Dear TV news talking head:
Welcome to North Carolina! We're not used to seeing your kind around here, especially during presidential election years. Heck, the last time North Carolina was a "battleground state" was April of 1865 — when General Sherman's troops came through!
By now, you can confidently rattle off the names of crucial neighborhoods in Cleveland, Miami and Philadelphia with ease, but you may be a little nervous talking about North Carolina. To help you along this election season, we've come up with a quick list of talking points:
RED STATE: North Carolina is typically a red state when it comes to presidential politics. The last time we went for a Democrat was Jimmy Carter in 1976. (To drive this point home, you can remind people that Sen. Jesse Helms was from here.)
PRIMARY FIGHT: This state was crucial in the primary battle between Obama and Hillary Clinton. Obama won the state and, by some accounts, ended Clinton's hopes for a comeback. The primary also left him with a network of supporters here.
ISSUES: With several military bases and a growing Hispanic population, Iraq and immigration once looked like big issues. But these days, it's all about the economy and jobs. The sale of Wachovia and ongoing discontent with free trade are a major factor.
NICKNAMES: Officially, this is "The Old North State." (It's even our state song, though you'd be hard pressed to find someone who knows it.) You'll probably be better off referring to it by our unofficial nickname, The Tar Heel State. (That's two words: Tar Heel.)
TRIVIA: We have 15 electors. We claim Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk and Andrew Johnson as natives, though all three were elected from Tennessee. Two of our recent senators — Elizabeth Dole and John Edwards — ran for president.
Oh, and there's no such place as Raleigh-Durham. They are two separate cities. (You may be confused because of Winston-Salem or the fact that our airport has that name.)
We hope that helps and we look forward to seeing you soon — maybe in 2012?
— Under the Dome
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Re: Press Limitations in N.C.
Journalists from other states ought to make sure they maintain their home-state connections while covering politics in North Carolina because the Democratic Party of this state has a sordid record of limitation of freedom of the press for writers who do not support the proper "ltef-liberal" wing of the national and state Democratic parties.
Around here in Raleigh and Durham, the sort-of-liberal wing of our Democratic Party loves to try to please the supposedly liberal branches of the national Democratic Party in Texas and in the Northeast and New England, even if it means limiting the publication of editorial essays in support of the Democratic candidate for governor of North Carolina, Bev Perdue.
So the end result of our Democratic Party's meddling with constitutionally protected press liberties has resulted in a whole slew of newspaper editorials in favor of the Republican candidate for governor.
Although our own home state's Democratic Party deserves the major responsibility for this unhealthy state of literary and journalistic affairs, some of the "credit" must also go to certain Democratic Party organizations in the Northeast, which managed to convince our political, educational and journalistic establishment in the Triangle years ago that our own North Carolina writers should play a lot of second fiddle when it comes to writing about politics, education and government here in North Carolina.
The extent to which certain operatives of both the state and national Democratic parties will go to make life miserable personally for Tar Heel writers unwilling to follow this nebulous left-liberal party line in their own independent research and editorial work is one of the great untold stories in American journalism today.
Because certain outstanding journalists--such as David Brinkley, Charles Kuralt and Tom Wicker--went from their native North Carolina to important positions at leading national press organizations such as NBC, CBS and The New York Times, now the conventional wisdom is that the Democratic Party, in dubious "arrangements" with certain local organizations of the Republican Party in cities such as Charlotte, ought to try to exercise harsh, unrelenting editorial control over the work of writers and editors in the Old North State.
Only in "liberal" North Carolina is it possible to go 30 years under the poverty line trying to earn an honest livelihood in journalism-related endeavors free from direct intervention or even censorship by the "progressive" wing of the national and state Democratic parties.
David P. McKnight