Analyzing North Carolina: Don’t Bother

President Barack Obama and Senator John McCain in a press conference, taking place on March 4, 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In 2008, Barack Obama managed to swing the majority vote over to himself in North Carolina, a state that had not previously selected a Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson. As the November election approaches, almost all political commentators and analysts agree that if Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate this year, does not win in North Carolina, he will most certainly lose the entire election and usher us all in to a second term under Obama.

I watch the worry in the analysts faces as they drill down into their giant interactive political maps, pointing to individual counties that have been color coded according to their previous voting majorities. I hear the angst in their voices as they share the details of their careful analysis, explaining this state’s demographic breakdown and the chances for each to favor the incumbent president this year. “The affluent suburbanites voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008; will he be able to win them again this year? The black majorities in these red counties here turned out in record numbers in 2008; will Obama be able to rally them again this November?”

Analysts biased towards the liberal side of the aisle point out the same factors and history, citing an unending list of reasons why this year’s election results in North Carolina will undoubtedly be a replay of those in 2008. The Republicans are worried, to say the least; the Democrats are calmly certain; yet I say to them and anyone else out there who finds themselves agreeing with either side’s opinionated analysis, “PHOOEY!” Let me tell you exactly what is going to happen in North Carolina, and why, and relieve these analysts of their over-researched opinions.

The campaign of 2008 saw the awakening of the patriotic spirit in a huge number of Americans, many of whom had never in their lives even cared enough to register to vote. These individuals, even though they had never bothered participating in the process before, were not completely oblivious to the goings on in politics, however; they were simply disgusted at the decades of cronyism and elitist mentalities to which they had been witness, and discouraged by the belief that there really was nothing that they could do to affect a change in their government. Then along comes a presidential race in which, lo and behold, one of the candidates actually stands out from the other! This man, Barack Obama, caught the attention of the sleeping patriot with his zealous and consistent promises to bring to government the things that they had always been hungering for but never had a hope of realizing.

Barack Obama promised hope and change, sometimes explicitly and verbally, sometimes simply by being the man we believed him to be. Unlike the dreary procession of past elections, this time the slumbering patriot saw stark and true contrast between the choices at hand. McCain was rank and file GOP, and represented nothing but more of the same. But Barack Obama…here stood an African American man who touted a personal crusade of extreme national unity where partisanship would fade away, social and economic divisors would become irrelevant, and reform would rule the day. Here stood a reason for so many lethargic patriots to wake up and participate in the process they had long ago written off as useless. And so they did.

In 2008, this awakening that occurred in so many was not so widely known as the Tea Party movement, but was simply an organic reaction to what they were presented with, and a reviving of their national pride. The choice they made was to roll the dice, betting it all on the hope and change that they believed Barack Obama would bring, and rejecting the almost certain status quo presidency that John McCain represented. As a result, yes indeed, Barack Obama won the majority of votes in North Carolina.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since 2008. In the past three years, all of those newly awakened patriots initially watched with hopeful hearts as Obama took his seat in the Oval Office, waiting for him to execute the promises made on his campaign trail. What they saw over time, however, was the daily revelation that the brand of hope and change they had rolled the dice for was far, far different from what they had been presented with. Day by day, they saw that the man they believed Barack Obama to be was nothing more than a façade, and that his campaign was nothing more than yet another successful political scam, one that succeeded due the extreme contrast it presented to McCain’s status quo. Over time, they watched as their president displayed a distinct pattern of ignoring the will of the people he was elected to serve and, partnering up with his liberal elitist pals in Congress, forced legislation upon the people which they quite vocally had rejected beforehand. They watched as their president appointed czars, expanded government, ignored his constitutional duties, overreached his constitutional constraints, signed myriads of executive orders, and enacted regulations via wasteful government entities that effectively ground this nation’s confidence level down to its foundation. They watched as prices for gasoline and food skyrocketed; they watched as their president routinely blocked legislation that would allow our nation to recover economically; and they watched as their Spender in Chief racked up more taxpayer funded vacations, golf trips, and fund raisers than any president ever did.

The awakened patriots, the same ones who bet on Obama in North Carolina in 2008, have watched all of these things and more. Not one stroke of his pen has gone unnoticed, not one threat made to the Supreme Court has gone unheard, and not one suing of a state for exercising its sovereign rights has been done in the darkness. The patriots, they see and hear it all, and have been laying it to heart for the past three years. The lethargic patriot of 2008 is now the wide awake, midterm election shellacking patriot of 2012. What occurred in North Carolina in 2008 need not even be analyzed at this point in the game, because all of the factors that allowed Obama to win North Carolina in 2008 are now null and void, and will play no role whatsoever in November. The advantages that he had in North Carolina in 2008 are now gone forever. The alert patriots of North Carolina, regardless of the county they live in or the demographic profile they most neatly fit into, will have no reason whatsoever to bet on Obama this time around. He will lose, and not just by a few points, but in a major way. The North Carolina vote will go to Romney by a landslide, and the North Carolina patriot will give Obama one final shellacking as they do their part to help usher out the greatest Divider in Chief this generation has ever known. So political analysts and pundits from either side of the aisle, don’t stress yourselves too much on this one; I’ve already called it for you.