Perhaps we should feel sorry for North Carolina's Republicans, at least those who run the party organization. They grew so accustomed to the racially tinged, search-and-destroy mode of campaign advertising used to such advantage by Jesse Helms during his long career in the U.S. Senate that they can't seem to break the habit. Or addiction.

The Republicans may be short on decency, but at least they're aiming their slime cannons at Democrats. Democrats, or some of them, aim at each other.

Whoever would have thought, after Tuesday night's oh-so-polite TV debate between Richard Moore and Beverly Perdue, that by the end of the week the two would be back to trading vicious insults? Is this what Democratic voters who shortly will pick their next candidate for governor really need?

Moore, the state treasurer who seems all too aware he's so smart, turned up a long-ago vote by Perdue when she was a first-term legislator against a bill to strengthen the SBI's authority to probe hate crimes. Who commits hate crimes? Groups "like the Ku Klux Klan," Moore's campaign says in an ad that surfaced Thursday.

The ad questions Perdue's character and honesty -- in the course of painting her as what amounts to a KKK sympathizer. You almost expect to see an old film clip of her in a pointy hood, hefting a gasoline can. Come on, Richard! You say you sponsored the ad. Even though she did cast that vote, you don't really think Bev Perdue is a racist, do you? Then why are you making such accusations?

African-American leaders in the General Assembly and elsewhere have watched Perdue as lieutenant governor for nearly eight years, and they give her good marks on matters involving race. Are their sensitivities just not sufficiently attuned to detect what Moore now thinks he detects -- on the basis of one measly vote in 1987?

Perdue's campaign in fact says that it must have been a "mis-vote" that she doesn't even remember. In other words, it was some kind of inadvertent rookie mistake. But if a legislator pushes the wrong button, he or she can have the record changed, right? Well, let's not complicate things.

Indeed -- why complicate things when, thanks to your opponent's overzealousness, you now have a license to boil him in the same oil he's using on you? What could be finer? Especially, after Perdue had declared she would keep her campaigning on a civil plane.

Perdue even dropped the H-bomb. Moore's ad is "no better than the race-baiting tactics of Jesse Helms," her campaign quoted her as saying.

(Helms, with a fair amount of nuance and cunning, plumped his popularity by cultivating anti-black sentiment among whites. Ripping Perdue as someone who wanted to go easy on the KKK hardly fits the pattern. But, heck, she probably figured Helms would make for a good line.)

Yes, Moore's ad is technically accurate. It's also short of context, unfair and just grubby. The two candidates apparently don't have many policy differences to argue about, so they're trying to draw distinctions on character and experience. But would good character not preclude ambition so vaulting that it drives you to act like, well, North Carolina Republicans?

What we're referencing, of course, is the crud-ball flung in the direction of both Moore and Perdue by the state GOP because they had the temerity to endorse Barack Obama for president. That's Obama whose long-time Chicago pastor was wont to work himself into a white-hot dudgeon sermonizing about the ill treatment of black Americans and what they could and should do about it (all within the perfectly respectable parameters of the United Church of Christ).

Did the Rev. Jeremiah Wright get carried away? His rhetoric -- criticized by Obama -- could be harsh, over the top, even a bit paranoid. But for those who've never had to deal with being black to condemn Wright as nothing but a black bigot and hate-monger is, it seems to me, to protest too much.

The Republicans in their ad released last week make it sound as if Moore and Perdue, besides supporting Obama -- for reasons that have nothing to do with his membership in the church Wright used to lead -- must have been Trinity U.C.C. deacons and co-chairs of the stewardship committee while Wright was fulminating away.

This is a brazen attempt to yoke these two top Tar Heel Democrats not only to a black presidential candidate (his race being off-putting enough to some, sadly) but also to a black minister who alarms many whites because of his outspoken advocacy of black interests as he sees them. It plays to prejudice and fear. And let's be clear -- anyone can favor Obama's candidacy without endorsing Wright's views. Too "extreme"? Sounds like the N.C. GOP to me.