Tuesday, Jun. 21, 2005

Truer Blue

By most measures, North Carolina Congressman James Broyhill is a true-blue Republican conservative. After 23 years on Capitol Hill, Broyhill, 58, has an 88% approval rating from the American Conservative Union, and the Congressional Quarterly reports that he took the conservative side in more than 85% of House votes in the past decade. But as he campaigns for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in a hotly contested primary next week, Broyhill is finding that his grades as a conservative simply may not be good enough.

Broyhill's opponent is Right-Winger David Funderburk, 42, a former Reagan Administration Ambassador to Rumania who resigned last year, charging that the State Department was too soft on the Communist country. Funderburk's campaign is being run by the state's National Congressional Club, which previously engineered the elections of Conservative Avatar Jesse Helms and his colleague John East, who is leaving the Senate after just one term because of a thyroid disorder. The N.C.C. has launched the same no-holds-barred polemical attack on Broyhill that it previously employed against Democrats.

Television commercials have lambasted the Congressman as a Washington insider not to be trusted, a turncoat conservative who voted for "Tip O'Neill's budget," the surrender of the Panama Canal and a national holiday commemorating Martin Luther King's birthday. The most damaging blow, however, may be Funderburk's recent contention that Broyhill wants to set up two nuclear-waste sites in the state. Actually, Broyhill introduced legislation to establish a waste site in the West; the bill was later amended in the Senate to set up a second site, not necessarily in North Carolina.

Although the N.C.C.'s tactics worked in 1984 to re-elect Helms in a close victory over then North Carolina Governor James Hunt, this time they may backfire. Broyhill has long represented the state's traditional Republicans, while Funderburk has never run for public office. The Congressman has tried to remain above the fray, refusing even to debate his opponent. Broyhill is still the front runner, but with only 20% of North Carolina's nearly 800,000 Republicans expected to vote in the primary, the decision could be close. The true winner could be the Democrats, who hope that after the G.O.P.'s spring mudslinging, the survivor from among the ten Democratic hopefuls can mop up in the fall election.