North Carolina's Surprising Turn to Blue in Election 2008

Wilmington, NC -- Past elections may have tagged North Carolina red, but the prevailing electorate is ambiguous about color. Though the state is geographically a part of the south, and all of that entails, I think its people are emancipating themselves from its days of yore. Votes that laid dormant in past elections awoke from slumber and are being cast in unprecedented numbers. Already bloopers sprang up in early voting sites. Reports of nearly 200,000 votes got sucked into a vacuum of obscure ballots that confused people into thinking their straight-party vote included their vote for president. Others reported they had glitches with voting booths that kept switching their choice to the opposite party. The ominous threat of voter fraud looms over North Carolina.

Once again, a cultural war is being waged against our civil liberties and threatens to amend the beauty of our democracy. The Republican Party has been hijacked by nutjobs and extremists whose visions for America accustom the sentiments of the Fourth Reich. Liberals are running exposés about The Republican Empress and her new clothes. And the hoi polloi is being tested like a monkey on its back with wild theories about a filibuster-proof democratic congress that will turn into a liability. Skewing the possibility that there's a flipside to the argument as the county faces critical challenges on so many fronts. That quite possibly a democratic dominance in congress, and the senate, might lend itself the fluidity of becoming a strength. With Washington divided on pressing issues the stakes have never been higher, and North Carolinians are not taking it lightly. No doubt the challenges that dog The South linger comparatively in more progressive places like Wilmington. Though the city bellows diversity, racism bellies a visceral divide. And similarly, The South's anti-intellectual war against The North is also entertained.

With the race tightening as it plays out, I thought I'd see what people here are thinking. I asked Marilyn Gillingham, a 56-year-old mother of two who hails from Santa Barbara, Ca, and has lived in Wilmington's downtown district for two years. "There is a cast system here," she said. What's more, "there's no smoke screen. People seem still shackled by the past," But the partiality of the south doesn't just stop at race, she said. Earlier in the day, she had seen a bumper sticker that read "We Don't Care How You Did It Up North." "Well, you better get used to it," she quipped. Transplants, who make up 40 per cent of Wilmington's population, and move to North Carolina for its balmy weather and lower cost of living, cannot be discounted. "Look what happened with the Mexican population in California," she added, "they didn't see that coming." She identified with Barack Obama's message: Change, and she said, "I feel comfortable with him representing our county's foreign policies," after traveling to Europe for a couple of years and didn't appreciate how Americans were viewed overseas.

Across the street from Gillingham, Suda Tuggle, has lived in Wilmington since the sixties. She always votes based on issues, she said. "I've voted liberal-I've actually voted for two democrats and one republican," Tuggle said. She was a Hillary supporter and presented with her current choices, Suda, voted for McCain, because her son served in the first gulf war, and "unless you've experienced what they [military] go through, you don't understand," she said. McCain "will weigh out the options before sacrificing our troops." When I asked if she would feel comfortable with an Obama presidency, she said "sure." But she was apprehensive about letting on to the neighbors whom she voted for.

Two weeks ago, on my way down to an Obama rally in Fayetteville, NC, I called my old neighbor, Gloria Mauro, a single mom from Connecticut. We chatted indefinitely. It was just filler talk when I changed the subject to politics, and she hesitantly admitted whom she's leaning for. Her voice broke and sounded as if it was the first time she said it out loud. "Really? I asked. "Obama is all about spend, spend, spend," she qualified. But more to the point, she admitted, " C.J.," her two-year-old son, "gets a seven-thousand dollar tax break," with McCain. "But, he probably won't win," she muttered. With child support hard a-coming I could sympathize. But I couldn't get around how she missed an essential piece of the puzzle: Her story is Obama's story. He was raised by a single mother-just like her. But indolent to reflection she wavered otherwise. As Gloria's news loomed over me my car seemed to be accelerating backwards. The McCain/Palin logo reigned supreme on SUVs, pick trucks and signs along the highway. It seemed the loathsome fuel of fear mongering had permeated the North also.