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CHARLOTTE - They come from Florida, the Rust Belt and the Northeast. And the way they vote is changing the political complexion of North Carolina.

The waves of moderates and independents who have moved here have made this a battleground state, one that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has a chance to win, pollsters say. That’s a massive shift for a state where Sen. Jesse Helms used race in 1990 and 1996 to beat Senate seat rival Harvey Gantt, Charlotte’s only black mayor.

But many of today’s voters weren’t even here then.

Newcomers have everything to do with the state’s being in play, said Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Public Life at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Republican political consultant Dee Stewart disagrees. North Carolina is a battleground, he says, because Obama has outspent Republican John McCain and is ahead of him nationally.

Obama “is running further ahead than the Democratic nominees in 2000 and 2004, and some of that is spilling over into North Carolina,” Stewart said. Another factor, he said: “The economy is not performing well right now with a Republican in office.”

Still, he believes the state’s conservative roots are strong and McCain will win here.

Where they come from

People have flocked to North Carolina because of better job opportunities, leaving behind places where the economy has been worse off, such as the Midwest and Florida. Charlotte’s big banks have also drawn transplants from the Northeast, a traditional Democratic stronghold.

Last year, Florida and New York delivered the most newcomers, while three Rust Belt states — Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania — were in the top 10. A Charlotte Observer analysis of county voter registration records shows more than half of Mecklenburg’s eligible voters registered after 1999.

Newcomer Fran Walshin, of Davidson, says she got out of Florida just in time — three years ago, when she could still sell her house. But it’s not all rosy here, she said, noting that as a job recruiter, she meets lots of “devastated” professionals.

“We got in trouble, and now we need a new outlook to get us out of this problem. You can’t speak to the same people to get us out of this mess,” said Walshin, who is in her 60s and will cast a ballot for Obama.

Past predictability

Until now, North Carolina had been a politically predictable state — one that hasn’t voted for a Democrat for president since 1976, when Jimmy Carter was elected. In 2004, President Bush won the state by 12 percentage points over Sen. John Kerry and North Carolina-raised running mate John Edwards.

Polls show McCain and Obama are tied in North Carolina less than two weeks before the election. McCain has visited the state twice, and Obama has been here four times. Both vice presidential picks have made multiple visits. And both campaigns are flooding the airwaves with ads.

But newcomers — 263,000 last year — aren’t the only reason North Carolina is in the election spotlight.

The Democratic Party has held huge voter drives targeting blacks. Then, there are economic and banking woes. The state was late to the slowdown but is now feeling the effects of slumping home prices and rising unemployment. The recent collapse of home-grown, Charlotte-based Wachovia Corp. is yet another reason people are on edge about jobs and the future.

Tina Gerbino, 39, who moved to Charlotte two years ago from Long Island, N.Y., cast her early vote for Obama. It was her first time ever voting. Her issue: the economy. Soon after moving, she lost her job, and her husband can get only part-time hours at his job.

Read More:News & Observer

The brisk pace reflects predictions that general election turnout will set records this year

Louise Renner, 79, voted Thursday for the first time since 1976. Using a walker, she inched down Fayetteville Street from the Sir Walter Apartments to be one of the first to cast her ballot at the Wake Board of Elections office in downtown Raleigh.

Renner declined to reveal whom she was voting for but said that she wanted to make a statement by voting early.

“I’m so burned up with the way this country is being run,” she said. “It’s not just one thing, but everything.”

Val Simpson, 66, used to think that she would not live to see a black candidate with a real chance of becoming president.

“I’ve seen it all — the dogs, the marches — I’ve come full circle,” said Simpson as she stood in line outside the elections office near downtown Durham. “Thank you, Jesus, that I’m here to see it. Thank you.”

Civic duty, the sense they were making history or just the desire to get voting over with sent thousands to the polls for the first day of early voting in an election season expected to set turnout records.

Statewide vote totals were not available, and efforts to reach Gary Bartlett, executive director of the State Board of Elections, were unsuccessful. But in Durham, voters arrived at the election headquarters before 6 a.m., knowing they wouldn’t be able to get in until 9 a.m., said local elections director Mike Ashe. More than 6,250 people had voted in Durham by the end of the day.

“This is huge,” Ashe said. “It doesn’t take a genius to know this is a big election. There’s no incumbent president, no incumbent governor. Commissioners, taxes, we’ve got everything on this ballot. Obviously, the presidential election is driving this train.”

More than 6,000 Wake voters had cast ballots by 5 p.m., said Cherie Poucher, the county’s elections director. She said she was startled when she got to work and saw the line outside the building. “This election is of more interest than any other general election in the 18 years that I’ve been here,” she said.

N.C. a swing state

The presidential campaigns are paying unusual attention to North Carolina this year, with polls showing a tie between Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama. No Democratic presidential candidate has won the state since Jimmy Carter did in 1976.

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin visited the state Thursday. McCain is coming to the state Saturday, and Obama is returning Sunday.

The atmosphere was electric Thursday as voters crowded polling places around the state.

Kenny McLawhorn, 18, a UNC-Chapel Hill freshman from Kinston, participated in his first election Thursday. He voted a straight Republican ticket, even though he said he was not happy with the way President Bush has conducted the war in Iraq.

“McCain I see as not as far right as Bush is,” McLawhorn said. “He’s more moderate, and Obama’s too far left.”

McLawhorn said early voting was convenient and exciting because North Carolina has become a swing state this election.

Both parties have emphasized early voting this year, but the feeling that Obama could win here appeared to energize his supporters.

When poll workers at Wake’s election headquarters unlocked the doors at 8:30 a.m., there were more than 50 early birds in a line that wrapped around a corner of the building. The Obama vibe was strong, with a handful wearing his name on buttons, T-shirts and, in one case, a baseball cap. As the line moved forward, at least two people loudly exclaimed to each other that he was why they were there.

At N.C. Central University in Durham, hundreds of students marched across campus to a polling place set up in a former church.

Carolyn Edgerton, 63, had been there hours earlier, waiting in a line that had grown to at least 40 by the time the doors opened.

Read More:News & Observer

WASHINGTON - The Democratic presidential nomination his, Barack Obama reached out Wednesday to mend fences with his defeated rival as Republican opponent John McCain tried to frame the fall campaign on his own terms. “I think he has exercised very bad judgment on national security issues and others,” McCain said.

Hillary Rodham Clinton was angling to become Obama’s running mate and her aides ramped up the speculation on that matter Wednesday. “I think a lot of her supporters would like to see her on the ticket,” Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe said. But Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs cautioned “there is no deal in the works.”

Clinton has yet to acknowledge Obama’s victory in the bruising Democratic race and her aides - also dodging that conclusion - said on the morning talk shows that she would take a few days to decide what comes next for her. Obama spoke by phone with her Tuesday night and both sides predicted he and Clinton would sit down together before long.

“When the dust settles and it makes sense for her, he’ll meet whenever she wants to,” Gibbs said. “She’s accumulated a lot of votes throughout this country. We want to make sure that we’re appealing to her voters.”

Read More:News & Observer

Several months ago, I was approached by a number of concerned citizens. They asked me to run for the state legislature to give eastern Mecklenburg County effective representation in Raleigh. After much prayer and consideration, I have decided to accept that challenge.

Its never an easy time for Mecklenburg County in Raleigh. Now we face additional challenges. Two Representatives, including the former Speaker of the House, have resigned. The current Representative for District 103 has seen his anemic effectiveness ranking decline even further.

Read More:CarolinaNewsWire

RALEIGH, N.C. - In a show of support for conservative military and displomatic historian Mark Moyar, who insists he was denied an interview for a position in the N.C. State University Department of History solely because of his political leanings, Raleigh Metro Magazine editor and publisher Bernie Reeves has posted a letter Moyar recently wrote to a reporter at The Technician, NCSU’s student newspaper, on the Metro website (www.metronc.com). The post is entitled “Campus Radicals Strike Again: The Mark Moyar Story.”

Reeves responded to Andrew, a close friend who has worked with Reeves on the annual Raleigh Spy Conference, that he was “not surprised. In my 30 years as an editor and publisher in a community containing three large, prestigious universities, I learned that the liberal arts departments at UNC, State and Duke have closed their doors to teacher applicants who did not toe the [liberal] party line.The result is the destruction of scholarship in the liberal arts and the ascent of sensitivity propaganda masquerading as learning.”

Read More:CarolinaNewsWire

HONG KONG - In an epic culinary clash in Antarctic waters, whale defenders are managing to stay the harpoons of Japanese hunters.

The Japanese government said Monday that its state-sponsored whaling fleet had stopped hunting after 10 days of harassment by the environmental activist groups Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary near Australia.

Greenpeace said its vessel Esperanza had driven the Japanese processing ship Nisshin Maru out of the hunting grounds after a high-speed chase over hundreds of miles.

Without the factory boat, Japanese harpoon boats have ceased activities, as they have no way of processing their catch.

Clashes between vessels from the whale-hunting countries Japan, Iceland and Norway and their two nemeses, Greenpeace, which uses peaceful means, and the more aggressive Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which has sunk whaling boats, have been an annual ritual for more than two decades. But this year has shaped up as especially confrontational following Japan’s announcement in November that it would target for the first time 50 humpback whales, only to reverse itself a month later under pressure from Australia, New Zealand, the U.S. and the European Union.

Greenpeace’s victory came after the resolution of a tense three-day standoff in which two Sea Shepherd Conservation Society activists were detained aboard the Japanese whaling vessel Yushin Maru No. 2. Benjamin Potts and Giles Lane had boarded the Japanese boat to deliver a warning letter to the Japanese crew. They were released after the Australian government intervened.

Crew members of the Sea Shepherd vessel Steve Irwin also threw bottles of foul-smelling butyric acid on the deck of the Yushin Maru No. 2, seeking to prevent the Japanese whalers from working.

Read More:Forbes.com

EMMETSBURG, IOWA - Elizabeth Edwards had heard enough.A man had just told her husband, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, that Michelle Obama said his decision to abide by federal spending limits would handcuff his campaign.

Elizabeth Edwards grabbed her husband’s mike.

“I’m surprised and disappointed in Michelle,” she bluntly told more than 100 people crowded into a northern Iowa restaurant.

After an absence from the campaign trail, Elizabeth Edwards is once again grabbing the mike and the spotlight in the run-up to Thursday’s Iowa caucuses.

Indeed, most of the wives — and one prominent husband — are here now and on their best behavior. They’re at the candidates’ sides or making stops as surrogates in other locations.

Myra Gutin, a Rider University professor and author of “The President’s Partner: The First Lady in the Twentieth Century,” said a candidate’s spouse is not usually paramount in voters’ minds as they consider whom to support, but it seeps into their overall impressions.

“It’s part of the equation,” Gutin said. “We look at spouses as a part of character. It is one of the parts of decision-making, and, who knows, maybe it’s one of the things that swings the balance.”

Elizabeth Edwards flew in on Thursday, and she’s kept a hectic schedule of appearances for and with the former North Carolina senator. She’s appeared on early morning TV news shows and shepherded her 9- and 7-year-old children for long days aboard the campaign bus.

At times last year, Edwards was a visible, sometimes controversial presence in the campaign. Last summer, she derided Illinois Sen. Barack Obama for being “holier-than-thou” in his anti-Iraq war rhetoric. She criticized Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York as failing to lead on health care reform and upbraided conservative pundit Ann Coulter on national TV.

But then she was often absent from the campaign trail. She says she was busy taking care of her aging parents and getting ready for 17 guests at Christmas.

She’s also been undergoing treatment for an incurable form of breast cancer.

Edwards, 58, shows little sign of slowing. She appears thinner, but the only visible sign of treatment is a quarter-size bruise on her left wrist where she’s been injected as part of her treatments. She says she has “a few” side effects from the medication.

She says she’s aware of a whispering campaign, fueled in part by anonymous, so-called push polls, that John Edwards “should be home to help his sick and dying wife.”

“People actually need to see me [to see] that I’m healthy,” she says.

Help with female voters

In her very public battles with cancer, and with a memoir, Elizabeth Edwards garnered wide attention and support. In a race where Bill Clinton and Michele Obama are also stumping the state, the Edwards campaign hopes that admiration helps win over female voters. A Des Moines Register poll published Tuesday showed John Edwards had less support from women than either of his main rivals.

Elizabeth Edwards has already helped her husband win the backing of Deb Damstrom, a bus driver from Madrid, Iowa. She plans to caucus for him.

“She’s an inspiring woman,” says Damstrom, 58. “I started looking at [John] after I read her book.”

At events, Edwards takes the stage to the amplified strains of Tom Petty’s “American Girl” and introduces her husband. While he talks about “corporate greed,” she argues for his electability. In her quick cadence, she criticizes the 2004 campaign of Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who tapped John Edwards as his running mate. “They didn’t run a single ad in North Carolina,” she tells audiences. “We had a candidate on the ticket. They didn’t run a single ad.”

Read More:News & Observer

economics | Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life by Robert B. Reich, Knopf, $25, 288 pagesFor a long time now we’ve been told we are living in an age of excess and nowhere is this more true than in our use of language. No longer is it sufficient, for example, for an exceptional athlete to be referred to merely as a star, but rather as a superstar or, better yet, a megastar. Such escalation, moreover, often bleeds into obfuscation. Tall coffees at Starbucks are really smalls, and a grande is actually a medium. Seats in the “second mezzanine” — mezzanine from the Italian for middle or intermediate — of many arenas are actually the highest (and worst) in the buildings, and large soft drinks and large orders of fries are really, well, mezzos in our fast-food nation. And for at least a decade now, the simple word “capitalism” has not been adequate to describe the economic system under which almost everyone in the world lives today. Edward Luttwak may have started all this with his 1998 book “Turbo-Capitalism,” and since then coinages such as uber-capitalism, and hyper-capitalism have become common.

In his smart and provocative new book, Robert Reich — secretary of labor under Bill Clinton and now a professor of public policy at Berkeley — creates a neologism of his own to refer to today’s economy: Supercapitalism. By this term, Reich essentially means the highly volatile, ruthlessly competitive international economic system that began to emerge in the 1970s, the result largely of globalization, new technology and production processes, and deregulation. As a result of such factors, we have experienced over the past 30 years both a radical compression of space and time, and the creation, in Manuel Castells’ words, of “an economy that works as a unit in real time on a planetary scale.” Supercapitalism has led to much higher levels of productivity worldwide, and higher GDP per capita not only in the United States, but also in many other parts of the world. Over this period it has enriched investors and enhanced the well-being of consumers in innumerable ways. In so doing, however, it has had other, much less positive repercussions as well, the most profoundly disturbing of which for the U.S., according to Reich, are growing inequalities, increased economic insecurity and the decline of democracy itself. In “Supercapitalism,” Reich traces the transition from an earlier era of democratic capitalism in the U.S. to our current era, details how and why this transition came about and proposes some reforms that would in his view allow us to retain the economic gains associated with supercapitalism without allowing it to kill off democracy in the United States.

According to Reich, the economic era from the end of World War II until the mid-1970s contrasted sharply from the era of supercapitalism that succeeded it. In the first period — which many writers refer to as the Postwar Boom, but which Reich calls the “Not Quite Golden Age” — America “struck a remarkable accommodation between capitalism and democracy.” During this 30-year period, the economy grew steadily, but equitably, with almost all regions, sectors, groups and classes improving their lots. The economy was dominated by large corporations, mass production and highly regulated, oligopolistic markets. Unions were strong, and labor and capital established a fairly amicable working relationship, in large part because the structure of the economy enabled them to pass along to consumers negotiated increases in workers’ wages and benefits. If there wasn’t all that much competition in the economy, if consumers and investors had far fewer choices than they do today, the economy was more or less democratic in its overall outcomes: “A rising tide lifted all boats,” as John F. Kennedy used to say.

Read On: News & Observer

The invitation appeared one Sunday in Joanna Chase’s church bulletin: Come to a “faith forum” and join a conversation about the intersection of religion and politics.Living in New Hampshire, Chase is accustomed to pitches from presidential hopefuls, especially those focusing on values-voting Republicans. But this one came from the team of a Democrat, Sen. Barack Obama.

The candidate himself wasn’t on the bill. But about 50 people showed up to talk about the war, poverty and trying to seize back the moral mantle some in the GOP claim. The night also featured an Obama video and a campaign altar call — an invitation to become a “congregation contact” and rally support for the candidate.

“I don’t know if I will vote for Barack Obama,” said Chase, 62, who was inspired enough to organize a similar forum at her United Church of Christ congregation in Northwood, N.H. “There are several candidates I like very much. But I love that he has the character and confidence to allow people to do this. He doesn’t have to own every bit of it.”

The leading Democratic contenders for the White House all have made a point of talking about religion this campaign season. They discuss their faith journeys and how their beliefs influence their policies. The campaigns of Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards all are doing outreach to religious communities.

But Obama, the junior senator from Illinois, has made religion a signature part of his campaign through his own public appearances in places where Democrats rarely venture, and a faith-based voter mobilization, topped by forums in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina that could prove key to organizing.

“I don’t think a Democratic presidential candidate has come close to doing anything like this before,” said Mark Silk, director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. “If you are going to parse the different dimensions of how a presidential candidate does religion, he’s doing them all.”

Will it win votes? Create a backlash from Democrats angry that religion and politics are too intertwined? Obama has drawn criticism from the Rev. Welton Gaddy of the liberal Interfaith Alliance, who said the senator “has sounded precisely like George W. Bush” in recent church appearances.

A member of the liberal United Church of Christ, Obama has said he was raised in a nonreligious home and had a conversion experience after doing community organizing in Chicago churches. He spoke last year — before announcing his candidacy — of a desire to tackle “mutual suspicion” between religious and secular America.

He invokes biblical imagery, saying that because government alone cannot solve problems, “we have an individual responsibility to be our brother’s keeper and our sister’s keeper.” At the same time, Obama has lauded the separation of church and state and has paid homage to America’s religious pluralism.

Campaigning in Iowa recently, Obama framed the climate change debate in religious terms, saying: “We are not acting as good stewards of God’s earth when our bottom line puts the size of our profits before the future of our planet.”

Obama’s religious affairs director, Joshua DuBois, said his charge is to create a “robust, grass-roots outreach program” — including nonreligious people who view issues through a moral lens and want a voice in the debate. DuBois is a former Obama Senate aide and former associate minister with the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination.

The faith forums, like the one Chase attended in New Hampshire, are perhaps the most visible illustration of the Obama faith ground game.

Read On:News & Observer