Last night I had the good fortune to attend a US Senate campaign forum hosted by Durham for Obama. Four candidates – Calvin Cunningham, Ken Lewis, Elaine Marshall and Marcus Williams – were there, and they each took turns making statements, answering pre-screened questions and shaking hands after the fact.

For the purposes of full disclosure, I knew Cal Cunningham before he ran for any public office and I am currently planning to vote for him in the primary due to his positions on my most important issues, not due to personal association. We hadn’t seen each other in a dozen years before I got to speak with him last night after the forum.

Some thoughts on each candidate:

Marcus Williams: just plain not up to the task. He came off as unprepared and possibly a closet conservative. He fumbled answers to questions about more complex issues and returned again and again to deficit reduction as his main issue, even when it didn’t make sense – that is, when he wasn’t stumping for his own website. I haven’t looked at it yet, but his whole performance reeked of Gregarious Troubled Uncle, a cross between class clown and used car salesman.

Elaine Marshall: genuinely surprisingly scrappy. She came off as a much tougher campaigner and more skilled on the stump than I had expected. I’ve been saying for months now that she seems like the most outspokenly liberal candidate and she only wavered briefly from that last night (the stab at Hugo Chavez seemed kind of random to me). Marshall made a very impressive showing. When Calvin’s campaign didn’t seem certain of happening in the first place, Marshall was my candidate of choice. What I hadn’t expected was that she would get interrupted by spontaneous applause and encouraging hoots.

Ken Lewis: Heavily associated with DFO and widely expected to walk off with the DFO straw poll endorsement (which did not happen – he got over 50%, but not the required 70%), he likewise impressed me with his practicality and general air of calm competence… right up until his closing statement. Here’s a tip, counselor: don’t go negative and go over your time in a closing statement to which no one will be allowed a response, even if you are on your home turf. It was exceptionally rude and unprofessional and wrecked what had been growing respect for him over the night. Up to that point, the substance of his answers and his closing statement had really impressed me and like I say he strikes me as someone who would be extremely competent in the Senate even if he came off as also being just as dull as dishwater. He clearly knows what he’s talking about, but he doesn’t make me believe he’s excited about it. Lewis comes off sounding like he’s auditioning for the part of Al Gore Stunt Double. If he wins the seat I’ll be very happy and I’ll have his sign up in my yard but I do not hope that he wins the primary and very little could move me to vote for him over anyone but a Republican.

Cal Cunningham: I love the guy, but he looks like he’s been replaced by SeriousExpressionBot 9000. He was initially slow to take specific positions in my personal opinion but he’s ramped that up, gotten a lot more specific in recent weeks and has said the things I need to hear – pro-choice, pro-equality, pro-public-option – to keep me enthusiastic about him. Last night he came off as surprisingly rehearsed which reflects a very solid knowledge of his position statements but contrasts – sometimes weirdly – with other candidates who had something of an “um” problem when answering questions but sounded more off-the-cuff and relaxed. I would say it was a mixed performance, in part because the hand gestures and “Serious Candidate Is Serious” sharpness of his diction and tone to his voice both made him seem slightly robotic and caused one to wonder with whom he hoped to pick a fight. He sounded like he was itching to argue with Richard Burr, not other Democrats. That’s fantastic, except that campaign doesn’t happen until May. I confess that he also surprised me by receiving multiple interruptions in the form of applause and supportive hoots from the crowd. Cal also displayed a pleasing practicality when he said that he expects healthcare reform to have passed and be old news by the time the winner takes office but that it will have happened in a fashion that will require a “second phase” to incorporate necessities like a public option.

So, overall? I think Marcus Williams should call it a day. I think the other three candidates would each be extremely stiff competition for Burr in the fall. I have to assume he had some people there last night, somewhere, and if he has a lick of sense – always a controversial question – he’s worried. They all knew their stuff, they all had very different approaches to delivering it and while all three looked like they could clean Burr’s intellectual clock it was Cunningham and Marshall who looked most amped up – by far – to get in Burr’s Kool-Aid. That closing statement of Ken Lewis’ really did jettison my support for him as a candidate, but I think there’s a case to be made for either Cunningham or Marshall in May that a lot of people could find compelling.