A family legacy and the threat of scandal

The Scott family farm in the rumpled hills of North Carolina is to the Tarheel state what the Kennedy compound is to Massachusetts.

It is the place where generations of one of the most powerful political families in North Carolina has lived or retreated to over the decades - first W. Kerr Scott, a folk hero and family patriarch who served as governor in the early 1950s; then his son, Bob Scott, who was lieutenant governor and later governor.

Now it's Meg Scott Phipps, the state's powerful agricultural commissioner, who comes home to the barns and silos and undulating grasslands on a hilltop 30 miles east of Greensboro. Yet her career, like the farm, is showing signs of tarnish.

Ms. Phipps is embroiled in a scandal over campaign kickbacks that's marring her reputation and threatening her political future - including, it's presumed from bloodlines, a run for governor.

More broadly, as the scandal deepens, it raises questions around a family that is synonymous with bringing North Carolina farmers "out of the mud."

"My dad [former Governor Bob Scott] says this won't affect the Scott name, but I wish I could be so sure," says Kerr Scott, Phipps' brother, who now lives alone on the dairy farm in Alamance County.

The controversy, appropriately for the South, revolves around the State Fair. This month, two chief aides pleaded guilty to extorting money from carnival vendors to pay campaign debts, and Phipps is under federal investigation.

The affair cuts to the core of an agriculture boss's role and stature: elected by voters, she is not beholden to the governor for appointment, and while fellow Democrats stew, many of Phipps's rural constituents couldn't care less about the ongoing FBI investigation, as long as farming improves. The scuffle illustrates, too, a changing reality in Southern politics: As the South becomes less solidly Democratic, candidates face new pressure to spend lavishly on elections - and cater to special-interest groups, as the Phipps campaign is accused of doing with the carnival industry.

Phipps has vowed to fight what supporters call a smear campaign engineered by "good old boys" to undermine the state's first elected female farm boss. Last week, speaking at the fairgrounds in a building named after her grandfather, she vowed to stay in office, despite Gov. Mike Easley's call for her resignation.

Phipps's grandfather, Gov. W. Kerr Scott, was a folk hero who won a surprise victory in 1948 after serving as agriculture commissioner. Then as now, the Scotts billed themselves as a voice for farmers, fighting well-heeled companies to ensure electrification and roads. Most native North Carolinians know the name as well as Louisianans know the Longs.

But it was Phipps's father, Bob Scott, who gave her a crash course in elections, as she tagged along on his unsuccessful 1979 campaign. Her four siblings took no interest in politics, but Phipps once told her brother she wanted to become governor. She got a law degree, ran a failed legislative campaign, and worked as an administrative-law judge before running for election in 1999.

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