RALEIGH – One of the greatest assets you can have in public life is an inner voice telling your outer voice to clam up. Politicians and other public figures almost invariably get into the worst sort of trouble by continuing to talk well past the point of diminishing returns (as do plenty of people in their private lives, present company very much included).

Our confessional, Oprah-fied culture certainly doesn’t help matters. When in doubt, the therapeutic impulse suggests, talk it out. Only sometimes what you end up doing is interfering with the natural process of scabbing over a wound, in this case a political or interpersonal one.

On the other hand, when candor is required, some of these same talkative people fall suddenly silent — because they’ve done something they don’t want to admit, and arrogantly believe they can keep things a secret.

Today’s case in point is Kevin Geddings, a public-relations consultant and radio broadcaster from Charlotte. Formerly the chief of staff to South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges, a Democrat whose election in 1998 was widely attributed to his support for a lottery, Geddings had helped led the fight for government-run gambling in the Palmetto State before heading northward.

Some weeks ago, Geddings received an appointment from NC House Speaker Jim Black to the new state lottery commission. In his initial statements, Geddings denied a business relationship with prospective lottery vendors, while admitting to a personal friendship with Alan Middleton, vice president of Scientific Games. Then later, he disclosed that he had had a previous business relationship with Middleton, but that it had predated Middleton’s employment at the New York-based lottery contractor.

At this point in the controversy, Geddings did not appear to have uttered bald untruths about his past ties but neither had he been as forthcoming as he should have been regarding a key player at Scientific Games and in the controversy surrounding Black and his key political aide, Meredith Norris. Were calls for his resignation from the lottery commission too strong a response to the misstep? Geddings certainly thought so, excoriating Republicans and anti-lottery editorialists in the major newspapers for suggesting that he resign. He insisted that he had done nothing wrong and that the rigid enforcement of a “no prior connections” rule for lottery commissioners could actually harm the interests of the state.

“I hope that the speaker will actually find somebody who can serve who doesn’t have any relationships with anybody who knows anything about running the lottery,” Geddings said Tuesday on the “Keith Larson Show” on Charlotte’s WBT-AM. “I actually think it helped that I knew something about a lottery, but, clearly in this day and age, that’s not an asset.”

His statement on the radio was framed in the past tense because Geddings was announcing his decision to resign from the lottery commission. Oddly, also on Tuesday the Raleigh News & Observer ran an indignant letter from Geddings in which he expressed no plans to resign. The paper had lifted its usual 30-day rule between submissions to allow Geddings essentially to extend remarks he had made, already at significant length, in a N&O letter on Oct. 19, in which he stated emphatically: “I won’t resign.”

Geddings admitted in that initial letter that the explicitness and virulence of his rebuttal to the newspaper violated the usual rules of public relations. Yes, indeed – had he exercised better rhetorical judgment, he would have been much better off. (Fair warning to any potential governor: you might want to think twice before appointing me to any such controversial post. I’d probably talk too much, as well.)

But, as it turned out, Geddings may have embarrassed himself with his blather but that alone didn’t necessarily force an end to his short career as a commissioner. What probably helped was advance warning of the revelation yesterday, hours after his announced resignation, that he did, indeed, have a business relationship with Scientific Games, a public-relations contract during this legislative session. So he talked too much — but did not talk candidly when required.

And so Kevin Geddings is the talk of the town. Not in a good way.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.