Don’t look now, but the GOP guv race may get more contentious than the ongoing spat on the Dem side.

Mayor Pat McCrory was immediately slapped down by Fred Smith’s camp after trying to play the statesman card. McCrory said as he filed his paperwork: “We’re not running against each other. We’re running against the culture of the state capital.”

Not quite. Look, Pat you are running against each other, that is why there is a primary. Someone wins, the rest go home. I know you are not used to competitive contests here in Charlotte, but that is the nature of a statewide campaign.

On the second point, you have half a point. The ultimate target is the corrupt and criminal status quo in Raleigh, but you need to call it that. You keep dancing around “the culture of the state capital” without calling it for what it is — a bunch of petty crooks leading the state to ruin.

Meanwhile, I had high hopes for a story entitled “Who the hell is Pat McCrory?” but the Creative Loafing cover story is a damn mess. The idea of heading east down 74 to find out what voters outside the Uptown bubble think of Pat has merit, but reporter Cheris Hodges is not up to the task.

She makes a good point about the limits of the Charlotte media market and gets a couple good man-in-a-booth snippets, but stumbles badly when she evidently mistakes Dear Leader Hood for a local columnist of The Laurinburg Exchange. Hodges seems to think that Hood’s syndicated column, which runs all over North Carolina, reflects local interest in McCrory and the guv race.

She recovers that gaffe with some good quotes from McCrory, who doggedly resists the c-word — and not the one Jane Fonda used on The Today Show:

But what about his reputation? Many in the state consider McCrory a moderate. While that may play well in Charlotte, more conservative areas of the state just aren’t feeling it.

McCrory says, “I don’t like labels. I think that the pundits love to try and stick a person under a certain title or label, which is often inaccurate. I am a Republican, and I am convinced that people are looking for a leader — not necessarily agreement on all the issues. I think the best compliment that I get is: ‘Mayor, I don’t agree with you on all the issues, but you’re a good leader.’ I’ll take that compliment any day. I’m not going to try and appease every interest group in North Carolina. I try to do what is best and let the people evaluate my job.”

That’s how McCrory describes the way he’s run the city of Charlotte over the last decade.

“I have stepped on the toes of the far right and the far left,” he says. “I anticipate doing the same thing as governor.”

This is the same riff McCrory has used for over a year now, long before he got in a GOP primary race. Again that little detail. The mayor is telling conservative voters statewide, Vote for me, I’ll step on your toes. That might be an acceptable message for November, but I fail to see how that helps him in May.

Especially if we see independents crossing over to vote in the Democratic primary in order to cast a vote for Barack Obama. The pool of moderate voters McCrory is trying to reach gets very small.

As we’ve said for weeks, Pat McCrory does not have to run as a conservative to win the nomination. He has to find some issue on which to take a conservative position, however. And he certainly cannot run as actively hostile or indifferent to a good chunk of the electorate he is vying to represent.

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