Less than 90 days to go!

Less than 90 days to go:

The campaign is getting ready to enter its last phases.

The issues that press me on a daily basis are surprising: Do you attend the Mule Day parade or the King Apple Festival or the Coon Dog Festival? Do you spend Labor Day with your family and friends at home? Answering these questions can drive one a bit crazy, especially when you have to work at the same time you are campaigning.

But the issues that are really important can’t lose their place in your head: the issues that drove me to run at the beginning. How do you make the legal system fair to its roots as grounding an entire political, economic and social system that is based on law and not on human caprice? And yet how do you also insure that the legal system, the implementation of the law as it is realized in court, is also fair to its most fundamental roots: the ancient impulses of Solomon, the human need to be simply fair so that transgressors pay a price and victims are protected?

That is the challenge. To keep what is important front and center, while still taking part in the mundane that can be the campaign.

Don’t get me wrong. Campaigning can be challenging and fun. I enjoy talking to editors (the Greensboro News Record and the Greenville Paper so far). Going through law firms has been educational, e.g. who knew there are over 200 intellectual property lawyers in Charlotte alone? (That says a lot about how important intellectual property, our ideas, has become in this age of change and innovation).

Talking to endorsement groups is also fun. The NC Trial Lawyers have finally interviewed me. Group talks and questions are challenging, e.g. often I am asked questions about child support.

The ignorance about the role the Court of Appeals plays in the legal system is pretty staggering. Most questioners want to know how judges would vote on federal constitutional issues – abortion, prayer in schools, and gay marriage. These are issues which are unlikely to be decided in the N.C. Court of Appeals. Most issues at this court involve criminal procedural defects. The Court of Appeals must apply the law fairly and consistently with both the US and NC constitutions. No other stand for a candidate makes any sense.

The other question I get is who’s going to win or how’s it going. The truth is: I have no idea.