fee), we at least didn't bottom-feed, coming in 6th in an eight-man (no women ran that year) Democratic Primary field. Why did I work so hard for him, why did I give so much of my life to his campaign? Because, his politics aside, Joe was one of the bravest, most courageous, most honorable persons I've ever had the pleasure to know, and he would have done North Carolina proud had he been elected to serve in the US Senate.


I originally met Joe when I became involved in the "Humanist Movement" as a teen-ager, when I became a Charter Member of the American Humanists Association's "Humanists Of North Carolina" chapter back in the early-mid 1970's. Yes, it was a real incongruity that I was then a member of Senator Helms' inner circle, Senator Helms constantly railing and wailing about the "secular humanist influence which was poisoning our nation", while all the while I was a national figure at a very young age in the Humanist movement. Eventually, I discovered much to my bitter disappointment how truly intolerant and hateful the Humanist movement was/is to people of faith, dropping out and renouncing the practice but not the principles of the Humanist movement in America, but that's another story. Anyway, Joe was a middle-age, overweight, loud, happy, hard-living Democrat newspaperman living in Winston-Salem (NC), and I was a young, thin, quiet, introspective Republican living in Raleigh. Joe had literally put his life on the line for his beliefs as a young man, being one of the original "freedom riders" which rode in the "colored sections" of interstate buses as they traveled the segregated South of the late 50's and early 60's, risking daily arrest and daily danger of being taken off somewhere in the middle of the nowhere and shot and killed because of the belief that all men/people were indeed created equal.


It was this kind of courage, Joe Felmet's personal courage of his beliefs, that attracted me to him politically. And the fact that we had established a real, strong personal friendship as members of Humanists Of North Carolina made it a virtual no-brainer for me to volunteer unsolicitedly to become his campaign manager. In the campaign, I got to know all of the other candidates and their staffs personally, and except for the dishonorable and disreputable John Ingram, came to admire and respect them all as well. It was during this campaign that I lost (thankfully) a lot of my knee-jerk partisanship, that I gained a respect for people of all sincere political beliefs, even those that I disagree with and maybe even were/are frightened by a little.


1972


In the summer of 1972, for reasons I still don't fully remember let alone comprehend, I wandered into what was then the basement of the Raleigh Hilton (now the Brownestone Hotel) on Hillsboro Street in Raleigh, which was approximately a 5-mile bike-ride for my 15-year-old legs, wandered through the door of what was the main campaign headquarters for the North Carolina Republican Party, and announced to the first person I found, Frank Rouse who was State GOP Chairman, that I wanted to volunteer.


In 1972, there hadn't been a Republican Governor elected in NC in the century, neither had there been a Republican US Senator elected from NC since before 1900. There had been a tiny handful of Republican NC State House Representatives elected, mainly from the Western part of the State (which had remained Pro-Union and anti-slavery during the Civil War, though NC as a State did join the Confederacy), but that had been it. By sheer chance, I had walked through the first door to the right off the elevator going to the basement, instead of the first door to the left off the elevator. If I had gone left instead of right, I'm sure my whole life let alone political life would have been different, much as my choosing the door to the right altered my life forever after.


To the left, the door to the left in the basement of the Hilton lead to the headquarters of the Holshouser For Governor campaign, Holshouser being the GOP nominee for NC Governor, and running a separate campaign from the main GOP effort. To the right was the main GOP Party Headquarters, where Frank Rouse and his political friend and ally Jesse Helms ran a different ship altogether from the Holshouser campaign, even though ostensibly they were both on the same Republican ticket. Not once during that summer did I dare venture over across the hall the "enemy camp", the Holshouser campaign, once I had made my accidental allegiance.


Between times of actually doing some work, the mundanities of campaigns, stuffing envelopes with campaign brochures, working the phone banks, etc., Frank and sometimes Charlie Black (who later became RNC Chairman) and sometimes others and I would just kick back and relax as we'd ride up and down Hillsboro Street and gawk at the young coeds that attended NC State University literally next door to the Hilton. Then private citizen Jesse Helms didn't show up a whole lot, and when he did, it was usually for strategy sessions with Frank and Charlie and others, some of which I was invited to attend, some of which I wasn't. I didn't show up to volunteer every day, but did so enough to where I was considered Frank's and the staff's "gopher" (as in "go for this, go for that").


When Election Day that November came and went and one could almost hear the near-thuds of the Editors of The News & Observer (our local paper, who was and is unabashedly Anti-Republican and Pro-Yellow-Dog-Democrat) as they almost jumped off their building's roof but didn't because they didn't want to give us the pleasure as we and Nixon's "New South Strategy" and a shift in the political center of the US all helped shock the world by electing Gov. Holshouser as our first Republican Governor of NC since the 1800's and Sen. Helms as our first Republican US Senator since then too, the joy at the Election Eve party once the polls had closed and the results started coming in was as addicting to me as the first toke of crack to any Marion Barry-head, and yes, I became for the next eighteen years a political junkie.


Much to my surprise, considering that imaginary frontier border crossing which divided our basement hallway during that previous summer, I received an invitation not to just Gov. Holshouser's Inaugural Ball but to his private, less-than-100-attendees Reception afterwards, an honor of which I'm still proud to have received. And not much to my surprise, Sen. Helms somehow got the Nixon Whitehouse to offer me, a then 16-year-old high school dropout (I had quit school on my 16th birthday, which was shortly after Election Day 1972, and gone to work for my father's plumbing business), a job as a Whitehouse Photographer's Assistant, basically a glorified gopher position, but one which I wanted to do so badly, Nixon being a political demi-god to me then even more than Sen. Helms was, but my father, knowing me, being concerned for me, refused to sign the (limited minor emancipation work) papers which would have let me do so. To this day, I still can't help but wonder, I know I will always wonder, what it would have been like, what would have happened to me, if my father had signed the consent papers, if I had gone to DC in early 1973 to load film and set up lights and ferry stuff for the real Whitehouse photographers, if I had become a minor non-speaking bit-part extra-player in the national historical drama which eventually became known as Watergate.




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