Something is going on in North Carolina politics that the news media doesn’t yet recognize. People are so disenchanted with the political system that many have quietly begun to embrace full public funding of election campaigns if candidates agree to voluntary spending limits and accept no other contributions.

The numbers are starting to show, in small ways and large. More than 600 people jammed the Friday Center at Chapel Hill the other night to listen to journalist and former White House press secretary Bill Moyers talk about the issue. Hundreds more showed up the next day at a meeting in mid-town Raleigh to listen to former Reagan and Bush administration policy adviser Charles Kolb talk about the increasing interest of business leaders in campaign finance reform, so they can escape the constant shakedown for contributions they get from politicians.

The audience heard the best political fund-raiser North Carolina ever produced — Gov. Jim Hunt, who by his own count raised upwards of $40 million to finance his six statewide campaigns — fall on the political money sword and declare that candidates “have been forced by the system to become full-time fund-raisers. That is a fact. I have become one myself. I have spent more time than I want to raising money. For every minute I was on the phones, it was another minute lost when I could have been talking to the public.”

Think about that for a minute: When Jim Hunt, who never gets too far out in front of the parade and who rarely takes a risk on a public issue, starts talking about the need publicly financed elections, you can bet that a majority of the people are already for it.

And so says the polls. The New York Times reports that upwards of 90 percent of the American people want major change, and more than80 percent would support a form of public financing that gets big money out of elections and puts integrity back into them.

How about North Carolina? There is a surprising amount of support for public financing, according to polls conducted by the polling firm The Mellman Group in 1998. When Mellman asked whether voters favored a system in which each candidate would receive a set amount of money from a publicly financed election fund, and where spending would be limited to the amount candidates received from the fund, 66 percent of voters said they favored such a system.

The advocacy group Public Campaign will release new national polling data next week. The results will show strong support for public financing of campaigns among all groups of voters. Obviously, something is happening.

We can see that in North Carolina, where more than 1,000 local and state officials, including state treasurer Harlan Boyles and former U.S. Sen. Robert Morgan, have endorsed such a program. Think about that: Harlan Boyles, the watchdog of the state’s finances for a quarter of a century, and Robert Morgan, the retired Air Force officer, state attorney general and U.S. senator, men whose conservative roots go deep into North Carolina soil, preaching the gospel of public financing of campaigns. Things have changed.

These are just some of the reasons I think the news media have just missed the story.

Bill Moyers, who has made a specialty of his documentary coverage of the impact of money on public policy, believes this is one issue where the general public is way ahead of the politicians and of the media generally. “The dots have been connected and the public understands how money drives people out of politics,” he said during a recent interview. “They have made the connection between money and politics. But the people who could change it are those who benefit from the current system. It’s a political arms race, and people know what’s wrong, and they want it changed.”

Moyers points to what has happened in Maine, Massachusetts and Arizona. Those are an independent state, a liberal one and a conservative one, and each has embraced full public funding of elections, joining 22 other states that have some limited form of public financing. “I think we are at about 1778 in the new revolution,” he says, comparing what’s going on nationally to a dramatic change in politics.

He thinks Sen. John McCain sums it up best: American politics has become “an affluence-peddling scheme in which both parties are selling the country to the highest bidder.”

The political process has become undemocratic because so few people decide who can run, and thus who can win. Moyers ticks off the figures: fewer than 800,000 Americans contribute more than $200 in elections, and only 170,000 contribute more than $1,000. That concentrates the big donations in a relatively small number of people — and those contributions dictate who can and who cannot run. That also controls who can win. And it shows up in public policy. “The media elites follow the politicians, and the politicians follows the agenda of the big contributors.”The result, he says, is “a stranglehold on democracy. If you are not a big contributor, you are a second-class citizen.”

Moyers believes the public is ready to fix the problem, if it can find political leadership courageous enough to change things. That’s not easy, for the system has worked for politicians, but not for the public.

“The most wonderful thing about America, to me, is the capacity for self-correction,” he says.

“You can go up to the bridge of the ship and grab the captain by the arm and say, sir, there is an iceberg out there.”

If Moyers is right, and I think he is, the people are ready for a course correction. Question is, are the politicians?