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Art Pope and his family recently moved to a house valued for tax purposes at $2.3 million in Raleigh's Country Club Hills. He has a vacation house on Bald Head Island valued for tax purposes at $960,130.

The Pope family has been civic-minded, giving generously to such causes as the Boy Scouts, a lecture series at N.C. State University and the North Carolina Symphony.

The vehicle for the family's giving is the Pope Foundation, whose assets had a fair market value of $53.6 million in June, according to tax documents. The family fortune has been the subject of an acrimonious suit involving the widow of Art Pope's brother.

Pope traces his interest in politics back to at least 1972, when he was a 16-year-old campaign driver for Jack Hawke, a Republican congressional candidate who now leads one of Pope's organizations. His father, John William Pope, was a leading Helms supporter.

Pope later worked as an aide to GOP Gov. Jim Martin and served four terms in the state House. He was the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor in 1992 but proved to be a plodding campaigner and lost to Democrat Dennis Wicker.

Pope, who is intellectually inclined and well-read, has always had a Libertarian streak -- a group that favors less government in all spheres, including personal lifestyle issues.

Pope organized a Libertarian state chapter while in college. Some of his close colleagues -- George Leef, who heads Pope's higher education foundation, and David Koch, who is national chairman of Americans for Prosperity -- have run for office as Libertarians. During his campaign for lieutenant governor, Pope was forced to say he did not support prostitution, legalizing drugs or gambling.

Pope said he began thinking about starting a free-market think tank while serving as Martin's legal counsel in 1985. A Republican governor dealing with a Demo-cratic-controlled legislature, he said, often lacked the research and resources he needed to make the conservative case.

"The whole establishment in North Carolina -- the business establishment, the university establishment and governmental establishment -- was basically supportive of the Democratic Party and its policies," Pope said. "We are the underdog. We are almost overwhelmed."

The problem, as Pope sees it, is not just liberals trying to expand government. It's also corporations and other interests using government to manipulate the marketplace for their own benefit.

For too long, Pope says, the state's Democratic dominance has given North Carolina one of the South's larger governments without many benefits to show for it.

Pope says his millions have only somewhat narrowed what he views as a mismatch between the liberal and conservative public policy efforts. Left-of-center organizations in North Carolina dole out $18 million annually while right-of-center organizations give away $9 million, according to an analysis by John Hood, president of the Locke Foundation.

Pope says the left's resources include former Gov. Jim Hunt's Institute for Emerging Issues at N.C. State University, the N.C. Center for Public Policy in Raleigh, and former U.S. Sen. John Edwards' Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, as well as organizations such as the N.C. Justice Center, the Common Sense Foundation and the UNC Program on Southern Politics & Public Life.

Unlike the more liberal organizations, the purse strings of the Pope groups are mainly controlled by one man. The Pope network also seems more intensely focused on an ideological agenda.

Once a month, as many as two dozen representatives of conservative organizations meet in Raleigh to map strategy and discuss goals. The meetings are patterned after a similar meeting started in Washington by anti-tax activist Grover Norquist.

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