The 2008 campaign for governor of North Carolina came to Person County this week in the personage of former N. C. Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr.

Orr, who is seeking the Republican nomination in the GOP gubernatorial primary next May, technically was in town Monday for an ostensibly non-political talk to the Roxboro Kiwanis Club. But taking the two-birds-with-one-stone approach, Orr stopped by The Courier-Times to talk about his bid to ride his 18-year career as an appellate jurist to the state’s highest office.

One of three Republican candidates announced thus far — the others are state Sen. Fred Smith of Clayton and Salisbury lawyer Bill Graham — Orr already is seeing press notices comparing him to former Gov. Jim Holshouser, who came out of the Tar Heel State’s western mountains to upset popular Democrat Skipper Bowles in 1972. The victory made Holshouser North Carolina’s first Republican governor since 1896 at age 38.

Orr, 60, who grew up on Hendersonville, chuckled and responded good-naturedly to The C-T’s inquiry as to whether he would be the “21st century Jim Holshouser.”

“I would love to be the 21st century Jim Holshouser,” he said, adding, “Certainly there is some reasonable comparison, although I do think Jim was a whole lot younger in 1972 than I am now. But obviously we’re both from the western part of the state and I think a little bit of an underdog in one sense. … I don’t think anybody thought at the time that Jim could be elected. Yeah, I would be more than happy to surprise folks in November of 2008.”

Appointed to the N. C. Court of Appeals by another Republican governor, Jim Martin, in 1986, Orr pulled off his own GOP upset by retaining his seat against Democratic opposition in the 1988 election. Until then, no Republican had ever been elected to the N. C. Court of Appeals. And by again withstanding Democratic challenge in 1992, he became the first Republican in state history to win two judicial elections.

Two years later, Orr won election to the N.C. Supreme Court, and he repeated the feat in 2002. He stepped down from the high court in 2004 to become director of the new N. C. Institute for Constitutional Law.

Orr, who holds undergraduate and law degrees from UNC-Chapel Hill and formerly practiced law in Asheville, launched a gubernatorial exploratory effort last year and subsequently announced his candidacy in January. He resigned from the Institute for Constitutonal Law to concentrate on his campaign.

Now in the running for an office that is far more intensely political than judicial races typically are, Orr finds himself having to shape positions on multiple issues. But during his visit with The C- T, he cited two of particular interest — public education and economic development — maintaining reforms are needed in both areas.

Referring to public education as “inevitiably the most important issue that a governor deals with,” Orr observed, “Despite the good things that are going on in public education, I think any fair observation would show that there are major changes that need to come about, major reforms that need to be implemented in the public education realm.”

He lamented a “terrible dropout problem,” a testing program that “has not done a very good job in giving parents and administrators and the public a sense of whether our money’s being well spent in public education” and the state’s seemingly “hard time retaining teachers.”

Orr acknowledged that he has yet to formulate specific proposals, but he said he would focus on “the front end rather than the back end of the system” in addressing the dropout problem and efforts to improve the classroom environment so that teachers can “primarily focus on teaching” instead of having their attention divided by so many other duties.

“I think some of these solutions go back to getting kids better prepared coming into the system, having a better sense of what a disciplined class is, what expectations are,” Orr said.

While allowing that “there are no silver bullets” to resolve education issues, Orr went on to say, “My concern is that over the past number of years the solution has been to come up with a catchy program or a catchy title and throw a little bit of money at it, throw a little more money at the salary issue for teachers and hope that that’s going to solve it. … If you look at the competitive environment around the world, we have to go about educating our kids in a dramatically different, dramatically better way.”

Orr has become one of the state’s leading critics of government incentives for economic development. He firmly reiterated his position on that issue this week.

“The system’s broken,” he said. “The current system allows the state and local governments to be manipulated and played off against each other. We’re hemorrhaging hundreds of millions of dollars that could be going to education, could be going to Medicaid, other expenses that state and local government has to deal with. And no one seems to want to stand up and say, ‘OK, the system’s broken, let’s see if we can’t come up with some solutions that will make things better.’

“You simply cannot solve economic problems by throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at the Dells and the Googles and Mercks and then let smaller new business start ups shoulder the burden taxwise,” Orr insisted.

Orr said he hoped to make additional visits to Person County during the course of his campaign.