Where do you get your campaign money? That question has become de rigueur on the campaign trail this year in Raleigh, particularly among voters who view this election season as a fight to the death between Big Real Estate and the [increasingly] powerless citizenship.

If you take lots of cash from real estate, the thinking goes, you will simply do their bidding on the City Council.

Is this a fair charge? It's certainly not a new one, as anyone who has followed Raleigh politics over the years can attest to. Raleigh, and all of Wake County, is awash in development as companies and people continue to flock to the area.

The city is filled with successful developers, brokers, contractors, architects and others who make their living off this robust section of the Triangle's economy. Branding all these folks with a scarlet RE seems idiotic and counterproductive.

That said, it seems equally idiotic not to pay attention to candidates' campaign finance reports. Money matters in American politics, even at the municipal level, and candidates who are overly sensitive to questions about their donor lists deserve additional scrutiny.

But it seems to me applying a litmus test to candidates distracts us from focusing on what we really need: Leadership.

The city needs people who have a future vision that taps into Raleigh's enormous potential. Those people can come in many stripes.

I grew up in Portland, Ore., a city that has become known, both positively and negatively, for its land-use planning system and urban growth boundaries.

While today Portland is as blue a city has you'll find, the man behind many of those ideas was Tom McCall, a Republican who was governor of Oregon from 1967 to 1975.

McCall defied characterization -- he was a notorious environmentalist who made all Oregon's beaches public and passed the nation's first mandatory bottle-deposit law while supporting nuclear power and defending the right of private industry to harvest timber without restrictions.

Whatever you thought of McCall, he was overflowing with imagination, common sense and a fierce love of Oregon.

Instead of drawing lines in the sand and choosing sides, we should be searching for Tom McCalls.