RALEIGH – Bev Perdue needed a ladder. Instead, she brought a shovel.

Having dug herself deeply into a political hole over the past two weeks on the key issue of offshore drilling for oil and natural gas, Perdue came into Tuesday night’s live television debate with Pat McCrory needing to offer a more coherent position. She needed to explain how she could go from being “100 percent opposed” to drilling off the North Carolina coast just last week to being, well, for drilling this week if Congress and a governmental panel say it’s okay – maybe. And she needed to perform better than in her first TV debate with McCrory back in June.

During the hourlong forum on WTVD, the Triangle’s ABC affiliate, Perdue did herself few favors. Overly programmed with soundbites, she overused some and stuffed others into unrelated topics. After each exchange, her face broke out in her trademark smile. Grins and gentility are worth something in North Carolina politics, but they’re no substitute for a relevant message, expressed clearly and convincingly.

Both candidates had some important rhetorical goals going into the debate. McCrory needed to tie Perdue to an unpopular Democratic administration in Raleigh while keeping the discussion focused on issues where he believes he enjoys an advantage, such as energy and crime. Perdue needed to tie McCrory to an unpopular Republican administration in Washington while making him look risky, unproven, or indifferent to middle-class anxieties about college affordability and health care.

McCrory accomplished his appointed tasks smoothly. After Perdue proclaimed herself “the health care leader in North Carolina for the past eight years,” McCrory referred several times to the failures of “this administration in Raleigh” over those eight years, on health care and other matters. Basically, she set herself up. The mayor kept it light, choosing a few opportunities to be personal or passionate – when he discussed the recent death of a mental patient in a state hospital, for example, or his attendance at policemen’s funerals – but otherwise seeming relaxed and confident.

His energy policies were straightforward and easy to remember: drill, build new power plants, and reinvest the proceeds of oil and natural gas exploration in coastal infrastructure.

Perdue did what she was supposed to, as well, but it was as though the two were in a footrace, McCrory was leaping effortlessly over the hurdles, and she kept knocking them down in a furious effort to keep up. Her convoluted discussion of drilling just sounded shifty and insincere. It didn’t have to be. John McCain flipped his position on the issue, too, but simply explained that $4 a gallon gas had changed his mind. That’s what Perdue should have done.

Instead, the lieutenant governor boasted and bludgeoned. I lost count of the number of times she began her sentences in the first person. “I’m so good at this,” she said at one point, referring to her coalition-building skills. “I’m shameless,” she said when touting her website. When a politician uses such language ironically, to poke fun at political arrogance, it can be disarmingly funny. Perdue wasn’t being ironic. She was being authentic.

Then there were the attacks. Someone advised Perdue to go after McCrory for being against “child health insurance,” without bothering to explain what that could possibly mean or citing any evidence. (I think it must have something to do with the S-CHIP program, but to the viewers the charge couldn’t have made much sense.) Someone told her to say her energy policies were “responsible not reckless” and that she was for “safety first,” so she repeated the phrases several times, sounding a bit like George H.W. Bush – or perhaps Dana Carvey’s impersonation of Bush – saying “message: I care” back in that infamous 1992 debate.

And forgetting during an earlier discussion of education policy to make her previous, absurd claim about the fiscal impact of school vouchers, she shoehorned it in at the last minute, just before the closing statements, looking clumsy and desperate rather than like a confident champion of public education.

I’ve debated Pat McCrory before, on a policy – rail transit – where we have continued to disagree. I came away with a healthy respect for his manifest ability to frame issues and craft messages, as well as the sense that whatever vulnerabilities he had lay in pushing him hard on details. Perdue, a longtime state legislator, should have challenged his knowledge of state issues while exhibiting a command of substance and detail, underlining the “risky and unproven” message her campaign and out-of-state allies are trying to sell.

That’s not the strategy Perdue chose. She chose to preen and peddle meaningless soundbites. And it cost her.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.