McCrory for Governer

Yesterday, Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory's campaign sent out an email announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination for Governor. In the email was an image of the campaign logo in which "Governor" was misspelled as "Governer". When asked about this by the press, you're supposed to say "Oops, thanks, we'll get that fixed," and make some self-deprecating joke about not having had enough coffee yet. That's not quite what happened.

"There's no way this was misspelled," said Victoria Smith, McCrory's campaign manager. She said a hacker had accessed the campaign's computer to alter the word. Smith said someone has been hacking McCrory's mayoral Web site for six months, though the campaign had not contacted authorities.

Then, a campaign spokeswoman, who was with McCrory as he announced his candidacy in Jamestown, said there was no hacker after all — that an overworked graphic designer had simply made a mistake when designing the logo.

That was not the end.

Smith, reached by phone, insisted the spokeswoman was wrong. The errant spelling — which had been fixed even as the e-mail sat in reporters' computers — was indeed the work of a hacker. She said the hacker must have re-hacked the campaign to fix the error.

Finally, McCrory himself weighed in. There was no hacker, he told a reporter. The campaign's designer spelled the word wrong.

This all should have been no big deal, a minor embarrassment at most, and not something that would get written up in the paper. But as they say, it's never the crime, it's the cover-up. And a very badly-handled cover-up as well.

Mary points out that going around and telling people that your IT security is nonexistent and that you haven't really done anything to fix it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the campaign. Certainly, it's a far worse approach than admitting to a simple typo. The fact that the campaign manager that McCrory hired was oblivious to this fact doesn't inspire much confidence, either. And then for that campaign manager to publicly bitch-slap the campaign spokesperson who tries to control the damage? Sheesh. I bet it's a fun day at campaign HQ.

The campaign's finance director must be thrilled with how this went down, too. I bet people will be lining up in droves to give online now that the campaign has used the "H" word.