Ballantine says age isn't issue

Fortunately for Patrick Ballantine, North Carolina has a history of picking governors who still have all their hair and most of their teeth and can still see their feet.

Jim Holshouser was 38, Jim Hunt and Bob Scott were 39 and Terry Sanford was 43 when they were first elected governor.

By comparison, current Gov. Mike Easley was a mature 50 when he became the state's chief executive.

Age is both an asset and a liability for Ballantine, the 39-year old Wilmington lawyer who resigned last week as state Senate Republican leader to concentrate on his bid for his party's nomination for governor.

Like Democratic Sen. John Edwards, Ballantine has a youthful appearance -- his baby face makes him look more like he is 34 -- that is a liability. When sharing a stage with his fellow GOP gubernatorial candidates, he looks as though he should be a campaign aide to such gray eminences as former Charlotte Mayor Richard Vinroot and former Congressman Bill Cobey.

But Ballantine is stressing his youth as a selling point, campaigning as a fresh face who can relate to younger people.

"Being governor isn't about age," Ballantine says. "It's about experience, drive and leadership."

In truth, the state GOP leadership has been getting a little long in the tooth for some time. When former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms praises Congressman Walter Jones Jr., 61, as a great young man, as he did a couple of years ago, that ought to tell you something.

Ballantine and U.S. Senate candidate Richard Burr, 48, represent a potential generational change.

But Ballantine has yet to prove that he can pull it off.

He has been campaigning longer than any of the Republican gubernatorial hopefuls. He has the endorsement of more GOP legislators and sheriffs.

The conventional wisdom is that Ballantine and Cobey will be fighting in the July 20 primary for a spot in the Aug. 17 runoff against Vinroot.

But if the public opinion polls are to be believed, Ballantine is still not very well known. His creative but offbeat TV commercial featuring his daughter, Wilker, seems not to have given his campaign much of a lift.

In a crowded Republican primary field in which there are few policy differences, Ballantine is touting his electability.

He is marketing himself as a candidate who is conservative enough to appeal to the party's grass-roots workers, but flexible enough to attract nontraditional voters to the Republican Party.

Ballantine notes that he has won five state Senate races in a swing district that Democrat Easley carried with 56 percent of the vote in the last gubernatorial election. He argues that he has a track record of winning the support of some conservative Eastern North Carolina Democrats and African-Americans.

But Ballantine is also handicapped by coming from a corner of North Carolina that everyone wants to visit, but where few people live. His two chief rivals, Vinroot and Cobey, live in the state's largest metropolitan areas, Charlotte and the Triangle, respectively.

Shed of his senatorial duties, Ballantine now has three months to convince Republican voters that their ticket in the fall should, in his words, be "The Three B's -- Bush, Burr and Ballantine."

And, I might add, not Balding.