Obamalina

[mmonk]

Surely this had to be some kind of mistake, or cruel hoax. It was the weekend before the second presidential debate, and the New York Times was reporting that Barack Obama had hunkered down in a battleground state to do his prep--while also holding a jubilant rally in local Republican territory and crashing the year's most exclusive state Democratic fundraiser in a "surprise," media-snatching visit. All of which made perfect sense. What defied credulity was the story's dateline: Asheville, North Carolina.

-snip-

Like Dean before him, Obama was questioned for putting cash and people into states like Georgia and North Carolina, despite their increasing Democratic leanings and rapidly changing demographics. North Carolina, where 3.5 million voted in 2004, gained 1.5 million legal residents from 1996 to 2006--
plenty of newcomers to fundamentally alter the state's voting patterns. But while he's given up on full-scale efforts in Georgia, Obama's North Carolina campaign, undergirded by 1,700 volunteers, forty offices and close to 400 paid staffers (McCain has thirty offices but only thirty paid staff), has outregistered Republicans five to one in the state this year and drawn even in the polls heading into the campaign's last weeks. In the first week of early voting, in mid-October, almost three times as many Democrats as Republicans were casting ballots in a record turnout; while African-Americans are only 22 percent of the state's population, almost 40 percent of early voters were black. Obama's been running many more ads in the state than McCain--and gearing them, spot-on, to the economic troubles shared by working-class Carolinians, who've suffered some of the nation's highest job losses, and overspending white-collar families around Raleigh-Durham and Charlotte, which was recently rocked by the implosion of Wachovia, one of several banks headquartered in the city.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081110/moser

[BlueIdaho]

1. What a beautiful photo! nm.

[mmonk]

2. Pretty nice.

Asheville.