RALEIGH — The question of where Mike Easley is at any particular point in time has become something of a parlor game, and a punch line, in Raleigh political circles. I don’t mean where the governor is on particular issues of public-policy concern — though that’s sometimes hard to divine, too. I mean where he is physically. Geographically.

Speaking of, Democrats and Republicans are questioning why Easley isn’t attending this week’s Democratic national convention in Boston. Some weeks ago, many of the same critics pointed out the conspicuous absence of the state’s top elected Democrat at a Raleigh rally featuring John Kerry and his new vice-presidential pick, John Edwards.

The Easley administration always has a cover story. For the Kerry-Edwards rally, it was a family reunion (which apparently did happen but could not reasonably be viewed as precluding a gubernatorial drop-by). For the Democratic convention, it is the need for Easley to be in the state to make some important economic-development announcements. “Overall, the governor believes he can better serve North Carolina by staying here and working to bring jobs to North Carolina,” Easley aide Jay Reiff told the Associated Press.

This is dutiful, plausible spin. And no one believes it, at least not in the press corps and among the political class. But here’s the most important part: the Easley administration doesn’t want them to.

You see, the business about Mike Easley being missing from the ceremonial circuit for four years, about him not playing the political game as it has traditionally been played, and about how he doesn’t want to be too closely associated with John Kerry or the national Democratic ticket — all of that is, well, part of the plan. I’m not saying that the image doesn’t also fit the personality of the man. Those who know him say it does. But even if it didn’t, I would venture to guess that the political advice would have been the same.

The “missing-in-action” thesis gets old-time pols upset, but let’s face it: most North Carolinians don’t care much for old-time politics. Busybodies-aren’t-us. Plus, the fact that Easley’s smiling visage and accent-laden voice haven’t exactly been pervasive in North Carolina circles is associated with the fact that he has weathered four years of recession, job loss, and fiscal miscues such as tax hikes without generating the kind of negative image among voters that, for example, Gray Davis had among Californians. Many voters don’t associate Easley with what’s wrong with North Carolina because they don’t associate him with much of anything.

I’m not saying that the governor’s policies don’t deserve some blame, or that blame won’t become afixed to his administration during the coming re-election campaign. I’m just making an observation.

With regard to Kerry and the national Democrats, the Easley folks want to see stories that take note of his nonattendance. It reinforces their own desired and probably valuable distinction between Mike Easley, the centrist-sounding North Carolina Democrat, and those lefties in Massachusetts. So every time his Democratic and Republican critics hope to snag and bloody Easley with the charge that he isn’t spending enough time slapping backs, particularly those of liberals like Kerry, he just nestles ever more comfortably in his briar patch.

Which is in Southport, I think.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.