Raleigh, N.C. — You’ve seen those Barack Obama rallies where thousands and thousands of people are packed into this arena or that stadium. This isn’t one of them. At the rich-in-basketball-history Reynolds Coliseum on the campus of North Carolina State University, Obama is standing roughly where one basket would be, and the crowd ends somewhere between the foul line and half-court. The great majority of the seats are roped off and empty.
On stage, there’s no hoopla. There are no lines of local pols testifying to Obama’s fabulousness, no adorable kids to lead the pledge of allegiance, no nothing, beyond one brief introduction of Obama and wife Michelle. This is, in fact, what it appears to be — a hastily thrown-together gathering, announced at the last minute as Obama kept open the option of a victory celebration in Indiana. When it looked like that wouldn’t happen, he ended up here. In the end, it seems a little small for a celebration of what might be the decisive victory in the long race for the Democratic nomination, but here it is.
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In the days leading up to the election, a lot of people in North Carolina sensed momentum for Hillary Clinton. The polls seemed to show a narrowing gap between her and Obama. Bill Clinton was racing like mad through the small towns of the state, giving a hot stump speech to solid crowds in picturesque settings. There was a lot of talk about the possibly negative after-effects of the Rev. Wright controversy. So it appeared that Clinton might make this a closer-than-expected race.
Wrong. At Reynolds Coliseum, the crowd lights up when the big-screen TVs show the networks calling North Carolina for Obama right off the bat. It’s a blowout, with Obama winning by 16-percentage points — more than 230,000 votes. His margin here is bigger than Clinton’s was in Pennsylvania.
As with all of Obama’s victories in the south, it begins with black voters, who are 22 percent of North Carolina’s population, but 34 percent of the Democratic primary electorate tonight. Ninety-one percent of blacks vote for Obama, with just 7 percent for Clinton. To overcome that, Clinton would have had to win well over 70 percent of the white vote, and she came nowhere close. Sixty-one percent of whites voted for her, with 37 percent for Obama. (The results suggest that whites in this southern state are a bit more inclined to vote for the black candidate than in Ohio, where Clinton won among whites 64-34.)
You could see some of the intensity of the African-American vote the night before the election, when Michelle Obama held a get-out-the-vote rally in Charlotte. Nearly 1,000 people came, the overwhelming majority of them black (although the Obama campaign arranged for the group sitting behind Mrs. Obama on stage — the people who would appear with her in head-on camera shots of her speech — to be mostly white). Black voters I talked to there were obviously big Obama fans, but they were also somewhat disgusted with the Clintons, especially Bill.
“I used to like him — he was one of my favorite presidents,” a woman named Clair told me. “But I think this race has brought out something in him that I didn’t know was there, because he started to play the race card.” Clair’s husband, Alan, told me the Clintons “are a little bit desperate now to cling to power.” As for Bill, Alan would only say, “I voted for him when he was president, but he’s different now.”
