The labor commissioner race is having its moment in the sun.

With Democratic candidates Mary Fant Donnan and John C. Brooks in a runoff next Tuesday for the right to face incumbent Republican Cherie Berry in November, the normally low-profile office is getting a little more attention than usual.

But what does the commissioner do?

As head of the N.C. Department of Labor, the commissioner is responsible for overseeing the health, safety and well-being of more than 4 million workers in the state, including enforcing federal regulations laid down by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The major divisions including Occupational Safety and Health, which enforces federal worker safety laws; Research and Policy, which compiles labor statistics; and Standards and Inspections, which inspects elevators, amusement park rides, and rock quarries, among other things.

The department also protects workers from discrimination based on genetic testing, service in the National Guard, or filing a workplace complaint, though complaints related to race, gender, etc., are handled by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The department was started in 1891, when the legislature created the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It's been a full-blown agency since 1931.

There have been five presidential spoilers in N.C. in the last century.

Since 1908, third-party candidates in the presidential race have earned enough votes to affect the race between the Republican and the Democrat on the ballot in 1912, 1968, 1980, 1992 and 1996.

In the first two cases, the third-party candidate came in second.

George Wallace was the most successful, earning 31.3 percent of the state vote in the 1968 race as the nominee of the segregationist American Independent Party. The winner, Republican Richard Nixon, won 39.5 percent, while Democrat Hubert Humphrey came in third with 29.2 percent.

The next most successful was former president Teddy Roosevelt, who ran on the Progressive or "Bull Moose" Party in 1912, earning 28.4 percent. Democrat Woodrow Wilson won the state with 59.2 percent, while Republican incumbent William Howard Taft came in third with 12 percent.

In the other races, the third-party candidates came in third, but got more votes than the margin of difference between the Democratic and Republican candidates.

In 1992, Texas businessman Ross Perot earned 13.7 percent of the vote, far more than the 0.79 percent margin that incumbent George H.W. Bush beat Bill Clinton by in North Carolina, despite losing the national race.

Four years later, Perot was roughly half as popular — picking up just 6.7 percent — but he still drew more votes than the 4.7 percent difference between winner Bob Dole and Clinton.

And in 1980, Independent candidate John Anderson won 2.9 percent, slightly more than the 2.1 percent difference between winner Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.

Over the past century, North Carolina has rarely been a battleground.

Since 1908, the average margin of victory in the presidential race here has been 18 percentage points, and the median has been 12.4 points.

The closest race out of those 25 elections was Bill Clinton's challenge to incumbent President George H.W. Bush in 1992. As a Southern governor running on the economy, Clinton campaigned heavily in the state, but he was helped by a strong third-party showing by Ross Perot.

Bush only won by 0.79 percentage points, beating Clinton 43.4 to 42.7 percent. (Perot got 13.9 percent of the vote, the third-best showing for a third-party candidate in North Carolina after George Wallace in 1968 and Teddy Roosevelt in 1912.)

The next closest race was 1956, when Democrat Adlai Stevenson edged Dwight Eisenhower by 1.32 percentage points despite losing the national election.

In third place was Ronald Reagan's 2.12 point win over Jimmy Carter in 1980. In fourth place, John Kennedy's 4.22 point win over Richard Nixon in 1960. And in fifth place, Bob Dole's 4.69 point win over Clinton in 1996 despite losing the national election.

Otherwise, North Carolina was reliably Democratic from 1908 to 1964, and reliably Republican from 1968 to 2004 (with the exception of Carter's post-Watergate win in 1976.)

John Hope Franklin says Barack Obama's nomination is "amazing."

In a brief interview posted on Duke University's Web site, the 93-year-old renowned historian says that he did not think an African-American nominee for president would happen in his lifetime.

Franklin, who is black, said that he used to joke about it.

My mother and I used to have a game we'd play out in public. She would say if anyone asks what you want to be when you grow up, tell them you want to be the first Negro president of the United States — and just the words were so far-fetched, so incredible that we used to really have fun just saying it.

Franklin, who endorsed Obama in the primary, said he is hesitant to talk about the obstacles.

"Anyone who's lived in the United States 10 minutes knows that they exist," he said. "The question is does he have the capacity and the resources to overcome them?"

Hat Tip: Anne Blythe

Rob Christensen recently took Dome reader questions on his new book, "The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics."

Here are his answers to a few of those questions: 

Is the book you wrote the book you set out to write? If different, how so?

This is pretty much the book I set out to write. I wanted to write the book that I wanted to read: a book that connected the dots, that provided some context, and that involved some story-telling.

In reviewing the period covered, did you have any eureka moments? What were they?

A long the way, there were a number of surprises. Who knew that we almost had a governor lynched or that the first woman candidate for governor was a KGB agent, or that a North Carolina senator was a Nazi sympathizer? But what was most interesting to me is how the same issues play out time and time again. As Harry Truman once remarked, the only thing new in the world is the history you don't know.

Who was the most fascinating unheralded political figure you encountered or learned about?

Gov. O. Gardner, who was elected in 1928. He was a textile plant owner and a lawyer who pretty much invented state government as it exists today. After leaving office, he moved to Washington to become one of the first of the super lobbyists. But for 20 years he continued to run the state from his suite in the Mayflower Hotel.

Is there anyone who in your estimate should have but didn't achieve political success warranted by his or her ability? Who was the most memorable overachiever?

The memorable overachiever was two-term Sen. Robert Reynolds (1932-1944) who won election saying that the sitting senator, Cameron Morrison, a Charlotte plutocrat, ate fish eggs and red Russian fish eggs at that, and wasn't it time to elect a senator who didn't mind eating regular old North Carolina hen eggs.

What would be the subject of a book about N.C. politics that you have no intention of writing?

A boring history of the administration of each governor.

Gov. Mike Easley's budget includes $1 million for a Freedom Monument.

The proposed monument in downtown Raleigh would honor the places where plantation slaves came together to learn. According to this account, it would be located next to the state Archives building across the street from the General Assembly.

A design team of multimedia artist Juan Logan, art historian Lyneise Williams and architect David Swanson, all of Chapel Hill, was selected by organizers in 2006. 

Their design includes a serpentine wall depicting the Jim Crow era with a large crack symbolizing the Wilmington race riots, a "weeping wall" representing slavery and an auction block with well-worn footprints.

The monument project was started in 2002 by the Paul Green Foundation of Chapel Hill. The group plans to spend $2.5 million with private donations and public money.

Organizers say except for an anonymous black soldier in the N.C. Vietnam Veterans Memorial, blacks are not represented on the Capitol grounds. 

The N.C. Freedom Monument Project's Web site says it has already received support from the N.C. Humanities Council, the N.C. Arts Council and the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation.

How can North Carolina be represented by John Edwards and Jesse Helms? Why is the state so politically divided?

N&O columnist Rob Christensen tackles that question in his new book, "The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics."

He'll be speaking at the Cary Barnes & Noble at 7 p.m. Tuesday, but he'll also take your questions in this comment thread.

Hillary Clinton gave a little lesson on North Carolina history at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner.

Listing off the accomplishments of various historical figures, the Democratic presidential candidate named progressives and union members, abolitionists and suffragists. 

She mentioned the college students in Greensboro who fought segregation at lunch counters.

And then she mentioned a more obscure historical footnote: The Edenton Tea Party.

As Clinton explained, the women of Edenton, N.C., protested taxation without representation in 1774 by resolving to boycott British tea.

It was "one of the first times women in America organized for political action," she said.

Dome has now heard the most esoteric argument yet against Hillary Clinton.

In a phone conversation with former U.S. Sen. Harris Wofford, a surrogate for Barack Obama, the topic of experience in the presidential race came up.

Wofford, an advisor to President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, is no stranger to political experience, but he said it's not everything, citing — wait for it — James Buchanan.

He noted that the Pennsylvanian served as secretary of state, ambassador to Russia and Britain, U.S. representative and U.S. senator before becoming president in 1857.

"All the historians used to say he was a terrible failure, but he was the most experienced president we had," Wofford said.

But, he argued, one of the best presidents was the relatively inexperienced Abraham Lincoln. Needless to say, he then compared Obama to Lincoln.