The Hunt club.

• Author: Whittington, Dennis
• Position: North Carolina Governor James G. Hunt's prescriptions for economic growth - Includes related article on former Governor James G. Martin

Our Mover and Shaker of the Year convinced the top cats of business that a leopard can change its spots.

These are strange times: The Berlin Wall has fallen. The Soviet Union has collapsed. Reynolds makes cigarettes in Poland and Hungary. And Jim Hunt thinks government might not have all the answers. "I've become more distrustful," he says, "of bureaucracy and government solutions to problems."

A dozen years ago, an actor-turned-politician parlayed that theme into eight years in the White House. But coming from a Democrat who built his career on the bedrock of big government, it sounds like heresy. Still, it worked to rally business behind him in winning an unprecedented third term as governor. He convinced his backers that somehow, somewhere during the eight years he was out of office, he'd seen the light -- the way things really work, as opposed to how government is supposed to make them work.

A lifetime on the stump has left Hunt rarely at a loss for words. He can quickly spill the canned message on why he returned to politics: "I had become so fed up with things not working, so angry at our country not being competitive, our people not having enough good jobs and our children not being prepared for their future, that I felt I had to come back." But pressed to explain what caused his conversion, he pauses. Rather than a crisis or grand event, the "lightning bolt" came in a Raleigh speech early last year by Eugene Gwaltney, chairman and CEO of Russell Corp., an Alabama-based apparel company.

"He said he has a rule: If you're a parent of school-age children and you work in one of his plants, then you have to belong to the PTA at your child's school and you have to attend the meetings. It struck me right there that government can talk about sanctions or whatever, but it's private employers who can do more to influence people's behavior," Hunt says. "|Business leaders~ have much more leverage than government does."

Preaching the gospel of good schools, the born-again politician pushed hard on an issue that appealed to a wide range of voters -- and especially to the enlightened self-interest of business and industry. It was also one that cut across party lines. O. William Fenn, a Republican and retired president of LADD Furniture Industries in High Point, met the former governor five years ago on an airplane. He was on his way back from a trade mission to the Far East sponsored by the Reagan administration; Hunt was in the adjoining seat, returning from an unrelated business trip.

Twelve hours later, Fenn was a rock-solid Hunt supporter. "I found him to be an extremely good listener. If something makes sense to him, he subscribes to it." Fenn told Hunt what manufacturers need is for government to do a better job of educating preschoolers and providing job training for adults. Both became cornerstones of Hunt's campaign promise to improve North Carolina's educational system.

First Union CEO Ed Crutchfield Jr. had a similar experience when Hunt came to his office in Charlotte looking for support. "He told me that his first priority was early childhood education. He had four other priorities, all of which were related to education. But I said, 'When you talk about early childhood education, you can stop right there as far as I'm concerned, because that's what we need to get going with.'"

The business community invested heavily in his campaign, which raised more than $4 million -- much of it from executives and their political action committees -- to win a $91,938-a-year job. In a year when North Carolina rejected the Democratic presidential ticket's call for change, it embraced Jim Hunt, the changed man, making the silver-haired lawyer, cattle farmer and, no way around it, professional politician BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA's Mover and Shaker of the Year.

It was a masterful performance, particularly in a year when calling a candidate a politician bordered on slander. Yet it's hard to find someone more deserving of that label than Jim Hunt, who was senior-class president at Rock Ridge High School in 1955, student body president at N.C. State in 1958-59 and led the state's Young Democrats before being elected lieutenant governor in 1972, governor in 1976 and again in 1980. Even after he left office in 1985 (after losing his bid for the U.S. Senate) and became a partner in the Raleigh law firm of Poyner & Spruill, he clung tightly to the political process, lobbying for and counseling companies seeking to influence the state's legislators.

Last fall, his Republican opponent, Lt. Gov. Jim Gardner, tried to score points on Hunt's subsequent career as a play-for-pay political pipeline. (Hunt, on the other hand, jumped all over Gardner's checkered business record.) The ex-governor wouldn't say how much he was paid as a lobbyist -- his firm's clients included ThermalKEM, RJR Nabisco, Pepsico, Martin Marietta and American Airlines -- only that: "It's going to cost me a fortune to come back and serve as governor again."

What he made, he says, is not as important as what his work taught him about business...