Should we bemoan another (possible) missed shot at Veep post?

Not so long ago, if we’d heard that Gov. Roy Cooper, was being considered as a vice presidential candidate, we’d have been heading to Washington en masse to beg Kamala Harris to “just say ‘no’.”

Our chant as we marched around the White House would go something like this:

Excuse us, Ms. Harris

We don’t mean no snark

But please don’t pick Roy

Because then we’d be stuck with Mark.

Remember last October when Gov. Cooper led a business delegation to Japan for five days to recruit business to the state?

Like a hungry duck pouncing on a June bug, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson grabbed the reins of power and changed the name of the state to North Markolina.

Okay, he didn’t go that far, but he did hurriedly call a press conference so he could stand in front of a lectern bearing the State seal and issue a proclamation declaring “North Carolina Solidarity with Israel Week.”

It’s doubtful that ceremonial act offset Robinson’s previous Facebook post calling the story of the Holocaust “a bunch of hogwash.”

I’m guessing it was Cooper’s fear of what a Robinson governorship would look like that dissuaded him from running for the U.S. Senate in 2022, and a possible reason he withdrew his name from the list of contenders presumably being considered for vice president.

“This just wasn’t the right time for North Carolina and for me to potentially be on the national ticket,” he said.

Translation: “Being Veep would be cool, but do you see what’s waiting to take over if I leave?”

Too bad, because how much damage could Robinson have done in the three months before the election, especially since he’s in his own race for governor and is thus trying to dial down the hateful rhetoric for which he is renowned?

 There is no constitutional mandate that Cooper would have to resign to seek another office, but the state constitution does say that the lieutenant governor becomes acting governor when the governor leaves the state.

Oh well, it looks like we’ll have to wait a bit longer for a North Carolina governor to be possibly considered for vice president.

Because no official list of potential running mates was ever released, we’ll never know for sure if Gov. Cooper was on the list or not.

The state’s governor, coincidentally, was in the exact same position 60 years ago.

Robert Caro, an obsessively thorough, meticulous journalist who has dedicated five decades of his life writing about Lyndon Johnson, gave this seldom-mentioned story new life when he cited the 1968 book by President Kennedy’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. In the book, she wrote that in Nov. 1963 JFK spoke of replacing Lyndon Johnson as his vice president – and was considering then-N.C. Gov. Terry Sanford.

Alas, the epochal events of Dallas occurred two weeks later and it never came to be.

Vice president or not, Sanford ranks among the greatest statesmen any state has ever produced.

As governor from 1961-1965, he doubled how much North Carolina spent on public schools, launched his own war on poverty in the state by – get this – raising taxes, and he fought against racial segregation and prejudice at a time when that was not politically prudent.

That, alone, places him head and shoulders above most politicians of either major party.

How transcendent was the progressive Democrat’s impact on North Carolina?

Howard Covington Jr., who wrote the biography on Sanford in 1999, wrote in a tribute years later that Sanford was the man who in various positions introduced former Gov. Jim Hunt to politics, hired Dean Smith to coach at UNC- Chapel Hill and “had something to do with Mike Krzyzewski’s berth at Duke.”

(Well, nobody’s perfect.)

In 1998, most of the telephone calls I received at the N&O were from angry readers - like the one who compared my character unfavorably to the scent of an undercooked chitlin - so I was often slow in checking voicemail messages.

One day I checked them, late again, and received a message from Terry Sanford himself inviting me to lunch: he’d died before I heard the message.

That – not being able to lunch with Sanford – is one of the greatest disappointments of my professional life.

The fact that he even knew who I was, though, remains one of the proudest moments.

 I asked Pope “Mac” McCorkle, a professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke, if he’d ever spoken with Sanford, his mentor and friend, about being considered for the vice presidency.

No, he said, laughing and noting that Sanford had sought the presidency twice, “but Terry told me ‘I never wanted to be vice president of anything.’”

Neither, apparently, does Gov. Cooper.