Mac Whatley's blog

Bill Clinton’s barnstorming tour of small-town North Carolina is finishing up its second round in the eastern part of the state as I write this; he was in four towns yesterday and did seven more today. But I was in the middle of last week’s traveling show, and I’ve been so busy catching up I’m finally making time to write before it’s all history. Actually it WAS, history, here in Asheboro, and the glow of it all is still burning pretty bright. But even now pundits are piling layer upon layer of speculation and analysis, and after next Tuesday it will all be academic, filed away in some history of the 2008 election. But all over North Carolina, generations of small town residents will remember when the circus came to town.

Bumped, this is a great diary. Thanks. - RP

Bill Clinton is coming through Asheboro at 5:30 tomorrow (or whenever; there are two stops ahead of us). Directions are here

I'd post more but I'm caught in the tornado of presidential politics- advance men, secret service agents, political directors, venues, bands, bunting, the whole kielbasa. Yikes!

Last Friday night Jim Neal and BlueNC blogger Sam Spencer came to Asheboro to meet some of our Randolph County voters. About 22 people came to the Coffee Xchange, kindly provided by good Dem G.P. Hanspal, and asked Jim questions for over an hour.

It has taken me almost a week to make the time to post about Michele Obama’s speech at Winston-Salem. I have new appreciation for the time and effort it takes to update a blog regularly! (And I apologize in advance for the photos being so big; I tried to get them to come through smaller, but I'm new at all this...)

When the Obama people called to offer me a special guest ticket to the speech, I took it without too much worry over seeming partial (Clintonistas: I’ll go see Bill anytime, too!) The last time I participated in the traveling show that is a national campaign was when I volunteered in the Carter press office as a college student at the 1976 Democratic National Convention. And things have changed a lot since then.
A lot of that involves how campaigns cultivate new voters. There were numerous places at the Gaines Center to register to vote, if you weren’t already. And if you were, there were lots of opportunities to help get those new voters OUT to vote. One was the “Faith Captain Table,” where religious leaders could organize their church. Another was “Barack Your Block,” a catchy name for grassroots organizing your neighborhood, street by street and block by block, to make sure the voters get in the booth. And the one that appealed most to me was “Barack The Early Vote,” described to the crowd by Merritt, the WSSU campus Obama chief. Their plan to for WSSU students to meet at noon on campus April 17th; then they will march en masse downtown to the local Board of Elections, where everyone will vote on the first day of early voting. That sounded like a really impressive thing: hundreds of students marching to vote early ought to galvanize a high turn-out. We’ll see.

If Barack is a better speaker than she is, that must REALLY be something to see.