RALEIGH, N.C.  – A former state senator said Tuesday he won’t seek the Democratic nomination to challenge Republican U.S. Sen. Richard Burr next year despite spending months traveling the state and testing out a campaign.

Cal Cunningham, a Lexington attorney and Army reservist who served in Iraq, confirmed he wrote a Facebook message to supporters saying he had “concluded that this is the wrong race at the wrong time for me and my family.”

Cunningham, 36, had been exploring a bid since the spring, making the rounds of Democratic Party rallies and dinners. Time away from home appears to have played a role in his decision.

“I also owe it to my family – before committing us to a hard year – to be a husband and father first,” Cunningham wrote. “Here on the eve of Veterans Day, I am reminded of the over 900 days our family has been separated because of active military service in the last few years. Today, I choose to be home.”

At least three Democrats already have said they’re seeking the nomination, including North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall. Another potential Democratic candidate – U.S. Rep. Bob Etheridge of Lillington – has been expected to announce a decision for weeks.

Etheridge, a seventh-term congressman who this year joined the powerful Ways and Means Committee, was expected to unveil his decision last weekend. But he delayed it because he couldn’t get home as the House voted on the health care bill, according to Jason Sulham, an Etheridge spokesman.

“He now expects to make a decision by the end of this week,” Sulham wrote.

Cunningham was elected to the state Senate in 2000 but didn’t run two years later because changing legislative boundaries had made his district too Republican for him to win. Kenneth Lewis of Durham and Frank Deaton II of Charlotte also have filed federal campaign documents indicating they’ll run in May’s Democratic primary. Marshall ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate nomination in 2002.

Several other Democrats – Attorney General Roy Cooper and Rep. Heath Shuler among them – considered the race but ultimately declined.

Burr, a former congressman who defeated Democrat Erskine Bowles in 2004 for his current seat, had nearly $3.5 million in his campaign coffers as of Sept. 30.

Lewis reported his campaign had $184,000 on the same date, while Marshall, who announced her bid Sept. 9, reported $164,000, according to federal election filings. Deaton didn’t organize his campaign officially until early October.

RALEIGH, N.C. – Has America moved into a “post-racial” era? Is the “race game” a thing of the past in American society and politics? “The South’s New Racial Politics” will be discussed in a free program at the N.C. Museum of History in Raleigh on Sept. 1 at 2 p.m., presented by the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources, Office of Archives and History, and by legislator and scholar Dr. Glen Browder.

In his new book “The South’s New Racial Politics: Inside the Race Game of Southern History,” former Rep. Glen Browder (D-Ala.) says race is “the most useful, single factor of both analysis and power in the South.” Browder follows racial history from the time of white supremacy and segregation, through the Civil Rights era and the progress of the 1970s-1990s, and discusses the importance and effect of political campaign racial calculations.

“The usually barren marketplace of books about Congress has been enriched,” says the CongressDaily. Browder writes about the “race game” in “a sometimes brutally candid description of cynicism on race across the political spectrum.”

Dr. Browder has bridged the gap between classroom civics and real-world government during an extensive career as college professor and public official. Now Professor Emeritus of American Democracy at Jacksonville State University, Browder has won recognition as an effective public servant, emphasizing political reform in a changing world, throughout an extensive public career-covering 14 years in elective office as a U. S. Congressman, Alabama Secretary of State and Alabama State Legislator, and spanning several decades as a political science professor.

For additional information, call (919) 807-7385. The N.C. Office of Archives and History and the Museum of History are within the Department of Cultural Resources, the state agency dedicated to the promotion and protection of North Carolina’s arts, history and culture.

RALEIGH, N.C. – Voters are still exhaling from the last election and balloons haven’t yet dropped to mark the beginning of the next.

But the 2010 Senate race in North Carolina has already launched in earnest.

North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr has been plotting his political strategy and quietly fundraising, expanding on $1.6 million in campaign cash that he had stocked at the end of March. Meanwhile, Democrats have already started targeting Burr. On Thursday, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee posted a Web ad criticizing Burr for telling his wife to withdraw as much money as she could from an ATM machine in the midst of the economic crisis.

Burr’s longtime political strategist, Paul Shumaker, said he expects a tough campaign that could cost upward of $60 million.

PPP says there is a challenge to conventional wisdom: more African Americans in North Carolina describe themselves as conservatives than liberals.

An analysis found that the past seven races in North Carolina were decided by an average of 6 percentage points — the lowest in the nation, the N&O reports.

RALEIGH, N.C. – Only three months after a record-breaking voter turnout in the 2008 election, potential candidates for an open North Carolina U.S. Senate seat in 2010 all start out with very low statewide name recognition.

See Full Results

According to the latest Civitas Poll, a majority of voters in North Carolina are not aware of either the incumbent US Senator Richard Burr (R) or his two rumored potential opponents in 2010, Congressman Heath Shuler (D), or N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper (D).

“While Senator Burr enjoys a slightly higher overall favorable rating than the other two, none of the three potential candidates are widely known among the electorate,” said Francis De Luca, executive director of the Civitas Institute. “Congressman Shuler is a virtual unknown outside of his district in Western N.C.” |

Current N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper and US Congressman Heath Shuler are among the two most publicly speculated candidates to challenge Burr.

“Despite being in office an additional three plus years, taking over the highly publicized Duke lacrosse case, and just recently spending in excess of $2.5 million on re-election, Attorney General Cooper has only marginally improved his favorability since October 2005,” said De Luca.

Civitas tested voters’ opinion of Roy Cooper back in October 2005:
Favorable: 23%
Unfavorable: 4%
Unsure: 25%
Not aware: 47%

“All three candidates have a tremendous amount of work to do to familiarize themselves with voters over the next two years. It is almost as if voters are starting off with a blank slate of candidates to choose from for their next US Senator,” De Luca concluded.

The Civitas Poll is the only monthly live-caller poll of critical issues and policies facing North Carolina. Complete results of the poll will be released at noon on Thursday, Jan. 29 at the Clarion Hotel in downtown Raleigh during the monthly poll luncheon hosted by Civitas.

The study of 600 registered voters was conducted Jan. 19-22, 2009. All respondents were part of a fully representative sample of registered voters in North Carolina. For purposes of this study, voters we interviewed had to have voted in either the 2004, 2006 or 2008 general elections or were newly registered voters since 2008.

The confidence interval associated with a sample of this size is such that: 95 percent of the time, results from 600 interviews (registered voters) will be within +-4% of the “True Values.” True Values refer to the results obtained if it were possible to interview every person in North Carolina who had voted in either the 2004, 2006 or 2008 general elections or were newly registered voters since 2008.

BY MICHAEL PAUL WILLIAMS
Times-Dispatch Staff Writer

Johnnie Taylor shook her head, raised her arms and mouthed a silent prayer as the band struck up “Hail to the Chief” for President Barack Obama.

Taylor, 60, recalled her youth as a civil-rights activist who was yanked from a lunch-counter stool during a Woolworth’s sit in. The conflict resolution trainer at the Richmond Peace Education Center sees Obama’s presidency as the product of divine intervention.

“When things like this happen, it’s not by accident. It’s not by history. It’s an ordained event,” she said. “I know man had to vote, but God made this happen.”

Kayla Hill-Jones was born a half-century after Taylor, but bore a psychic load no less onerous. For the Glen Allen Elementary School fourth-grader, yesterday meant this: “That I can accomplish anything, even though I’m black.”

Taylor and Kayla were among three dozen people who watched Obama’s inauguration at Highland Park’s Fire House 15 as they washed down chili, cornbread, tossed salad and brownies with sweet iced tea. The fire station-turned-eatery is run by Boaz & Ruth, a nonprofit that seeks to transform Highland Park, serve as a community bridge and rebuild the lives of formerly incarcerated men and women.

As I listened to a 10-year-old child describe her brave new world, it brought to mind the old one of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Upon telling his young daughter that the Atlanta amusement park Funtown was closed to black children, he could see “ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky.”

Those clouds have hovered over the collective mental sky of African-Americans throughout the nation’s history.

Yesterday, the skies cleared.

The forecast for America is another matter. The nation’s helm has been handed to an African-American during one of the most turbulent times in our nation’s history.

Adria Scharf, director of the Richmond Peace Education Center, described yesterday as “disorienting,” and indeed, there was a magical aura that bordered on surreal. You might say the country has found its bearings after straying wildly off course from the grand ideals charted in its founding.

The journey toward that ideal is far from complete. But perhaps for the first time, many of us understand how King felt in the famous speech that foreshadowed his death. Like him, we don’t know what will happen now. There are difficult days ahead. But that doesn’t matter as much anymore. We’ve been to the mountaintop.

“I’m 50,” said Ruth Cosby, a Boaz & Ruth graduate who supervises its furniture store at Third and Main streets. “I thought I would never see this. I just couldn’t stop crying. I think this is going to unite us as a country, and we’re going to realize Dr. King’s dream.”

If that’s the case, it’s children such as Kayla who stand to inherit a nobler nation.

Kayla’s parents, Stan Jones and Regina Hill, are supporters of Boaz & Ruth. “We wanted her to experience giving instead of receiving — of serving others,” her mother said of Kayla.

Kayla wore a red and blue T-shirt that featured a portrait of the new first family inside the presidential seal.

“She said she wanted to be the first African-American president,” her mother said, chuckling. “I told her she could be the first woman.”

ST. PAUL, Minn.  – The board that will determine whether Republican Norm Coleman or Democrat Al Franken won Minnesota’s Senate race will be “extraordinarily nonpartisan,” according to its new chairman.

Democratic State secretary of State Mark Ritchie chose a canvassing board Wednesday that includes himself, two state Supreme Court justices appointed by Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty, and two county judges.

The board is charged with certifying vote totals and settling differences over disputed ballots once local officials complete their recount.

Coleman currently leads by 206 votes out of 2.9 million – a margin of seven-thousandths of 1 percent, small enough to trigger an automatic recount.

The board meets Tuesday to certify the machine-counted tally before officially ordering the manual recount that will start the next day. A month later, the panel will reconvene to determine the fate of ballots challenged during the recount.

Besides Ritchie, a Democrat, the board includes two Supreme Court justices appointed by Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty – Chief Justice Eric Magnuson and Justice G. Barry Anderson – and Ramsey

County Chief Judge Kathleen Gearin and her deputy, Edward Cleary. Gearin’s politics are unclear; she was elected in a non-partisan race in 1986 and declines to talk about her politics. Cleary was appointed in 2002 by then-Gov. Jesse Ventura, an Independence Party member.

At a news conference Wednesday, Ritchie downplayed the political ties of the canvassing board members, including himself.

“When they put on the robe, they stop being of a political party and they start being servants of the people of Minnesota and

I feel the same way when I took the oath of office and walked through the door,” Ritchie said. He added, “I can promise you and the citizens that this is going to be run in an extraordinarily nonpartisan way.”

Fritz Knaak, Coleman’s lead lawyer, said he was comfortable with the board’s makeup. “The people of this state should feel good about who’s on the panel,” he said.

Franken spokesman Andy Barr jabbed at Coleman supporters who have raised questions about Ritchie’s impartiality.

“I think we can all now see that their claims were just political posturing,” Barr said. “Today, Mark Ritchie has named two partisan Republican Supreme Court justices to the state canvassing board.”

The recount action will be spread around the state. Ritchie’s office has identified 74 recount sites and predicts that will grow to as many as 120 by next week.

There were 2.92 million estimated voters on Election Day, but 2.88 million recorded Senate votes. Some voters may have intentionally skipped the race, but officials expect the hand count to show votes that the optical-scan machines didn’t pick up. Local elections officials are due to receive recount training on Thursday.

Depending on the size of the county, the local counts will take anywhere from a day to a couple of weeks. Some places won’t start their count until Nov. 24.

The secretary of state’s office wants all the local counts done by Dec. 5, although it stopped short of saying it was a hard deadline.

What’s more scary: a bleak economy or a black president? The two ideas converge in a small but influential group of voters who fear that if elected, Barack Obama would give blacks preferential treatment just when all of America needs help in financial hard times.

Some of Obama’s success thus far against John McCain is due to his casting himself as a “post-racial” candidate who would fight for the middle class and represent everyone equally. The Democratic nominee also says that affirmative action should be extended to low-income whites and exclude privileged minorities like his two daughters.

But the collision between economic worries and fear of a black president most often occurs in middle- and lower-class swing voters, a coveted demographic in this tight election, polls show. The sentiment also hints at racial hurdles that would arise if Obama does become the nation’s first black chief executive.

“I do think he has that minority thing probably in the back of his mind, deep down,” said Charles Palmer of Lafayette, La., a retired oil company manager and registered Democrat who plans to vote for McCain. “He’s not going to hurt ‘em, let’s put it that way.”
 
“It’s just the attitude blacks have toward the whites in this country,” Palmer said. “It’s very negative.”
 
Palmer has lost about a third of his retirement savings in the stock market tumble, but at age 74 he’s not scared of running out of money. Among those closer to the financial edge, however, fear is more stark.

A farmer from Eau Claire, Wis., was quoted recently in The New Yorker magazine as saying an Obama presidency would mean “the end of life as we know it,” while a retired state employee in Kentucky said he didn’t want a black president because “he would put too many minorities in positions over the white race.”

Obama opened up his biggest lead in the polls in early October, just after Congress and the White House approved the $700 billion economic bailout. The polls have tightened in recent days as the apocalyptic headlines receded.

“The economic issue has been enormously beneficial to Obama at the end of the campaign,” said Glenn Loury, a professor of social science and economics at Brown University. “So I think you have to say that fear of economic instability and belief that the Democrats in general and Obama in particular are likely to be better on those issues have won out over race.”

But even in latent form, fear of a black president raises provocative questions: Is it predicated on the belief that the 43 white presidents have favored white citizens, and that a President McCain would do the same? Do people assume that a black president would be powerless against the desire to avenge centuries of slavery and oppression?

Are the interests of whites and blacks necessarily opposed? Is power a zero-sum proposition? And what are Obama’s thoughts about race-sensitive issues like disproportionate incarceration rates or the war on drugs?

“Post-election, with a huge mandate, a lot of these issues will come back and be more intense because it will be a black man setting the agenda for the country,” Loury said.

Obama has assembled diverse Senate and campaign staffs. His Senate chief of staff, chief campaign strategist and campaign manager are white. McCain did not respond to a request for information about the racial makeup of his staff.

When Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review, some liberal and minority editors were critical of Obama for not appointing more minorities to leadership positions, his Harvard classmate Bradford Berenson told the PBS show “Frontline.”

President Clinton assembled one of the most diverse cabinets in history. President Bush appointed Colin Powell as the first black secretary of state; the 21 cabinet-level positions currently listed on the White House’s Web site include Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice – Hispanic, Asian-American and black, respectively.

Even among white voters who believe that Obama would govern equally, like Dominic Moccio of North Brunswick, N.J., there are concerns rooted in America’s rapidly changing racial demographics.

“People who are in power set the agenda,” said Moccio, who works in information technology at a cosmetics plant. “If Latinos are in power, they’re going to set an agenda that tries to make things better for Latinos … (Obama) doesn’t come across that way, but who’s going to be influencing him (if he’s elected)? Is it going to be Reverend Wright, (Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s controversial former pastor), is it going to be Jesse Jackson, or is it going to be Colin Powell?”

Moccio, an independent who supports McCain, said he doesn’t fear an Obama presidency. But still, “It’s hard to be a white male today.”

“Every time I turn around, I see people being treated special because of their ethnicity, their gender, their sexual orientation,” said Moccio, an independent who supports McCain. “All these people are protected. But when I see them, I just see another person that I’m competing with.”

White men support McCain 55 percent to 33 percent for Obama, compared with 44 percent of all likely voters supporting Obama and 43 percent McCain, according to a AP-GfK poll released last week.

Twelve percent of white men in a recent AP-Yahoo poll said the fact Obama would be the first black president would make it less likely they would support him.

Ramon Chavez, a University of Oklahoma professor who is Hispanic and Native American, agrees that “it’s a scary time for white males, because they’re in the last vestiges of their power.”

“If I’m a white middle-age or older male, I’m looking around me and saying, ‘I’m losing power, I’m losing my influence,’ and I get a little scared because the tables have turned. And that’s OK, that’s the way our population and the world is going. So they’re going to have to make an adjustment, and that might mean giving up a little bit of power. I can understand why white people are scared right now.”

Fear can be an irresistible political tool. Obama uses fear about the future of the economy to push people away from the incumbent Republican party of President Bush; McCain leverages fear about values to separate himself from Obama.
  
“I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way that you and I see America,” McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, said on the campaign trail.

Liberal critics such as Rep. John Lewis, who accused Republicans of “sowing the seeds of hatred and division,” say Palin’s language is designed to stoke fear of a black president – a task made easier by the sheer unfamiliarity of the concept.

“There’s something about everyone to be afraid of,” said Moccio. “The biggest thing people are afraid of is the unknown.”