By By JONATHAN CLAYBORNE
Staff Writer
Editor’s note: This profile continues a series of candidate profiles.
It’s not every day that the president of the United States grants an audience to a state senator in absentia.
That’s exactly what happened to state Sen. Marc Basnight, D-Dare, with a little help from a congressman.
On Feb. 24, Basnight sent a letter to President Barack Obama. The letter decried a further delay in the replacement of the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge over Oregon Inlet.
Basnight asked Obama to “urge” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood “and their respective agencies” to accept the bridge design and let the replacement go forward.
According to Schorr Johnson, Basnight’s spokesman, U.S. Rep. G.K. Butterfield, D-N.C., hand delivered the letter to the president, who read it while the congressman looked on.
Obama asked one of his top policy advisers to look over the letter and contact Butterfield’s office about the issue, Johnson related.
“The president presumably gets thousands of letters every day, and we know how extremely busy and spread thin he is, so it pleased Sen. Basnight greatly to know for sure that the president had read the letter himself and asked a top aide to look into it,” Johnson said Wednesday in a telephone interview.
While the letter is no guarantee the federal government will bow to the state’s request, the way the document was delivered and received is, perhaps, a measure of the clout that Basnight wields.
As president pro tempore of the state Senate, Basnight enjoys unrivaled power in the government of the Old North State. In that position, Basnight appoints senators to committees that study special issues or pass legislative measures for consideration on the floor.
That authority alone gives him enormous influence over the Senate’s role in hammering out the all-important state budget.
Basnight is known to work closely with members of the state House as well, meaning his authority is felt in both chambers.
Beyond his power in the Legislature, Basnight, who has served more than a quarter-century in the Senate, is something of a standard-bearer for the Democratic Party in North Carolina — a measure of success for a party that has held a majority or benefited from power-sharing agreements in the House and Senate for more than a century.
Though he ran unopposed in 2008, the senator raised more than $1.7 million through his campaign committee. Of that, he distributed in excess of $1.325 million to the North Carolina Democratic Party, campaign reports show.
Basnight has repeatedly been ranked the state’s most effective senator by the North Carolina Center for Public Policy Research. The center ranks lawmakers on a biennial basis.
Yet, some local officials say that Basnight’s effectiveness doesn’t always translate to action on a local level.
“He’s done some things for us, but he could do more,” Jerry Langley, chairman of the Beaufort County commissioners, told the Daily News in February.
“I’d like to see him do more things for Beaufort County,” Langley continued. “It’s like the Janet Jackson song ‘What Have You Done for Me Lately?’”
Basnight also attracts Republican challengers on a regular basis.
This year, his GOP opponent is Hood Richardson, a Beaufort County commissioner.
“This guy is beatable,” Richardson told the Daily News in February. “He’s never had anybody run against him for real.”
The senator has been plagued by questions about his health, having revealed that he has a rare, unnamed nerve affliction.
“I’m the same today I was last year and two years ago, so it doesn’t change,” Basnight said in an interview with the Daily News late last year. “It is what it is. I wish we had a name, and then I could tell you, but they’re unable to give it a name.”
Basnight’s doctor has said the disease isn’t fatal and isn’t affecting the senator’s cognitive abilities.
Defying rumors that he wouldn’t be a candidate, Basnight filed to run for re-election this year.
“I am running again to serve the people and if they see fit to re-elect me, I will continue to serve them as I have done in the past,” he said in a written statement released to the media.