There has been a shakeup in the Senate campaign of GOP Sen. Elizabeth Dole.
J. Sam Daniels, the campaign manager, has been shifted into the role of a top fund raiser, Rob Christensen reports. He will be replaced by Marty Ryall, who until recently ran the gubernatorial campaign of Bill Graham.
Daniels is a former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party and he had also worked in the 2000 gubernatorial campaign of Bill Cobey.
There was no immediate reason given for the shuffle. But recent polls have shown that Dole has a much closer race against Democrat Kay Hagan than many had anticipated.
No immediate word from the Dole campaign.
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Re: Dole shakes up campaign
Give Sen. Elizabeth Dole credit for politically minding the homefront in her campaign battles. In 2004, as Erskine Bowles began to break through in some of the larger counties of the Piedmont, Sen. Dole gave even more attention to the immediate region of counties immediately surrounding her home county of Rowan, then proceeded from there to fortify her political bases elsewhere against an appealing and visionary Democratic candidate.
But now in moving Marty Ryall into the campaign manager's position, Elizabeth Dole is "returning to the neighborhood" by relying on someone who managed the gubernatorial campaign of Salisbury's Bill Graham. But Sam Daniels' stint probably was helpful since the entire push from the Democratic Party up north recently has been to run the North Carolina Piedmont from South Carolina in every thing from politics to journalism.
They completely goofed up John Edwards' role as vice presidential candidate in 2004, trying to make him into more of a South Carolina candidate (perhaps since he was born in the Palmetto State) who would come up to visit North Carolina every now and then (but not very often). And while the national Democrats' "journalism coordinators" usually leave the venerable News & Observer to its own devices in press-and-politics matters in the Triangle and Eastern North Carolina, they keep trying to have McClatchy's Columbia, S.C., daily newspaper, The State, command the North Carolina Piedmont, leaving Charlotte writers and journalism folks playing a lot of second fiddle, which can be fun for a while until you miss your turn to call the tune.
So while it's not exactly "fighting fire with fire," as long as the national Democratic Party keeps re-enacting South Carolina's role in starting the Civil War militarily, though with a supposedly more liberal agenda, the Dole Senate campaign is smart to keep its forces drawn in, like infantrymen on a battlefield or linebackers on the defensive side of the scrimmage line in a football game.
Fortunately for North Carolina Democrats, Kay Hagen has every chance of rising up over the national Democratic Party's drive to make North Carolina the stool pigeon of Southern politics. They'll have a tough time trying to reverse the legacy of Kay Hagen's late uncle, Lawton Chiles, as a reform-minded senator and governor in Florida, and they should have even a harder time trying to arrange for political instructions to be delivered to the Guilford County state senator from south of the Carolina line.
The best way for the in-the-know, savoir-faire, politicos-par-excellence of the national Democratic Party to celebrate the modern-day neighborly North and South Carolina partnership would be to try visiting Carowinds, go to a stock car race, or maybe take a tour of Uptown Charlotte, especially since some News & Observer columnists have just about offered to provide free South Carolina driver's licenses for every banker, baker and Panthers playmaker up and down Tryon Street in the Queen City of the Carolinas.
Even the country's greatest academic social climber of them all, Duke University, which says "Yale" more often that "y'all" and is determined to make Southerners who are interested in the history of the Democratic Party get all their "larnin'" from up North, should observe just how one former Duke coed whose smarts are doubted by few has combined her Salisbury upbringing with her Duke education and public service career to help move the N.C. Piedmont down the field and into the end zone for the Republican cause. Duke doesn't even try to convert Southern Republicans academically, but they sure will try to convince Southern Democrats from Chattanooga to Corpus Christi get their political driving lessons from the Poughkeepsie Journal and the Boston Globe. If Harvard and Yale treated Massachusetts, Connecticut and New England the way some Duke savants look upon North Carolina, South Carolina and the South, then David Gergen's U.S. News magazine would probably not give them such high ratings. How Duke gets away with this in the academic ratings game is a real mystery because how can you educate students about America if you simply omit any study of the actual region ofthe country where your university is located?
So as long as the national Democratic Party keeps trying to make North Carolina serve as some kind of a "throwaway state," some vacant field of contented kudzu between Norfolk and Spartanburg, Republican leaders like Elizbeth Dole are going to keep showing them the wisdom and practicality of good old North Carolina tea leaves, as when Asheville's "Our Bob" Reynolds told voters back in the 1930s that unlike "Caviar Cam" Morrison, he'd rather have "good old North Carolina fish eggs."
That old expression from North Carolina history, with the humorous reference to this state as "a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit," is a lot more elegant than the stark politics-and-journalism "command from Columbia" forumla that national Democratic managers have been dishing out for the last few years. Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Kay Hagan can certainly improve her chances for election in November by ditching the national party's I-77 South strategy and sticking to the tried-and-true blacktops and coast-to-mountain highways of the Old North State.
It's going to take all the North Carolina erudition that the Hagan campaign can muster in going up against a wife-and-husband team that is undefeated in all its candidate-and-spouse senatorial campaigns in Kansas and North Carolina. Yes, folks, it'll be every bit as tough as challenging Roy Williams to a Big 12/ACC trivia game.
David McKnight