  The spectrum of two-dimensional adjoint QCD is surprisingly insensitive to
the number of colors $N_c$ of its gauge group. It is argued that the
cancellation of finite $N_c$ terms is rather natural and a consequence of the
singularity structure of the theory. In short, there are no finite $N_c$
contraction terms, hence there cannot be any finite $N_c$ singular terms, since
the former are necessary to guarantee well-behaved principal value integrals.
We evaluate and categorize the matrix elements of the theory's light-cone
Hamiltonian to show how terms emerging from finite $N_c$ contributions to the
anti-commutator cancel against contributions from the purely finite $N_c$ term
of the Hamiltonian. The cancellation is not complete; finite terms survive and
modify the spectrum, as is known from numerical work. Additionally we show that
several parton-number changing finite $N_c$ matrix elements vanish. In
particular, there is only one trace-diagonal finite $N_c$ correction. It seems
therefore that considering matrix elements rather than individual contributions
can provide substantial simplifications when computing the spectrum of a theory
with a large symmetry group.
