Reply #13: More of an administrator than a politician- very low key and not ambitious [View All]

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He keeps such a low profile that it is hard to judge how he stands or how committed he really is on some key Democratic issues.

This article (on his own website!) does a good job of describing why he has been nicknamed :

'The ghost'

Easley's most visible departure from the patterns of past governors is that he regularly skips big events that others expect him to attend. Such absences have ruffled political insiders and left some less willing to help him get things done.
But Easley's public profile also worries the governor's own allies, who say he has missed too many chances to promote the agenda he claims so passionately to be fighting for.

Easley's schedule speaks for itself. Every Thursday or Friday, his press office issues his plans for the following week. One hundred such schedules have been published since his 2001 inauguration. Thirty-one have been blank.

Consider these absences:

On March 8, 2002, Easley skipped the annual conference of the North Carolina Association of Educators.

Also March 8, he missed the memorial for the first soldier from North Carolina killed in Afghanistan.

He was absent from the funerals of two lawmakers who died in office: state Sen. Luther Jordan, a Democrat from Wilmington, and state Rep. Larry Justus, a Republican from Hendersonville.

He missed the annual meeting of the state NAACP, and the annual banquet of the General Baptist State Convention.

He skipped the Wright Brothers centennial kickoff ceremony in Kill Devil Hills on Dec 17.

And his most glaring absence was on Nov. 5, when North Carolina Democrats gathered at the North Raleigh Hilton to celebrate its few election night victories and console its headliner, U.S. Senate candidate Erskine Bowles, on his loss to Republican Elizabeth Dole.

Even those sympathetic to the bewildering schedule demands placed on a sitting governor say this one seems particularly hard to find.

http://www.mikeeasley.org/pages/pgs_profiles/prof_lowprofile.htm