RALEIGH – To get a sense of how Bob Orr fits into the 2008 race for North Carolina governor, take a look at what Cabarrus County blogger and Republican activist Justin Thibault discovered in the course of picking his preferred candidate.

Thibault, who blogs at Cabarrus Cheap Seats and also edits a key aggregator of North Carolina political blogs, counted up the total number of words on the “Issues” pages of the four GOP candidates for governor. The relative newcomer to the race, Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory, had only about 300 words on his policy positions. The citizen-activist outsider, Salisbury attorney Bill Graham, had just over 1,000.

State Sen. Fred Smith, running as an experienced leader at the state and local levels, offered nearly 9,400 words worth of issue discussion and policy prescriptions. And Orr, the former Supreme Court Justice? His “Issues” word count came to more than 20,000.

Orr can speak and write succinctly when he needs to. As a young man, he put in a brief stint as a television reporter covering state government. Later, after leaving the high court to become executive director of the N.C. Institute for Constitutional Law – in the interest of full disclosure, I helped recruit him to that post – Orr became an effective panelist on “N.C. Spin,” the statewide political talk show where brevity is a boon and windbags quickly deflate.

It’s telling, however, that when it comes to laying out a vision for state government in North Carolina, Bob Orr can literally write volumes. For one thing, his 18 years as an appellate judge in Raleigh have given the candidate a unique perspective on many current political controversies: mental-health reform, educational finance, tax policy, trust-fund shenanigans, and government corruption. Indeed, on some of these issues, Orr either wrote the key Supreme Court decision guiding state decisionmaking or, perhaps as importantly, he penned a spirited, sometimes bracing dissent.

For another thing, Orr is naturally drawn to such tasks as studying complex issues, analyzing alternatives, and constructing arguments for change. If he hadn’t been a judge, he might well have made a career as a university professor – or, horror of horrors, a think tanker.

A native of Hendersonville and once a lawyer and community leader in the Asheville area, Orr hopes to attract the support of voters in Western NC who often feel left out of the political discussion in Raleigh, as well as of voters who seek detail, substance, and political experience (he’s the only Republican in the field who has won statewide elections in the past). On the issues, Orr offers a broadly conservative agenda with some unique flourishes:

• Use tax reform, deregulation, and innovation to create a broader market for private health insurance while reforming education and licensing systems to meet shortages of key medical personnel such as nurses and general practitioners.

• Build a new state tax system that eschews special incentives for a few corporations in favor of lower marginal rates applied to a broader, fairer tax base.

• Restructure the Department of Transportation to spend state dollars more wisely, including a redirection of highway funds to the most-congested thoroughfares and a greater use of user charges and public-private partnerships.

• Introduce merit pay, stronger management at the district and school levels, clearer lines of accountability to Raleigh, and more charter schools into North Carolina education.

• Strengthen the state’s open-meetings and public-records law to combat misconduct in government, including penalties for officials who violate the law and fee recovery for those who must sue to obtain records, while limiting the terms of legislative leaders and introducing competition into legislative races through redistricting reform.

• Enforce existing laws and regulations keeping illegal immigrants from inappropriately accessing state services, while tallying the cost of mandatory services to illegals in order to pursue reimbursement from Washington, including if necessary a lawsuit against the federal government.

On that last point, as Orr is hardly a strident politician, some were surprised at how combative he sounds on immigration policy. But as he explained his position in a recent interview, Orr does understand the reasoning behind such proposals as giving longtime students in the state public schools access to college and university, even if they were brought to the country illegally. “There is not a more volatile issue out there in the election than immigration – and probably not a more complex issue,” he says. But state officials “can’t selectively pick and choose which laws to enforce.”

As a judge, Bob Orr is used to making – and writing – complicated decisions. He’s hoping Republican primary voters value that experience.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.