Blood in the Water in NC - Salon checks on Liddy Dole - I could hardly have had a lousier Senator !

[Mira]

edited to add:
Word I get is that the Democrats have a net gain of 245,000 new registrations this year in NC.


Oct. 13, 2008 | CONCORD, N.C. — Elizabeth Dole stood on the track at Lowe’s Motor Speedway Saturday night, a few minutes before NASCAR’s Bank of America 500 got started, and looked up at the stage. Up where Dole had just given a quick welcoming speech to the racetrack crowd of 115,000 (many of them her constituents in North Carolina), Jessica Simpson was getting ready to sing the national anthem. And evidently, Dole had no idea who she was. “The young lady who is singing was over practicing a minute ago,” Dole said, an expression of pity on her face. “God bless her heart.”
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In any other election year, what’s happening in North Carolina would be just another case of a first-term senator paying a little less attention to winning a second term than she probably should have, and discovering voters had noticed. (Dole, who lives in Washington’s Watergate apartment complex with her husband, Bob, recently found herself on the defensive over newspaper reports that she spent only 13 days in the state in 2006; aides say she made unspecified other trips when she didn’t do any official business, but that’s not much of a comeback.) But even if Dole hasn’t wrecked her chances all by herself, she may get run over by Barack Obama’s campaign.
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“The McCain campaign is playing a little catch-up in North Carolina now,” said Paul Shumaker, the chief consultant for Republican Sen. Richard Burr, who’s probably lucky his seat isn’t up till 2010. As a sign of how scary the national map now looks for McCain, he is actually going to have to show up in North Carolina — he will be in Wilmington on Monday, in a corner of the state where Republicans need to rack up big margins to offset Democratic strength in Charlotte and the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill “Research Triangle.”
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Hagan zipped around the state all weekend, bouncing from the North Carolina A&T University homecoming parade in Greensboro (the area she represents in the state Senate) to a fair in Winston-Salem to a barbecue in Morganton before winding up at the same NASCAR race as Liddy Dole and Cindy McCain. Still, it wasn’t until the last few weeks that she started pulling ahead. “I think people are understanding the fact that Liddy Dole has voted over 92 percent of the time with George W. Bush,” Hagan said. “People realize that she’s not representing people here in North Carolina.” The presidential campaign is helping her, too. “We haven’t had presidential advertisements in North Carolina since Jimmy Carter,” she said. Rep. Watt said Obama’s turnout machine could be what puts Hagan in office.

As for the incumbent, Dole seems to be running a much more somnambulant campaign. She dodged five proposed debates, passive-aggressively failing to commit to them rather than outright refusing. Voters are seeing her on her terms, not theirs — her campaign Web site doesn’t have a public calendar of events, and her Senate calendar is three and a half years out of date. While she was at the race Saturday, aides limited her to banal small talk with Salon — after she spoke with a local Associated Press reporter at the NASCAR media center, they hustled her off to the suites to mingle with the race’s sponsors and other donor types and said she’d try to call me later, which she didn’t.



For all of it go to :



http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/10/13/north_carolina/print.html

[flakey_foont]

1. agree to that

she seemed absolutely useless to me. Can't wait to vote her out of office

[Birdiesmom]

2. Her office refuses e-mails addressed to her...

WITHOUT letting you know that your e-mail never got through -- unless you use a form on her webpage. Her aides have been surly when I have called her office about various issues over the years. She is mostly inaccessible, sends form-letter, condescending reasons why she is voting with Bush on nearly every issue, and has never represented my interests as a North Carolinian.

She is everything I detest in a politician, short of the sex scandals -- I confess I haven't heard about her running around with interns or anything like that. And, as far as I know, she isn't responsible for getting anyone killed -- except for the under-equipped soldiers she's keeping in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the prisoners that are dying in Gitmo and other prisons from torture while she votes with Bush to deny them their civil rights -- oh, and the civilians in those wars.