News-Record.com

Our friends at AP report:

GREENSBORO, N.C. (AP) _ The Republican challenger to Attorney General Roy Cooper has started running television ads designed to point out what he calls problems fighting crime in North Carolina.

Asheboro lawyer Bob Crumley said the first of two 15-second ads started running Tuesday in all state television markets except for Greenville.

The ads direct viewers to a Web site, www.nccrimenews.com, where Crumley appears in what look like television news segments highlighting what he calls failures by Cooper.

The ads will run for about four weeks.

Crumley's law firm recently changed TV ads to remove his name and image after election officials said they could constitute illegal campaign contributions. Crumley said he's done nothing wrong and will fight the ruling after the election.

Here's the website in question.

Cross-posted from Capital Beat.

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Back in July, I wrote about AG candidate Bob Crumley, a Republican from the Greensboro area, and his television commercials. What he described as an image ad struck me very much like a campaign commercial, a fact that Crumley disputed at the time.

Prior posts here and here. The ad itself:

After I wrote about the ad, the state Democratic Party filed a complaint about it.

Separately, Crumley and his law firm had asked the state board of elections another set of questions about law firm advertising. Primarily, they wanted to know whether a guy who owns a law firm can continue to appear in his law firms commercials in a 60-day window before the election, which is handled differently under election law.

As it turns out, whether you think the image ad is legit law firm solicitation or not, the answer to this second question is "no." That's according to the state board of elections.

Click here for today's story.

For background: This notice ran in the North Carolina Register on Sept. 15. And click here for more correspondence between the campaign and the SBOE.

Crumley contends that the SBOE ruling is wrong-headed but said he's not going to fight it so he can pursue his campaign and says he'll take it up after the election. He told me last week that it has cost him $10,000 to pull his image and name from the law firm's ads.

I'm told that there are legislative candidates, including at least one Democratic legislator, who this ruling may end up affecting.

Update: From a story in today's paper:

"If I had never done advertising before and all of a sudden came up with television ads, you might have an argument there," Crumley said. "But I'm not doing anything that I didn't do before."

[snip]

"You can't watch that thing without thinking it's an ad for someone running for office," said Bob Phillips, who heads the North Carolina branch of Common Cause, a public-interest advocacy group that has lobbied for more stringent campaign finance rules.

Click here for the whole thing.

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Related to Bob Crumley's image ad, the state Democratic Party has filed a complaint against Crumley. The complaint, filed with the SBOE and signed by the party's executive director, reads in part:

Without disclosure of who is paying for the advertisements and how much is being spent, voters will have no information regarding the sponsorship of this apparent effort to influence the 2008 election.

Clearly, the sponsoring entity is violating the law, and I ask that the Board investigate these advertisements and any other communications for which disclosure is required.

Click here for the full letter.

More in tomorrow's paper.

For those who haven't seen it, here's the ad:

I wrote back in February is the about a Bob Crumley commercial that seemed as if it might have some campaign implications.

Crumley is a Republican Greensboro-area lawyer running for Attorney General against Roy Cooper, the Democratic incumbent.

I noticed this weekend that Crumley is running a new ad. The tag line refers people to his law firm's web page. But you tell me: does the ad seem more like a commercial one might use in a campaign?

Early voting for the Democratic runoff for the state's labor commissioner race began today.

John Brooks asked for the special election after a close finish behind Mary Fant Donnan in the May 6 primary.

Nobody seems to expect people to rush to the polls in this race, which will cost Guilford County about $150,000 to pull off. Right now, polling locations are open for early voting in the Greensboro and High Point elections offices. All regular polling locations will open for the June 24 special election.

Before last week's election, there was a good deal of speculation about what the drop-off would be. How many more people who would vote in the presidential contest versus other races lower on the ballot, particularly in the Democratic primary?

After looking at some data from the State Board of Elections and the Guilford County BOE it's fair to say that there was some serious drop-off, although I found the ballot spots where it happened a bit surprising.

At both the county and state level, the presidential contest definitely was the draw. But at both the state and county levels, the race for governor was the second-biggest draw on the Democratic ballot. That was followed by the U.S. Senate race. Statewide, the drop-off from President to governor was 5 percent, versus U.S. Senate 15.5 percent.

In Guilford County, nearly 4,000 fewer people voted for U.S. Senate versus for Governor. That's despite the leading candidates in the senate race (Greensboro state Sen. Kay Hagan and Greensboro-native Jim Neal) having ties to Guilford County and the race appearing on the ballot ahead of the race for governor.

This bum-fuzzles me. I would think that the choice of who Democrats want to take on Sen. Dole would be pretty darned important to them. I'm not sure how to interpret this, although I'm betting if I talked to Dole's folks they'd say it's a sign that some Democrats are happy with the incumbent.

The only alternative I have at my fingertips involves advertising: Richard Moore and Bev Perdue were on the air a lot. Hagan was the only one of the U.S. Senate candidates on television and in nowhere near the rotation that Bev Perdue and Richard Moore were.

Among the partisan statewide races, the biggest dropoff on the Democratic side was between President and Labor Commissioner. Statewide, 376,425 - or 24 percent - fewer people voted for the state official responsible for inspecting elevators and amusement rides and enforcing workplace safety rules. Phhhhppttt...who needs to keep nails out of their skulls anyway.

In Guilford County, a lot of people went to considerable trouble to under-vote the down ballot races. You can tell because a total of 127,589 people voted in the Republican and Democratic presidential races. Then 122,000-plus voted in all the sales tax and bond referenda.

But only a total of 105,345 Democrats and Republicans voted for Lt. Governor, the #2 elected official in the state.

To roughly extrapolate, that means about 17,000 punched a button for president, and then leafed through several pages, leaving races like Lt. Gov. blank, before getting to the bonds.

What does this all mean? Several things, I think, some obvious:

• * Not all races caught the voting public's imagination equally.
• * All politics is local and the referenda are about as local as it gets.
• * Folks probably aren't sure what the people who hold the council of state offices do, much less the differences between the candidates.
• * There's probably an argument in here for eliminating some council of state offices, if one wanted to have it.

Your thoughts welcome at the comment link below.

Okay, so with the presidential circus, races for governor and U.S. Senate, and everything on down the ballot to sanitary district offices going on, candidates and causes like to try to think up whacky ways to get the attention of us scruff media types.

Case in point: Greensboro lawyer Bob Crumley, a Republican running for Attorney General and this week's winner of the profligate campaign spending award, unseating candidate for governor Fred Smith who buys hushpuppies for his 'cue feasts that he acknowledges he doesn't even eat.

The Crumley campaign mailed along a little box with a mini trashcan and broom and rug and a couple of news releases...well, here, take a look:

And under the rug there is a note on his opponent in the General Election, Democratic incumbent Roy Cooper, and his alleged misdeeds that have been swept under the rug. (See, it's a sight gag!) See:

You can find the substance of his charges here. There's also apparently a news conference on April 3.

There's no primary in this race, so it's going to have some problems breaking through the fog this Spring. And while this is all very cute, I could have done with an e-mail and it's sort of a miracle I'm in the office today to get these anyway. Besides, my cats don't need a trash can or a broom ... it's that whole lack of opposable thumbs thing.

The capper: Crumley sent about 12 of these boxes to my office, at least 10 of which appear to be addressed to folks at the Raleigh and Charlotte papers. So McClatchy guys, come pick up your press releases if you want 'em.

I was roused from my post-Super Bowl stupor last night by and ad for Crib to College, a nonprofit founded by Crumley and Associates.

The law firm is owned by Republican AG candidate Bob Crumley. The firm does heavy advertising for itself, including on the back page of the phone books.

Now, call me skeptical, but this got me to thinking and digging a little bit.

Crumley formed the Crib to College nonprofit in 2006, shortly after his 2005 declaration that he would run for Attorney General in 2008. (Yes, he's been running for nigh on three years.)

The ad for the scholarships features Crumley in a lot of the visuals and mentions his name several times. It sure as shooting looked to me to be a couple half steps short of a campaign ad. Could the foundation and its on-air advertising be taken as a way to boost his public profile around the state?

Crumley told me I'm taking the coincidence the wrong way. After 2006, the law firm realized it wasn't getting the number of applicants that it wanted for the scholarship. So in 2007 and again this year it began advertising the scholarship.

Crumley said his company has been doing public service work, such as drivers education, for years and that the formation of the nonprofit had to do with the expanding its community outreach efforts.

"Totally coincidental in terms of timing," Crumley said.

Alright. Fair enough. Still, advertising is advertising. Has he given any thought as to cutting back ads for the foundation or the law firm as he runs for AG.

Short answer: no.

"The company has been advertising for a long, long time. The company is going to continue to advertise, I guess forever...It's two separate things and the campaign will do its thing and the law firm will do its thing," Crumley said.

For those wondering if there's a law against this sort of thing, yes and no.

If you're a sitting member of the Council of State - the AG is a member - you can't do publicly-funded Public Service Announcements except in case of a national emergency, said Gary Bartlett, who heads the state board of elections.

So, for example, Democrat Roy Cooper can't do a bunch of ads for his department's fraud prevention efforts this year as a way to build his name recognition and good will.

Crumley, however, is pretty much in the clear to do ads for his foundation and his law firm.

The state can't regulate anything that doesn't have the "magic words," Bartlett said. Those would be words like "vote for," "support," "oppose," or "defeat." Anything else is, at best, an issue ad, which is dicey if not impossible for the state to regulate anyway. Advertisements for private businesses or foundation don't get close to coming into the SBOE's purview.

So there's nothing the state can do to put Crumley's foundation and business ads off the air, regardless of how they may or may not help his campaign. As for Crumley, he emphasized the foundation had nothing to do with politics.

"I don't want to see a really good program politicized for my benefit or anybody's benefit," he said.