In it for the long haul.

• Author: Stroud, Lisa
• Position: Jim Long, North Carolina's insurance commissioner

Politics, like the industry he regulates, is risky business, but North Carolina's insurance commissioner says he's IN IT FOR THE LONG HAUL

Bolstered by a big slice of chicken breast followed by lemon meringue pie, the heavy-set man who ranks among the nation's most powerful insurance regulators was his jovial self. Four times during his 45-minute speech, Jim Long threatened to yank the license of one or another of the 235 insurance agents assembled at a downtown Charlotte hotel.

He was joking, of course. The luncheon address to the Charlotte Chapter of Chartered Property and Casualty Underwriters gave him a chance to tout his successes and his audience an opportunity to check out the politician who regulates their livelihood.

Jim Long, a man who at 51 has thrived in the public arena most of his life, can crack jokes with the best of them. But this time, the laughs were muffled. Even his best lines had a hard edge of tension to them. With insolvencies at record levels, medical bills skyrocketing and some giant insurers teetering, insurance isn't a laughing matter these days. Except to Jim Long.

His timing, he told the agents, has been impeccable. He took office as insurance commissioner in late 1984, just in time for the liability crisis, when finding coverage became an act of desperation for many businesses. Then last January, he became president of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the industry's most influential regulatory group, just in time for the insolvency crisis.

But it's the timing of the worst insurance scandal in recent state history that could wipe the grin off even Jim Long's face. Nothing has surfaced to suggest he benefited from anything the now insolvent, Kinston-based Interstate Casualty Co. did, and he's so confident he'll come out clean that he invited the State Bureau of Investigation to take a look for itself.

But the Interstate Casualty collapse remains his Achilles' heel, raising obvious questions about his judgment. It pokes a hole in his long-held belief that states are better able to regulate insurance than the federal government. It overshadows his achievement in opening up a department that was run with a bunker mentality for 12 years by his predecessor, John Ingram.

Most important for this yellow-dog Democrat, whose master and mastery is politics, is how the scandal threatens his oft-stated goal of staying insurance commissioner until 2009, when he turns 70. He once told a reporter he'd rather be commissioner of agriculture -- "if you look at me, you can tell I know a lot more about eating than I do about insurance" -- but that was just Jim Long the good old boy, shucking and jiving, clowning around.

"I plan on staying right here until I retire," he vows, "God willing and the voters keep putting me in every four years."

Already, three opponents -- Republicans J. Mike Causey and Larry Rogers and Democrat Charles Paxton -- say they want to send him home to Alamance County.

"I think he is very vulnerable in the next election," says Robert Brawley, a six-term Republican state representative who runs a Mooresville insurance agency. "The Interstate Casualty issue will weigh heavily. He had the authority to prevent what happened at Interstate unless it can be proven there was out-and-out fraud. Even if fraud was involved, why didn't they detect it?"

"He's got egg on his face," admits David Wood, a professor of insurance at Appalachian State University.

Long responds that he's not Superman. "We're never going to be able to stop the thief," he says. "You must prosecute them."

Since he took office, Long's department has conducted 1,600 investigations that have led to 1,300 indictments and $3 million in restitution. But ask what the record is on putting dishonest companies and agents out of business or behind bars and you get the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug of the shoulders. With the complexity of the department, a spokesman says, it would take too long to compile that information.

Jim Long is a classic case of a man caught in the middle -- the regulator who, on one hand, must work responsibly with the industry he regulates and, on the other, owes his job to voters who see his role primarily as their champion against that industry. To not only survive but thrive, he must satisfy his dual constituencies with both profit and protection.

In these troubled times, it's a tightrope that must be walked with all the fancy footwork and finesse a master politician has at his command. And Jim Long, it would seem, has the right genes for the job. Politics has been a way of life for his family for four generations.

Distant relatives include Jacob A. Long, a one-term state legislator in the 1890s who, during Reconstruction, had helped organize the Ku Klux Klan in Alamance County, and Jacob Elmer...