RALEIGH — I’m a sucker for wordplay. I appreciate a good pun, and a bad pun possibly even more. I like to see old, archaic words rejuvenated, or at least reanimated for an evening’s constitutional around the boneyard. I prefer Cole Porter to Coldplay. I enjoy lists of synonyms, antonyms, homographs (words that are spelled the same but differ in meaning, derivation, or pronunication), homophones (words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings), and contronyms (words that are simultaneously either homographs or homophones and also serve as their own antonyms, such as cleave and rent).

Today’s term of art is heteronym. This refers to a particular subset of homographs: words spelled the same but differing in meaning and pronounciation, though the meanings can be somewhat related due to a similar derivation.

And today’s heteronym is “intrigue.” If you put the accent on the first syllable, it’s a noun. It refers to a “secret scheme or machination,” the “practice of engaging in secret schemes,” or a “clandestine love affair.” If you put the accent on the second syllable, “intrigue” becomes a transitive verb meaning “to trick or cheat,” to “entangle,” or “to arouse the interest, desire, or curiosity of.”

Now that we’ve got the appetizer out of the way, here’s the main course: one reason why I find politics so intriguing is because it’s so intriguing.

(Whoops, I snagged another bit of the appetizer. If you convert either version of “intrigue” into a verb, it becomes a homonym — it is spelled and pronounced the same but has a different meaning.)

What I mean is that I continue to be intrigued by the fact that political candidates, operatives, and actors have so much going on under the surface of what they do that it is possible to be surprised on any given day by any given one of them, regardless of how carefully you think you are paying attention. This is not to say that politics consists of grand, gnostic, and successful conspiracies — my head remains unadorned by metallic tissue — but rather that for all of its significance politics remains, in part, a game in which planning, strategy, and discipline matter a great deal.

Here are some observations that occurred to me over the past couple of days as news broke about state or national elections:

* The current fundraising blitz by President George W. Bush is as much about other Republican candidates as it is about his own. If this Christian Science Monitor report is accurate, the Bush campaign still plans to adhere to federal spending limits and receive federal matching funds in the general election campaign next fall. To break the primary spending limit, as Bush will and Howard Dean and John Kerry have also said they will do, is not to forego federal matching funds in the general election. I didn’t know that. What this means is that if Bush or one of the other candidates gets through the primary season without spending down his primary-election kitty, he can’t roll it over to the general election (unless he plans to break the limits altogether) but he can give it to his political party.

That means that every time the president has one of those big-ticket fundraisers, he is potentially raising money for the very congressional and state candidates who can be heard grumbling about the effects of Bush’s vacuum cleaner on the availability of campaign cash. The difference is one of control. If parties are the source of funds for candidates, rather than donors directly, then parties can pick their battles more strategically across a state or across the nation. Parties can also choose to expend dollars for coordinated, get-out-the-vote efforts — which are more important now than they used to be, given that political pros in both parties now believe the pool of truly swing voters is shrinking and thus elections will increasingly turn on turnout.

(Uh, sorry for the slip on “turn on turnout.” That wordplay morsel was too scrumptious to pass up.)

* GOP gubernatorial candidate Bill Cobey “won” the straw poll Saturday at a gathering of state Republicans in Cary. Of course, a straw poll isn’t really an election. You don’t win by attracting the votes of attendees. You win by attracting your attendees to vote. Still, those who deny that straw polls are significant are either unlikely to win them or uninterested in what straw polls actually signify.

They don’t signify popular support. For all their inherent flaws, random surveys of the general voting population are the only metric for that. But straw polls do speak to a campaign’s organization. In this case, it is also significant that among the hundreds of North Carolina Republicans, probably disproportionately from the Triangle, who were able and willing to plunk down $125 a plate for a fundraiser, most (52 percent) turned out to be Cobey supporters. Ballantine’s folks showed up, too, comprising about a third of the vote. And Richard Vinroot? He and Fern Shubert got 4 percent, slightly behind George Little.

But Vinroot is still overwhelmingly the candidate with the highest profile among average voters.

* Just when you think that Gov. Mike Easley might finally have gotten the hang of running a state government, along comes another reminder that the right hand doesn’t always know who the left foot is kicking. On Saturday, the Fayetteville Observer reported that Easley’s transportation secretary, Lindo Tippett, was still in favor of studying the idea of charging tolls on Interstate 95 to finance needed improvements. He denied that he or the administration had actually come out in favor of tolls in the first place, but he also clearly indicated that improvements were needed, the alternative of a gasoline-tax hike was unlikely, and “there is a trend toward user fees throughout the government.”

A day later, The Charlotte Observer had Easley ruling out the idea of tolls on I-95. The story noted that Tippett had denied ever specifically endorsing the idea, but it also, again, had the transportation secretary essentially making the case for tolls as the best of three bad alternatives.

That’s the wacky Easley administration for you, a living embodiment of a contronym.

* Finally, there’s an intriguing intrigue underway in the Democratic presidential race. John Kerry’s campaign is imploding. Howard Dean’s is exploding (in both senses of the homonym). Richard Gephardt is contesting Iowa but has no presence in New Hampshire. Wesley Clark is sounding idiotic and has no campaign to speak of in either state. John Edwards often speaks of his campaign in each, but the vast majority of voters there apparently don’t.

Does that mean what true-believing members of the He-Man Clinton-Haters’ Club thinks it means? Newsweek is on the case. The real question comes down to this:

Will Hillary flog the Democratic presidential field? Or will she flog the Democratic presidential field?

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