Cool Papa Stan & the Exocet Missile | Eastern North Carolina Now

Campaign and election for Beaufort County commissioner reveals the similarity of this rather esoteric, but relevant anecdote.

    On a humid November night, when the local conservatives were down to their last shot, a hero emerged. His name was Stan Deatherage and when ten days out he started picking and grinning with his old six string at the early voting site, the conservatives awakened and he became a political Exocet missile.

    Students of military lore will recall how in 1982 the first combat fired Exocet missile destroyed the pride of the British fleet, HMS Sheffield, with a stunning Mach 2 strike a meter above the waterline. Asleep at the wheel the Sheffield crew never saw the missile until seconds before impact, and thus it was the same for the Democratic candidate bamboozled with a thousand vote margin by an old Pam Pack linebacker. Dismissed as a non-campaigning bungler by the moderates of the county, Cool Papa Stan struck with lethal precision in a stunning ten day blitzkrieg that saw him crisscross the county in his convertible Mustang playing the guitar and sharing the conservative mantra of "keep your hands off my wallet brother."

    The Argentine pilot that fired the fatal shot in 1982 had been forbidden to deploy the post-modern ship-killer as the country was in shambles much as Stan's home county of Beaufort was after the last "liberals pretending to be Republican tax cuts". Enraged by the shocking tax increase, Stan Deatherage put down his pen, picked up his guitar and took his conservative message to the people of the county with a little bit of that old school stumping. And the rest, as they say, is history.