About
Trail Mix, the campaign blog of the Winston-Salem Journal, is a conversation about North Carolina's elections in 2008. Come here for news and analysis on the U.S. Senate race, the governor's race and all the other statewide races. We'll also follow John Edwards as he makes his second run for the White House.
Trail Mix is written by James Romoser, the Journal's Raleigh reporter. Got a tip? E-mail me at .
Gov. Mike Easley sent a letter today to Barack Obama asking him to participate in a debate in North Carolina.
Noting that more than 125,000 North Carolinians have registered as Democrats or unaffiliated voters this year, Easley wrote in the letter:
“I understand that CBS has offered to sponsor a debate moderated by Katie Couric and Bob Schieffer on the evening of April 27 in Raleigh at the RBC Center. Your commitment to participate in this event will give North Carolinians their best opportunity to hear you and Sen. Hillary Clinton discuss important issues, from education, our economy and our nation’s role in the world, that face our nation today. I am confident that this debate will even further energize and motivate North Carolina’s voters to express themselves at the ballot box on May 6.”
Clinton has agreed to the April 27 debate, but Obama has not. Obama previously agreed to debate in North Carolina before April 22, which is the date of the Pennsylvania primary, where Clinton is favored.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama released details today of their planned visits to North Carolina later this week.
Clinton, as previously reported, will return to Winston-Salem to campaign at Wake Forest University’s Wait Chapel on Friday evening. The doors open at 4 and the event is scheduled to begin at 6. It is free and open to the public. The event is being billed as a conversation between Clinton and poet Maya Angelou. (The next day, Winston-Salem is hosting a celebration in honor of Angelou’s 80th birthday.)
On Thursday, Obama will hold rallies in Raleigh and Greenville. His Raleigh event is scheduled for 11:30 a.m. in the Kerr Scott Building. The event is free, but tickets are required; they will be distributed at Obama’s Raleigh headquarters all day Wednesday. In Greenville, where Obama will campaign at East Carolina University, doors will open at 4 p.m. Tickets are not required to that event, but an RSVP is “strongly encouraged.” People can RSVP at Obama’s North Carolina web site.
Note to the Hillary Clinton campaign: The man in the picture above is not a woman.
He is Ashley Thrift, a prominent Winston-Salem attorney and the chairman of the N.C. Partnership for Children. Why is his gender relevant? Because his name appeared on a long list of prominent women who are supporting Clinton in North Carolina. The list was sent out today by the Clinton campaign.
On the list, which was billed as a “North Carolina women’s leadership council,” Thrift appeared three spots below Maya Angelou, the renowned poet and professor at Wake Forest, and one spot above Emily Herring Wilson, a Winston-Salem writer. Also included on the list: Julianne Thrift, the former president of Salem College ... and wife of Ashley Thrift.
Thrift’s name wasn’t the only gender gaffe from the campaign. Dana Cope, the (male) executive director of the State Employees Association of North Carolina, also appeared on the list.
(Hat tip to the eagle-eyed Laura Leslie for first pointing this out.)
From today’s print edition: Both the Clinton and Obama campaigns are reaching out to young voters in advance of the May 6 primary, the Journal‘s Lisa Boone-Wood reports. Obama is focusing on grassroots organizing on every college campus in North Carolina; the Clinton campaign also has a college program and has used Chelsea Clinton to connect with young people. “In the past, conventional political wisdom was that young voters don’t vote, so campaigns ignored them,” said Gary Pearce, a Democratic consultant. “That has changed this year.”
Hillary Clinton will return to Winston-Salem for an event at Wake Forest University on Friday, the Wake Forest student newspaper is reporting tonight.
According to the Old Gold & Black‘s Kevin Koehler, Clinton will speak at Wait Chapel at 5:30 p.m. The newspaper’s source is Zahir Rahim, the president of the university’s College Democrats chapter. The Clinton campaign has not confirmed the visit, but the paper quotes university spokesman Kevin Cox as saying that he expects the Clinton campaign to make an announcement Tuesday about the visit.
Clinton has already visited Winston-Salem once this campaign season: On March 27, she held a campaign rally at Forsyth Tech.
Barack Obama is also returning to the state this week. On Thursday, he will hold a rally at East Carolina University in Greenville, with doors opening at 4 p.m., the Obama campaign said yesterday evening. Obama is also planning an event in the Triangle area on Thursday, but no details have been announced.
In this week’s Democratic tracking poll from Public Policy Polling, Barack Obama maintains his lead in North Carolina, while Beverly Perdue and Kay Hagan each get a bump.
Obama leads Hillary Clinton 54 to 34 — almost identical to last week’s numbers — despite the weekend controversy over Obama’s remarks about “bitter” small-town Americans. (But Dean Debnam, the president of PPP, notes in a press release that many of the likely voters surveyed over the weekend may not have heard of the controversy yet.)
Meanwhile, in the race for the nomination for U.S. Senate, Kay Hagan launched ahead of Jim Neal, leading him 28 to 7. There’s one reason: the TV ad she recently started airing. About a third of voters surveyed reported having seen Hagan’s ad, and among those voters, she had a 48 to 6 advantage over Neal. But undecideds still dominate the Senate race: 58 percent say they are undecided.
In the race for the nomination for governor, Beverly Perdue appears to have received a bounce from her pledge to drop her negative ads. She leads Richard Moore 41 to 31. PPP’s Tom Jensen writes that the big question for Perdue is whether she can sustain her momentum in the midst of continued attacks from Moore. (And as it happens, Moore just released a new negative ad against Perdue, Under the Dome reports.)
From today’s print edition: A full story on Barack Obama’s “bitter” comment, his “regret” at causing offense and the potential fallout in North Carolina. Also, a look at the surging voter registration in Forsyth County and across the state.
Barack Obama said today in an interview that he regrets offending people in recent remarks in which he said that small-town Americans are “bitter” and “cling to guns or religion.”
Obama has come under fire yesterday and today after revelations of the remarks, which he made last weekend at a fundraiser in San Francisco. Here’s what Obama said at the fundraiser in reference to small-town residents in Pennsylvania who have experienced economic distress:
“It’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Initially, Obama appeared to stand behind his comments, but in a phone interview with Trail Mix this afternoon, he for the first time expressed regret about the remarks, while simultaneously defending the core of what he was trying to say. Here’s what Obama said in the interview. He was responding to a question about whether he would apologize to small-town Americans who were offended by his quote in San Francisco:
“Well look, if there — obviously, if I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that. But the underlying truth of what I said remains, which is simply that people who have seen their way of life upended because of economic distress are frustrated and rightfully so. And I hear it all the time when I visit these communities. People say they feel as if nobody is paying attention or listening to them and that is something — that is one of the reasons I am running for president. I saw this when I first started off as a community organizer and the steel plants had closed, and I was working with churches in communities that had fallen on hard times. And they felt angry and frustrated.”
From today’s print edition: More coverage of Beverly Perdue’s abrupt advertising drawdown. Says Perdue: “For the last month, it’s been hard for me to look some people in the face.” Says Richard Moore: “What is negative? Everything that we have put on the air is based in fact.”
Meanwhile, seven candidates who want to succeed Perdue as lieutenant governor debated last night in Research Triangle Park.
Beverly Perdue said this morning that she has pulled all of her negative television ads from the air because she got fed up with the tone of her race against Richard Moore for the Democratic nomination for governor.
“For the last month, it’s been hard for me to look some people in the face,” Perdue said.
Perdue and Moore have frequently and vigorously attacked each other on TV and on the web. Perdue said that Moore went negative first, and that after he did, Perdue’s political consultants pushed her to fight back. Now, she said, against some consultants’ advice, she is promising not to run any more ads attacking Moore. She would not, however, extend her no-negativity pledge to the general election.
This morning she launched a new tv ad (which you can view above) in which she explains her decision to change her campaign’s tone.
Last week, in an interview with Trail Mix, Moore said that he sees no problem with the tone of the campaign and thinks it is legitimate to talk about Perdue’s background and record. Over the last month, during the period in which he increased his negative ads, Moore gained on Perdue considerably in the polls.
