Bowles may have been haunted by '72 race

Erskine Bowles didn't mean to deflate anybody's high hopes when he announced Thursday that he wouldn't seek the Democratic nomination for governor.

But he must have been keenly aware of the danger of history repeating itself.

In 1972, another Democrat, after a bruising primary fight with the lieutenant governor, was narrowly beaten by a Republican who claimed a historic victory for his party. The Democrat was Erskine's father, Hargrove "Skipper" Bowles of Greensboro. Forty years on, Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton is seeking the Democratic Party's nomination for governor.

But ever since Jan. 26, when Bev Perdue announced she wouldn't seek re-election, many Democrats had been touting Erskine Bowles as the ideal man to pit against Republican Pat McCrory, a former Charlotte mayor. Bowles is the former UNC system president, chief of staff for Bill Clinton and bipartisan fighter for deficit relief.

He has also lost two races for U.S. Senate. Erskine Bowles is just as decent and committed to public service as his father was. But he's not the natural, charismatic campaigner that his father was.

The mention of Erskine Bowles' possible candidacy for governor spurred memories of his father's '72 race. I was in elementary school then, and remember my father talking about Bowles' run and what a good guy he was. Last week, I combed through old newspaper files and did interviews to try to get a sense of the man and his bid for governor. Erskine Bowles did not respond to my request for comments.

His father, a beloved businessman who died of Lou Gehrig's disease in 1986, was a fundraiser and donor for big projects at his alma mater, Carolina. He had a sharp mind full of big ideas, and was as at ease with bluebloods as he was with blue-collar workers. "Skipper was a great guy," said Carroll Leggett of Winston-Salem, former chief of staff for U.S. Sen. Robert Morgan. "You had to love him if you knew him personally. Flashy. Drove a Bentley. Wonderful laugh."

"There's still a Skipper Bowles cult," national political strategist Robert Squier, who made commercials for the Bowles campaign, told The Washington Post's John F. Harris in 1998. "He was one of the most charismatic candidates I've ever worked for. … You could take any slice of any conversation he had and put it on TV unspliced."

Skipper Bowles, a Monroe native and World War II vet, served in Gov. Terry Sanford's cabinet. His work for Sanford included leading the way in integrating the state park service. Bowles then served in the state House and Senate before entering the Democratic primary for governor.

The race came down to a runoff between Bowles and Lt. Gov. Pat Taylor Jr. After squeezing out a win, Bowles took on Boone attorney Jim Holshouser in the general election. Bowles' platform included holding the line on taxes, taking politics out of the allocation of road money, expanding vocational programs at community colleges and building a public kindergarten program.

There were signs of trouble. The primary had turned off some Democrats. Taylor fans weren't transferring support to Bowles. His campaign wasn't doing enough to woo them.

And it was becoming obvious that, at the top of the ticket, Republican President Richard Nixon was going to soundly thump Democrat George McGovern.

But Bowles had sought to distance himself from McGovern. And in North Carolina gubernatorial races, the winner of the Democratic primary had long been the de-facto winner of the general election. A Republican had not won in the 20th century.

A joke about the outcome of the '72 race has entered the North Carolina lexicon: Skipper Bowles was the second-most surprised person.

Holshouser, the winner, was the most surprised.

For many Democrats, the loss was heartbreaking. Others saw it more practically. Bowles, "the wrong man at the wrong time," "got hit by a train" that included his own fractured party and "the Nixon tsunami," said Hayes McNeill, a longtime observer of Democratic politics who was in his mid-20s during the '72 race.

Holshouser, a moderate, earned widespread respect as governor, laying a firm foundation for another moderate Republican, Jim Martin, to win in 1984.

But there hasn't been a Republican governor since Martin, and certainly not one in the 21{+s}{+t} century.

This year, regardless of who the Democratic candidate is, Republicans are hoping their luck will change — just like it did in 1972, when luck ran out for a good guy who had everything going for him.