Political Life in the Tar Heel State
A classic www.lockjawslair.com blog entry.
What’s wrong with the Republican Party in North Carolina? Why do they have such a hard time getting elected in this state? Why is it, after all these years, that North Carolina is still practically a one-party state?
When I turned 18, I immediately registered to vote. I asked my parents for advice on what party to register under, and they suggested the Democrats. The reasoning was sound in that our county and city elections were exclusively among Democrats at that time. Since Republicans rarely ran for local office, the actual elections for the partisan seats were in the Democrat primary. If I wanted to be able to vote in those races, I needed to be a Democrat. That made sense.
As I grew older, I got to be more interested in politics. I began to look at my party affiliation for what I believed.It wasn’t hard to do so, as the major newspapers, television news, and even entertainment worked very hard to push me in that direction. I became what I have come to call a “Tax them all and let the government sort them out” liberal.
I would get into political discussions on a regular basis.On topics which I felt were my favorites, I regularly got trounced in debates. Going on the evidence provided by my side, I would discuss how the Republicans attacked the First Amendment right of free speech in some particular way. My debate opponent would point out how the bill I was angry about was sponsored by a Democrat, and how more Democrats than Republicans supported it. I’d do the research, and discover they my opponent was right, and I was wrong.
It took a LOT of being told I was wrong, followed by research, to show me that I was wrong on a lot of things.It wasn’t that I was wrong in my support of free speech, religious freedom and other constitutional rights. My most basic fallacy was that the Democrat Party was the party that supported those freedoms. My research showed that attacks on those freedoms came, more often than not, from the Democrats.
On race issues, I believed that the Democrats stood up for minorities, and tried to help them achieve a higher place in life after being held back for so many years by a primarily Republican oppression. After some time, I began to realize that most of the opposition to the Civil Rights act of 1964 came from Democrats. The governor who blocked the doors of a public school to keep blacks out was a Democrat. Today, it’s the Democrats who oppose any attempt to raise educational standards, on the basis of race.
Apparently, Democrats think black people are just too stupid to be able to do well in school. I saw Republicans trying to take actions against violent crime, and Democrats would argue that those actions were racist, apparently on the basis that black people are criminals.
I didn’t, and still don’t, think that black people were stupid, incompetent or automatically criminals. The party I chose to support, though, seemed to argue that they were all of those things, and more.Any attempt to require people to act civilized by the Republicans was attacked by the Democrats as racist. Any attempt to treat people equal, regardless of race, in the eyes of the law by the Republicans was attacked by the Democrats as racist. The message I got from this was that the Democrats had a low image of black people in America, and simply didn’t think that they could achieve anything in life unless white people gave it to them.
It didn’t take much of this to decide that I no longer wanted to be a Democrat. I still had a low opinion of the Republicans, so I registered as a Libertarian. The Libertarian Party believed, as I do, in the basic constitutional freedoms. In a short time, I began to realize that the problems with government in America came from powers far above what was allowed in the US Constitution. Nothing in the Constitution says that the federal government should be involved in education, housing projects, firearm laws, drug laws, or much of what today’s federal government seems to be involved in. The Democrats had no concept of constitutionality, and the Republicans seemed to give it little more than lip service.
I became an active Libertarian. I gathered signatures for ballot access. I worked booths at street fairs. I talked to many prospective libertarians. I registered new libertarians to vote. I worked as Press Secretary for the Libertarian Party of North Carolina, served as an alternate delegate to the 1996 Libertarian National Convention, and I ran for US House of Representatives in North Carolina’s District 2. I like to think that I was a valuable member of the Libertarian Party.
These days, I run a bookstore. I love my job. As a husband and father, my political views have mellowed in some ways, and become much more extreme in others. I’m very libertarian in my views, but have found myself at odds with the Libertarian Party on issues such as the War on Terrorism. I’ve made the decision that I’m possibly ready to be a Republican.
Becoming a Republican could be very easy. All I have to do is fill out a form and make the change. That’s pretty easy. I, however, have chosen a slightly more difficult method.
I have friends who are active in the Republican Party. They often ask me about my views on issues, knowing my strong libertarian leanings will give them a different angle. They have invited me, on many occasions, to join the Republican Party. I’ve been invited to the county meetings. I’ve been invited to be active in local Republican activism. Finally, I started accepting, with one caveat. I will be glad to register as a Republican, attend the county meetings, and be involved in local activism on one condition. A member of the Republican Party must deliver to me a voter registration form, so that I can make the switch.
As a Libertarian activist, I delivered voter registration forms to several people. I carried them in my car. I kept them in my backpack, just in case I met someone who wanted to register. I do not think that it is too much to ask for one of them to bring a form to me, so I can change my registration.
So far, it has been months since I first made this offer. I am still not a Republican.
At the NC State Fair, I visited my friends at the Libertarian booth, but I walked around with a Bush-Cheney sticker on my shirt. At the Republican booth, I was eager to sign a petition to put George W. Bush’s name on the primary ballot in this state. I was turned away, however, because I was not a registered Republican. The dominoes have begun to fall.
Soon, the time will come for the political welfare to be doled out. Each political party will receive, if my information is correct, $1 for each registered voter they have. If that money went out today, the Libertarian Party would get that dollar. If my invitation to the Republicans were accepted, then THEY would get that dollar. There goes another domino.
This might not sound like much, but it is indicative of the Republican plight on a statewide level. The Democrats might be corrupt, and incompetent at running the state of North Carolina, but the Republicans repeatedly prove themselves incompetent at getting elected to statewide office. In this county, and many others, even getting a local office is a fluke.
Why is this the case? I know that it doesn’t have to be this way.
What will it take for the Republicans to become the prominent party in this state, which has swung Republican in the last several presidential races?
I don’t know for sure, but I can tell you that they haven’t indicated yet that they want me to be a part. If the Republican Party in North Carolina is as inviting to everyone else as they have been to me, then they’ll always be #2.
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