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City Councilwoman Trudy Wade says she's always known political consultant Bill Burckley as a "gentleman."

C'mon, Trudy.

What you've always known is better than that.

Wade has been around long enough to know Burckley, a former council member, can be both annoying and relentless-- like a pebble in your shoe, or a mosquito in the dark.

So while jeering and waving and ultimately getting arrested, as Burckley did during the June 18 council meeting, was outlandish, it was not exactly out of character.

Not for him.

So, why has Wade used Burckley to run her campaign and kept him on as a paid consultant? And why do so many others use him as well, liberal and conservative, Republican and Democrat?

Because he's that good.

"If you want a strategy to win an election, I don't know of anybody better," Wade says.

Even Florence Gatten, a former council member and reputable political consultant in her own right, has used services of the man she once called "Dear Bill."

For the answer why, look no further than Nov. 3, when Burckley, 64, engineered arguably the biggest mayoral upset ever and absolutely nobody saw it coming. But him.

With Burckley running his campaign, a relative newcomer, Bill Knight, unseated heavily favored incumbent Yvonne Johnson for the mayor's job.

Burckley knew Knight had won even after only a fraction of the returns had trickled in and Johnson was still ahead by more than 1,000 votes.

He told his candidate: "We've got a new mayor."

And the rest, as they say, is history.

But there's much more to the story than that.

As happy as Burckley was to be victorious on Nov. 3, he was even happier to be alive.

'More and more irrational'

It all goes back to that bizarre meltdown at the council meeting six months before, where he had heckled council members from the rear of the room like a Cameron Crazy at a Duke-Carolina game.

Burckley has always been known for his passion and his unpredictability, including a well-chronicled rasslin' match with a fellow council member while Burckley himself was serving on the council in 1988.

But last summer's antics were strange behavior even for him, and they ultimately got him arrested.

Meanwhile, there were calls for the candidates to sever ties with Burckley.

After all, how could anyone run on a platform of vision, leadership and civil discourse with a frothing pit bull like Burckley on his or her payroll?

What most of us didn't know at the time was that Burckley was wrestling with much more than a supersized passion for politics. Demons inside of him had driven him so close to the edge that he genuinely feared he might kill himself.

'What's going on?'

So Burckley disappeared from public view.

He checked himself for four days into a VA hospital in Durham, where he was diagnosed as bipolar.

"I was becoming more and more irrational," he says. "I was doing things that were just bizarre. But you don't notice it. You don't know that you're doing things that are irrational.

"So when this particular incident happened, it was really a godsend."

He realized then, he says, that this was serious and that he needed help.

"You suddenly realize, what's going on? What's happening?"

He says he believes the lingering effects of his experiences as a paratrooper in Vietnam helped trigger a bout with deep depression. "I was involved in some really, really intense situations," he says of his combat experiences.

One pill, two pills, three ...

He met with a psychiatrist.

"Initially, they thought it was depression," he says. "But later they determined I was bipolar.

"And I had to promise to do several things. I had to promise to lock away all of my guns in a safe-deposit box."

And he agreed to a strict regimen of medication to help steady his moods.

"The first four days you take one pill," Burckley says matter-of-factly. "The next four days you take two pills. The next four days you take three pills. The next four days, you take four pills."

He says he can feel the difference now.

"I'm not as short as I had been. The quick trigger is not there now. It's not that I wouldn't chew your (expletive) out if you screwed up. But I don't fly off the handle as quickly as I used to."

Why so candid about a condition many would consider so deeply personal?

"I think that it's important that the people who have known me, and have seen some of this wacko stuff, understand what triggered it -- what the hell's going on with this guy."

"This was around the Fourth of July," he says of the fallout following the council meeting incident. "This was filing time. And I had people who wanted me to do work for them."

Not to worry. The clients kept lining up, among them council candidates Wade, Luther Falls, Jim Kee, Mary Rakestraw, Zack Matheny, Danny Thompson, Nancy Vaughan, Robbie Perkins.

And Knight.

And all but one of them was a winner, Burckley points out.

Knight had hired Burckley to run his campaign on three conditions, spelled out in a written contract, the consultant says:

l "That there would be no negative campaigning."

l "That Greensboro would be no worse off after the end of the election than when we started."

l "That there would be no animosity, no polarization."

The Knight strategy

So Burckley read the statistical tea leaves and devised a plan to make up the roughly 4,800-vote margin by which Milton Kern had lost to Johnson, the city's first African American mayor, in the 2007 campaign.

He targeted white voters. ("Milton pulled 84 percent of the white vote, as far as I could determine," Burckley said).

He targeted Republicans and conservative Democrats who don't normally vote in City Council elections.

He targeted areas that had been recently annexed into the city and were none too happy about it -- and therefore more inclined to vote against an incumbent.

He targeted a "special group" -- parents with school-aged children and the grandparents of those children who were expected to turn out to vote for the Natural Science Center bonds.

"That's an untapped group that the average candidate doesn't even think about," Burckley says.

Playing an angle few considered, Burckley says he also sensed waning enthusiasm for Johnson in the black community.

"I told (Knight) your ace in the hole may be black voters who may be dissatisfied may simply say home."

As it turned out, the surprisingly light turnout in east Greensboro was a major factor in Johnson's defeat.

But turnout seldom seems light for Burckley's services, whatever a client's race or age or political stripe.

In the 2007 election, he worked for Johnson and might have again if Knight hadn't approached him first.

"First come, first served," Burckley says.

Given all he's been through over the last six months, how does he still manage to sustain that kind of clout?

He laughs.

"Because I'm the best there is."