When you think about all the twists and turns until Americans choose their next president and North Carolinians choose their next governor, what's abundantly clear is that clarity is hard to come by.
Much political wood remains to be chopped before Republicans settle on a nominee to take on President Obama. If party members were comfortable with the current pack of candidates, one would already have risen to the surface as the nominee-apparent, or at least be well on his or her way. It hasn't happened.
Even if Mitt Romney reclaims his standing as frontrunner and manages to pound his rivals, including the bombastic Newt Gingrich, into submission, he risks going into the fall campaign as one of the walking wounded.
Obama's fate hangs largely on the pace of economic recovery, which seems to be quickening but not yet enough for him to brush off charges that he's mismanaged the recession he inherited.
And Gov. Beverly Perdue's bolt-from-the-blue announcement that she'll forgo a run for re-election puts North Carolina Democrats into scramble mode. What looked to be a mortal lock, as the gamblers say - a rematch between Perdue and Republican Pat McCrory - now has come unglued.
Perdue's campaign wasn't exactly in the pink of condition as it prepared to fend off Republican barbs involving the state's high unemployment rate, the governor's call to reinstate a sales tax increase and legal troubles that have ensnared three of her operatives, accused of violating campaign finance rules.
Her poll numbers were reliably mediocre. But it seemed premature to conclude that she was toast.
Obama is sure to mount an all-out effort in North Carolina, a state pivotal to his own re-election hopes, where the outcome is likely to be close and where the Democratic Party, hoping for an extra boost, will stage the media extravaganza that is its national convention. Perdue could have expected to piggyback on that effort through and beyond the convention in Charlotte. If she was embarrassed about having benefited from Obama's hard-won popularity here in 2008, she never showed it.
Perdue also could plausibly have run as a tested counterweight to a General Assembly solidly in Republican hands and poised to remain that way.
GOP legislators turned out to have enough votes to enact their own budget, imposing all-too-rigorous cost controls when they could have taken a more balanced approach that refrained from so much tax-cutting. Perdue made the case - and continues to make it - for spending levels that uphold the state's traditional commitment to education. Meanwhile, she has given her veto stamp a workout, as the first governor with veto power to serve alongside a legislature controlled by the opposition party.
It may well be that, focusing on a final year in office without the ordeal of a re-election campaign and all the fund-raising that goes with it, she can more effectively push a strong pro-education agenda - the explanation she gave for deciding not to run.
But was that the sum and substance of her thinking? Probing for other reasons will be the capital's favorite new pastime until further notice.
It doesn't strain the imagination to picture someone in the Obama camp assaying Perdue's situation and concluding that she was not a good bet to help him here. An incumbent president can hardly expect to ride a governor's coattails - if anything, it works the other way around. But what if her upside, from the White House perspective, was zilch? Hints could have been dropped.
That would amount to some hardball treatment for the nation's only female Democratic governor, someone who in the natural order of things would have a featured role at the convention and help carry her state for Obama.
Yet if North Carolina really does shape up as an ultra-critical swing state, then the president will be angling for every conceivable advantage while taking potential liabilities off the table. The calculation could have been that if North Carolina Democrats, in fielding a candidate for governor, are given a do-over, it likely works in his favor.
That would have been a difficult talk to have with Perdue. But a president who stands a reasonable chance of being re-elected is not without his tools of persuasion.
We've ventured pretty far out onto a speculative limb. Those who are feeling queasy, feel free to turn around. Otherwise, ponder this: Who might the powers in the Obama camp rather see atop the Tar Heel Democratic ticket? If Perdue has been escorted off the stage, after all, it's logical to think that someone has been pegged as her best replacement.
This would amount to some truly high-octane wheeling and dealing, probably carried out in ways to maintain deniability for everyone in the president's circle. But the roster of people who arguably would bring advantages beyond Perdue's to a race against Pat McCrory - and who are willing and able to run - can't be that long.
The envelope, please!
