The Buie Knife

End the $10 Million Subsidy for Athletic Booster Clubs at UNC, NC State

I'm a UNC-Chapel Hill grad. I love Carolina and I'm proud of the basketball team, but $10 million of taxpayer funds for athletic booster clubs at UNC and NC State in a time of retrenchment in other areas is an outrageous example of misplaced priorities. Chris Fitzsimon of NC Policy Watch has the details in "Save Our Students or the Booster Clubs?"

Central NC to Grow Exponentially, Gain 40,000 New Residents By 2013

Here's some good news that has so far mostly been ignored by major North Carolina media: parts of the state may be insulated from the national recession as it receives a huge economic stimulus. Not enough media attention has been paid to the huge influx of more than 40,000 soldiers, civilians, contractors and their dependents to central North Carolina by 2013 as Ft. Bragg receives commands resulting from Base Realignment and Closing decisions. As many as 20,000 could arrive by fall 2011.

Powerful New Progressive Coalition Emerges

Obama skeptic Glenn Loury identifies a powerful new force in American politics.

Makes me proud to be involved in www.hkonj.com, a coalition of 80+ progressive groups in North Carolina.

NC's Changing Political Landscape

Ten percent of North Carolina residents 5 years and older now speak a language other than English at home, and "it's not clear that Jesse Helms could be elected in this state today," Ferrell Guillory, a longtime observer of the state's politics and director of the Program on Public Life at the University of North Carolina, tells The Washington Post in a front-page piece, "North Carolina's New Blues: In Insecure Times, A State Once Firmly Republican Now Wobbles."   

"If this were 2012, I'd be willing to say this is no longer a red state. I don't know if North Carolina is as far along as Virginia is, but the Obama campaign may be accelerating that. We'll see."

Previous:

• Jesse Helms, 1921-2008: One of Us

Kay Hagan May Well Beat Elizabeth Dole for Senate

(Watch this ad on YouTube.com )

This is one in a series of clever TV ads by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee against Senator Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina as she runs for her second term. Who would have thought in January of this year that Dole would be highly vulnerable, even "likely to lose," according to some Republican operatives. Dole's opponent, State Senator Kay Hagan of Greensboro, is coming on strong, ahead in the polls, and may be the first Democrat to win a U.S. Senate seat from North Carolina in a presidential year since Sam Ervin in 1968.

"High Energy Hagan Was Dynamo in Community," is the headline from a front-page profile in The News and Observer.

Ed Cone of Greensboro gives a good summary of why Dole has lost her edge and why Hagan is running so well.

Previous:

• NC's Dole-Hagan Race for Senate Is Surprisingly Close

Jesse Helms, 1921-2008: One of Us

Watching the funeral of Jesse Helms, one certainly gets a different impression of him. It is initially difficult to reconcile the portraits of him at his death with his national reputation. I watched the ENTIRE Helms funeral on WRAL.com. The good man described is hard to reconcile with the racial warrior, but that was often true in the old South. Good people had a horrible blind spot. And maybe it is still true that most of us have blind spots.

I now concede that Helms' 1972 campaign slogan, “One of Us,” was correct – he was one of us, even though it seemed he didn’t want to acknowledge that people who were DIFFERENT from him were also part of the fabric of what Martin Luther King called “the beloved community.”

I wrote on Ed Cone's blog: "The attitudes Jesse Helms expressed were very popular and commonplace in North Carolina. He was a man of his times, only more outspoken than many who felt the same way. Most of us have relatives who believed as Helms did. On a personal level, Helms and the people who supported him could be salt of the earth people. He was a hard worker, great at constituent service, and had a disarming, gracious, gentlemanly, self-effacing charm about him.

"But we cannot cover up or whitewash the dark side not only of Helms but of our own extended families and community histories. To pretend that there was no racism in Helms or in his political appeal is to perpetuate the blindness into the next generation." Read the whole discussion here.

On another blog, I simply could not let such statements as "Helms was not opposed to integration" pass without correction and documentation, quoting a few of Helms' many statements against integration over a 40-year period. Nor could I fail to respond to Helms-like rants in the same thread against affirmative action, "Martin Luther King was a man of violence," and "entitlements are aimed at those of a particular race."

My mother and uncle grew up in Monroe with Jesse Helms, and shared "small town values" with him. I've often wondered why they took such different stands on civil rights than Jesse did.  My mother, Lillian Secrest Buie, was North Carolina English Teacher of the Year 1979 and an outspoken advocate of racial equality in Scotland County, NC. My uncle, Andrew McDowd Secrest, was a crusading newspaper editor in Cheraw, SC, and worked as a civil rights conciliator for the Justice Department, most notably in Selma, Ala in 1965., negotiating between Martin Luther King and the local police.

Not to be snobbish about it, but they had very different parents, and I think the differences were illustrative of the importance of education in shaping one's outlook on life. Jesse's parents never finished high school; he never finished college. That wasn't at all unusual for the time -- indeed, after the Great Depression, his family couldn't afford four years of college for him.

Jim Jenkins of The News and Observer wrote a touching column, "Remembering the Chief's Son," recalling Helms' days at Wake Forest from the perspective of Jenkins' father, a classmate. "The chief's son had four jobs at one point. No one knew when he slept. He left school without a diploma, not uncommon in those times, on the eve of World War II."

"The pundits will offer multitudinous views of his legacy, and many of them will be very critical of him, to be sure. But lots of other people will separate all that from what they knew of the man, even though some of their acquaintances won't get it."

Considering what Jesse came from, one has to give him his due. "I certainly wasn't chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and I didn't know the Dalai Lama," my uncle said.

My favorite story about Helms in his later years was related by my friend Bruce Johnson, recalling Helms' meeting with the Dalai Lama at Wingate University near Monroe. Someone there quipped that "maybe Jesse Helms has a Buddha soul after all," referring to concepts in the Buddhist religion of compassion and transcending personal conflict. That would have been a helluva evolution for "Senator No."

My sister observed that Jesse "mellowed towards the end of his life, but he didn't want to lose his image" as the Confederate General fighting for his principles and the romantic lost cause, until the very end, "so he kept up the bluster. Pretty typical of Southern men of that generation."

Drill Deeper:

• Quotes from Jesse Helms
• Helms and Carol Mosely Braun
• Race was always an issue in Helms' campaigns (Charlotte Observer)
• Helms' Values Never Changed (News and Observer)
• Not My Favorite Senator, by Barry Saunders (News and Observer)
• Rob Schofield, Progressive Pulse Blog: "We'd be a lot better off as a country if more politicians emulated at least this part of Jesse Helms' life."
• No one is always wrong, and except for the truly evil, good things can be recalled about most everyone at the time of death. I found this op-ed about Helms, "The Jesse Helms You Should Remember," recalling his later years as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to be illuminating, asserting that he had moved to the Republican mainstream on foreign policy.
• The singer Bono sent this message to the Jesse Helms Center: "Give (Helms' wife) Dot and the family my love and tell them there are 2 million people alive in Africa because Jesse Helms did the right thing.”
• Rev. William Barber, president of the NC NAACP, on the passing of Jesse Helms.
• Jim Jenkins' column, "Remembering the Chief's Son."
   

Can Obama Take North Carolina?

A June 12 Rasmussen poll of likely NC voters shows John McCain "continuing to struggle in the traditionally Republican state of North Carolina." He earns45% of the vote while Barack Obama attracts 43% support. In May, McCain held a three point lead over Obama in NC. 

A Rasmussen poll of likely NC voters in April showed Obama and McCain tied in the state with 46% each, and eight percent undecided.

If Obama can maintain his national lead, and end with 54% of the vote or more on election day, North Carolina could be in play. Bush won the 2004 election with 50.7% of the vote, but he won North Carolina with 56.02% of the vote, or 1.96 million votes; and did as well percentage-wise in NC in 2000, winning 1.6 million votes. Bush's popularity is down to 40% in North Carolina, compared to 29% nationally. If Obama were running against Bush, he could probably beat him in NC.

But Obama would probably have to win a national landslide of 55% or more to take North Carolina. If there is a huge increase in Democratic turnout -- say, 10% -- and low Republican turnout, or substantially more than 10 percent of normally Republican voters support Obama, it's possible.

But if Republican operatives are successful at raising serious doubts about Obama that overshadow doubts about McCain in the minds of Republican and Independent voters, I'd imagine McCain would take NC.

Related:

• Six Point Lead for Obama in General Election Poll; Race Not Much of a Factor
• Obamacans: Republicans and Conservatives for Obama
• Seeing Blue in NC

Presidential, Gubernatorial and Senatorial Races in NC May Be Closely Tied. Straight Party Voters and Ticket Splitters May Determine Who Wins

I've offered an analysis of how NC might be in play in the presidential race this fall. Political consultants John Anzalone and Jeff Liszt also suggest this could be a Democratic year in NC -- lots of new voters, an energized Democratic Party base, with particularly high African American turnout, extremely low voter approval for George W. Bush (58% disapproval in the state), and widespread perceptions of a negative economy.

Gary Pearce, a longtime adviser to former governor Jim Hunt and other Democratic candidates, is skeptical of Democratic chances to take the presidency, according to a Boston Globe article. He says Democrats generally need high African American turnout, and at least 42 percent of the white vote to win a statewide race in NC. Whites still represent an overwhelming majority of 75 percent of the state's voters, he says. Gov. Mike Easley got 43 percent of the white vote in 2004, while Senator John Kerry received only 27 percent of the white vote in the state (he lost NC by 13 percent to George W. Bush).

Obama's presence on the ticket could boost the Democratic turnout by five percent, or tens of thousands of votes for Democrats up and down the ticket, Pearce noted. That could be the difference in close races like the 8th congressional district, where Republican Robin Hayes squeaked through in 2006 by a few hundred votes.

But Pearce doubts the Democratic presidential candidate will take North Carolina. Pearce says national Democrats would be wiser to invest more of their limited time and money in Virginia, which is leaning more strongly in a blue direction.

If Obama carries the state, it would probably be by a very thin margin. A squeaker. The Democrats do tend to win the governorship in North Carolina. At this early stage (June 2008), the governor's race is almost tied, with 47 percent for Beverly Perdue and 46 percent for Pat McCrory.

If Perdue runs strong, she could pull Barack Obama and Kay Hagan, the Democratic candidate for Senate, over the top with her. But if, as I suspect, Perdue will face a very strong challenge from the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory, Perdue, Hagan and Obama could all lose their statewide races. Hagan has some work to do as she introduces herself to the public. Dole is viewed favorably by 62 percent compared to Hagen's 45 percent.

Pearce thinks McCrory would be favored to win the governorship "by using Obama's strategy: be the candidate of change. Attack "a culture of corruption and mismanagement in Raleigh." He suspects Perdue could be a "brittle candidate, who may not stand up to smart, sustained attack." McCrory, says Pearce,

doesn’t have to overstate things. Stating the facts will do: A Speaker in prison, legislators forced to resign, a state lottery conceived in sin, mental health care in disarray, a probation system in disarray, etc. 

And he can exploit the poisonous relationship between the press and government.

Perdue has to somehow neutralize those issues, and prove that she'll do a better job than McCrory. Her best chance is to galvanize the public around education and the health care issue, which "she owns," Pearce observes.

McCrory would probably lead the Republican ticket in North Carolina, with coattails for McCain and Elizabeth Dole, who is running for re-election. Or Dole could be the top vote-getter, with coattails for McCrory and McCain.

In my view, only if Perdue runs strong and beats McCrory would Obama and Hagan have a chance to win their races.

One can understand why Obama is already focusing on historically Republican Virginia as a potential swing state this year.  Former Democratic governor Mark Warner is very popular and expected to win the U.S. Senate seat -- he could provide coattails for Obama. With the Virginia GOP still smarting from Democratic Senator Jim Webb's defeat of George Allen in 2006, the Democratic Party in Virginia is feeling its oats.

North Carolina's Democratic Party is not in as strong a position as Virginia's Democratic Party. If North Carolina is truly in play, Obama would probably win a landslide nationally.

An essential question may be how many straight party voters and ticket-splitters there are in North Carolina in 2008. North Carolina has a long history of ticket-splitting in gubernatorial races -- the state usually elects Democratic governors while voting for Republican presidential candidates, Republican senatorial candidates, and Democratic state legislators. Still, it's very difficult to imagine the state electing a Republican governor in 2008, while also defeating an incumbent Republican senator like Dole and somehow voting for Barack Obama for president. In other words, the results of the three top statewide races are likely to be tied together.

Related:

• Surprisingly Competitive Re-election Campaign for Senator Dole
• NC Republicans Find Bright Spots: Despite National Woes, Party Leaders Say Odds Are Good for McCrory, Dole (Charlotte Observer)
   

NC's Dole-Hagan Race for Senate Is Surprisingly Competitive

Incumbent Republican Elizabeth Dole, who first won election to the Senate in 2002 with 54 percent of the vote, has a surprisingly competitive race for re-election as Senator from NC. She and her Democratic opponent are virtually tied, according to polls. The conservative Washington Times characterizes Dole's poll ratings as an "embarrassing showing for an incumbent...."

A number of conservative Republicans in North Carolina are grumbling about Dole.  "When Senator Helms left office, his excellent mostly North Carolinian staff was mostly willing to go to work for Dole, but she did not want them, assembling a new staff instead, with almost all of her Washington staff being out-of-staters," writes Jeffersonian Republican. "The first problem from this move was that Helms' constitutent service operation, one of the best in Washington, was replaced by a slip-shod lackluster version from Dole.  It has also been a problem in policy issues, as Dole's out-of-state staffers don't understand North Carolina politics and often don't even seem to try to do so."

Conservatives like "Jeffersonian Republican" don't like Dole's support of the Warner-Lieberman ''cap and trade'' bill in the Senate. "This wise bill inspired by such great leaders of our sky is falling /manmade global warming movement as Al Gore will give the government a lot more power and cost consumers a lot more for energy...The (conservative) Club for Growth is running ads questioning her wisdom."   

Realizing she needs to shore up her conservative base, Dole has already launched an ad campaign,  appealing to anti-immigrant sentiment and trumpeting her controversial plan giving sheriffs authority to target, arrest and deport undocumented immigrants who commit crimes. In the ad, several sheriffs speak out in favor of the plan. But some sheriffs say the program has drawbacks, according to the N&O:

Wilson County Sheriff Wayne Gay said the program seemed to unfairly target Hispanics for arrest. "When you start targeting a segment of society, and not looking at anyone else, that's when I have a problem," Gay said.

Pitt County Sheriff Mac Manning said most illegal immigrants in his county obey the law and value family and hard work. Manning advocated a path to legal residency for some, such as a woman in Pitt County who has two children and works in a "menial" housekeeping job that he said most Americans wouldn't want.

Dole's opponent, State Senator Kay Hagan (D-Guilford) calls the program a "Band-Aid" solution that uses local money to solve a federal problem and creates a patchwork of inconsistent enforcement. "We need an overall immigration policy that works," Hagan told the N&O. "We need a policy that is uniform throughout the country." She says she favors securing the borders and deporting criminals but acknowledges the need for foreign workers.

Dole retorts that Hagan favors "amnesty for illegals." But Dole seems to have no realistic long-term solution to the problem. There is no chance that 12 million undocumented immigrants are all going to be deported. Dole's rigid position seems far more inflexible than what presumed Republican nominee John McCain and President Bush have supported. Dole is counting on resentment of North Carolina citizens toward undocumented immigrants.

If Hagan could persuade Republican-leaning business voters that Dole's position or lack of position on immigration will hurt the state's economy, and that she doesn't really offer a viable long-term solution, it might be a wedge issue in November for the Democrat. Hagan criticizes Dole for "a lack of leadership" on immigration.

Immigration hardliners think their position is more popular, but they lost ground in 2006. The conservative Wall Street Journal and several Republican leaders have warned members of the GOP that if they don’t take a more generous stand on the issue of immigration, they will spend a decade or more in the political wilderness. Depending on how the issue is framed, most Americans seem to want a path to citizenship for undocumented workers.

Since Dole is running an ad trumpeting her support for a program that doesn't go anywhere near solving the immigration mess, perhaps Hagan could run an ad blaming Dole for being part of the problem, part of the long stalemate, for Washington's failure of leadership on immigration.

For now, Hagan probably needs to focus attention on raising money. After the May primary (which was competitive for her), she had less than $400,000 in the bank, compared to Dole's stash of more than $3 million. 

To win, she would probably need to portray Dole as out of touch, not spending enough time in North Carolina. Dole's primary residence for 40 years has been Washington, DC. Dole has spent several years gallivanting around the country raising money for Republican senatorial candidates. Hagan's campaign can ask skeptically what has Dole accomplished as North Carolina's Senior Senator in Washington, or if it's "time for a change." 

Presumably, Dole raised the issue of immigration first because she considers it to her advantage to do so. Hagan will probably gain more mileage by emphasizing populist rhetoric on the economy, health care, and the need for change in Washington.

Still, given that Dole won her first race in 2002 against Erskine Bowles with a solid 54 percent of the vote, you'd think this is her race to lose. But that was an off-year election, and she only received 1.2 million votes. The combined Obama-Clinton Democratic primary vote this year was more than 1.5 million votes. If a unified Democratic Party with high general election turnout is campaigning against a factionalized, dispirited Republican Party with low turnout, North Carolina's Senate race could be in play, and Dole's seat could be in jeopardy.

Related:

• Results of Presidential, Senatorial, and Gubernatorial Races in NC Will Be Closely Tied Together

Will NC's High Turnout and Front Row Seat for Democratic Presidential Primary Give the Party's Nominee a Chance to Carry the State in the Fall?

In the once-in-a-lifetime Democratic presidential primary in North Carolina, with repeated visits by the candidates and former president Bill Clinton to cities and towns that had never seen a president, turnout was heavy. And it seems Senator Obama put together a remarkable coalition that included at least some working class, blue collar whites in urban, suburban and rural voters, as well as an overwhelming number of African Americans and young people.

If Obama can build on this trend in the fall, I wonder if the likely Democratic presidential nominee might win North Carolina in the fall.

Obama won the North Carolina primary in a near landslide, with 56 percent, or 883,480 votes, compared to Hillary Clinton's 41.6 percent, or 656,371 votes. A total of 1.5 million votes were cast, according to NC State Board of Elections data. 

Some 36 percent of registered voters voted statewide. That's more than twice the 16% who normally turn out for a presidential primary. And many registered independents chose to vote in the Democratic primary, suggesting that Democrats have some chance of carrying North Carolina in the fall.

To do so, Democrats would have to defy historic patterns -- George W. Bush won this state with 56% of the vote in 2000 and 2004, and no Democratic presidential nominee has carried the state since Jimmy Carter in 1976. North Carolina went for Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972. One has to go back to 1964 -- the year of  Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory against Barry Goldwater -- to think of North Carolina as part of the "Solid South" that almost always voted Democratic.

Come November, the Democratic nominee will not be able to claim that the Democratic message did not get through to NC voters. Tens of thousands of citizens attended rallies and events, heard directly from the candidates themselves, or their surrogates, and millions of NC voters heard from the candidates through the state's media.

With NC's new one-stop early voting law, turnout in the November election is likely to increase by at least 10 percent, and possibly by as much as 30 percent. Early estimates are that nearly 190,000 new voters registered in NC between January and May of 2008. NC voter registration as of primary day was

Democratic: 2,633,381;
Republican: 1,933,658;
Unaffiliated: 1,244,739;
for a total of 5,811,778.

Early exit polls indicate that 40% of Clinton voters say they may vote for McCain instead of Obama in the fall. But exit polls during primaries are notoriously unreliable, as James Stimson, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, pointed out to Frank Stasio of WUNC. He also noted that party affiliation is still the best predictor of voting: two-thirds of voters are party loyalists.

What's exciting for me is that Chatham County is VERY CLOSELY DIVIDED between Democratic and Republican voters in the general election. In 2004, Kerry/Edwards won the county by FIVE VOTES -- 12,997 to 12,992 for Bush/Cheney, with 18 for Ralph Nader. West Williams precinct cast 612 for Kerry-Edwards and 462 for Bush-Cheney.

Download 2004votingdata.pdf

In Chatham County, where I live, Obama won 57 percent of the Democratic primary vote, or 8,712 votes, compared to 6,175 for Clinton, or 40% of the vote.

In Chatham County's West Williams precinct, which includes Fearrington Village where I live, Obama won 455 votes and Hillary Clinton won 294 votes, according to Chatham County election data posted here. Turnout in West Williams was 29.44%, lower than the state average for this primary, but much higher than for usual presidential primaries.

In Chatham County and other parts of North Carolina, Obama appeared to win over some working class white voters as well as some senior citizens and hispanics. Chatham has a lower than average African American population, 16.8%, compared to NC as a whole, 21.7%. Yet he won the Chatham precincts of  Pittsboro, East Siler City, Manns Chapel, North Williams, Oakland, Hickory Mountain, Hadley, Three Rivers, and Bynum. Many of these precincts have few African American voters.

He edged out Hillary by 30 votes in the Chatham County senior citizen community of Carolina Meadows, 186 to  156, and beat her in the (mostly) retirement community of Fearrington Village. But these highly educated voters may affiliate more with the university community of Chapel Hill than with their age group, and Obama has overwhelmingly won college towns in almost all of the primaries.

In the fall, it will be especially important for the local Obama campaign in Chatham County to target the precincts that Hillary won:  Albright, Bennett, Bonlee, Harpers Crossroads, and West Siler City.

Download 2008chathamcountyprimary.zip 

Drill Deeper:

• Obama, in Raleigh, Shows He's No Elitist Egghead
• In First Forays into North Carolina, Hillary Offers Softer Version of John Edwards' Populism
• In NC, Michelle Obama Draws Larger, More Intense Crowd Than Bill Clinton
• Citizen Journalism Coverage of Bill Clinton's College Tour
• I Met Hillary Clinton in Wake Forest, NC

Related Posts on Other Blogs:

• New Voters, Party Switchers Dominate