Great Article But Who's Reading It

This morning's Asheville Citizen-Times had a great article by Jordan Schrader about my judicial record and its relationship to my run for governor. Jordan spent a lot of time in preparation for this story researching my opinions from both my 8 years on the Court of Appeals and 10 years on the Supreme Court. As I told him it always makes me nervous when reporters, particularly those without a legal background start trying to report on the cases I participated in as a judge. The brevity of the news media doesn't lend itself to giving a complete picture of the record of the case, briefs filed and arguments presented that go into reaching a decision.

That being said, I thought Jordan did an excellent job in summarizing several key cases and reporting on my observations about them. One pleasure I take from the campaign is the press and opposition needing to research my background and thus the necessity of reading all those opinions I wrote over the course of an 18 year career as an appellate judge. Folks, that's great reading, particularly if your having trouble sleeping. But as I once told Professor Doris Betts, the wonderful creative writing instructor at UNC-CH and distinguished author, I'm her most published former student.

Back to Jordan's story and who's reading it. Now hopefully everyone who gets a copy of the paper will be drawn to the story but I guess there's no way to adequately determine who's reading the hard copy. But the web story does have a number count and it's both informative and maybe encouraging along with a healthy dose of discouragement.

In the first 12 hours that the story has been posted,well over 400 "hits" on the story have taken place. The good news is that I'm running ahead by a few votes of the story about the young Wisconsin deer hunter who had his hat shot off but wasn't injured. The bad news is I'm trailing the story about an 81 year old woman punching a police officer in the face. Ok, so as I'm plotting my massive media campaign expect to see occasional references to deer hunters and angry 81 years old grannies.