McCrory whiffs in his first at-bat

Charlotte Mayor Patrick McCrory said he wanted to run a "garage band" campaign for governor.

But after last week's fiasco, McCrory may want to consider hiring someone who knows the difference between a bass guitar and an amp.

McCrory might have made the worst entry into a political race since U.S. Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, who spent the first days of his presidential campaign explaining how he didn't mean to be patronizing when he described Illinois Sen. Barack Obama as articulate and clean.

When McCrory announced his candidacy, his campaign put out a release saying he was running for "governer."

It was an embarrassing mistake but not a huge one.

What came next was far worse. McCrory's campaign manager concocted a story about a hacker breaking into the McCrory campaign computers and changing the spelling as a dirty trick. She repeated the story -- even contradicting her own campaign spokeswoman -- until McCrory ended the agony by acknowledging that the campaign had made a mistake.

Rule No. 1 of political campaigns: The coverup is usually far worse than the original sin.

The episode raises questions about whether McCrory is prepared to make the jump into the political big time. One reason that four recent Charlotte mayors have failed to win statewide office is that they had been lulled into the false view that being mayor is the political major leagues.

It's not. There is not as much competition among candidates, not as much media scrutiny nor as much likelihood of hardball politics.

With a few exceptions, Charlotte's mayoral races tend to be polite. Races for governor or the U.S. Senate tend to be barroom brawls.

Democrat Eddie Knox felt he was mugged so badly when he ran for governor in 1984 that he backed President Reagan and later switched parties. Democrat Harvey Gantt was undone, in part, in the 1990 Senate race by one of the most famous racial quota ads in American history.

Republican Sue Myrick was made to look like a religious fanatic when she ran for the Senate in 1992. And Republican Richard Vinroot was portrayed as an abortion lover when he ran for governor in 1996 because he once cut a ribbon at a Planned Parenthood facility.

All four Charlotte mayors returned home badly scarred by their experience.

"Politics ain't beanbag," humorist Finley Peter Dunne once remarked.

McCrory must know that the chief media strategist for one of his GOP rivals, state Sen. Fred Smith, is the same guy who produced the Swift Boat ads that torpedoed Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

If McCrory wins the GOP nomination, he must face the Democratic strategists who twice helped elect Mike Easley governor and ended the political careers of Vinroot and former state Sen. Patrick Ballantine.

McCrory has the sort of center-right suburban profile that can win elections in North Carolina. And his backing by former Republican Govs. Jim Holshouser and Jim Martin will cause people to take notice.

But a garage band campaign seems unlikely to get you to the governor's mansion.