Kerry Appearance Raises Questions 

The local party must have spent hours on the phones organizing the event. Nearly every Democratic candidate who has ever run for anything in this county and just about everyone who has ever worked on those campaigns showed up. The 700-person-strong audience at the Grady Cole Center was like a who's who of the local Democratic Party, including worker-bees and wannabes, has-beens, up-and-comers and just-glad-to-be-theres. In short, just about every cell of the heart of the local Democratic Party was represented in one place at one time on Friday, a rarity these days when neither of the official county party organizations have much sway over local politics anymore.

The effort put into organizing the event down to the last minute detail showed. The abortion protesters never made it past the sidewalk a few hundred feet from the door. Reporters who wandered more than a few feet from the press box were quickly shuffled back inside by party enforcers who patrolled the perimeter between them and the audience. No detail was left to chance.

And when Kerry spoke, a surprising thing happened, something that, oddly enough, didn't really seem to come across as well in the radio and television coverage of the event. He connected with his audience. His smile was genuine, his manner relaxed. This was not the stiff and sweaty Kerry from the Democratic Convention whose audience cheered on cue, but a guy who genuinely seemed to be enjoying both himself and the crowd. And in Kerry's more folksy style, there were faint echoes of the mannerisms and cadence of his running mate, John Edwards. Kerry may be taking heat for how he comes across on television and radio, but little of the coverage of the event gave him credit for his growing strength at connecting with a live crowd.

Kerry's speech was the same one he's been giving lately at other campaign stops -- affordable healthcare, tax cuts for the middle class, child care credits, more college loan money, all paid for through tax increases on those who make more than $200,000 a year. He promises a larger military and better intelligence through stronger partnerships with other nations. He'd handle the Iraq situation better, he promised, though he didn't detail how. He'd fight to preserve the earth for future generations by working for clean air and water. He wants an aggressive, government-led effort to develop alternative fuel sources, a struggle he likened to President John F. Kennedy's 10-year race to land an American on the moon.

"One thing I know people of this country want more than anything else is leadership that looks them in the eye and tells the truth," Kerry told the cheering audience.

The message in the speech was clear. His team can do a better job than George W. Bush is doing. The message conveyed by his presence here was less clear.

North Carolina is now a battleground state, the Kerry campaign and his Democratic supporters declared. But is it? Kerry campaign staff told the same thing to reporters in Tennessee a few weeks ago, which gave respected national political analyst Charlie Cook a good laugh.

In his column last week, Cook, the author of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, wrote that "the fact that the campaign has yet to buy a single broadcast television ad in Nashville or Knoxville should tell us just how important, or unimportant, the state is in the Kerry campaign calculus for attaining the required 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House. If you want to know where the real battleground states are, just listen to the advice that Deep Throat gave to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein: follow the money."

So where does North Carolina stand in campaign spending? In a dollar-for-dollar line-up that takes into account the money the Kerry and Bush campaigns, The Media Fund, the AFL-CIO, MoveOn.org, and other 527s have shelled out, North Carolina comes in 20th, barely making the bottom of the list of second-tier battleground states. That means North Carolina's still in the game, sort of.

Cook's organization, which has been tracking spending by the campaigns and organizations above, says $41.5 million has been spent on television in Florida, $30.7 million in Ohio, $24.9 million in Pennsylvania, $18.4 million in Michigan and $18.2 million in Missouri.

The next top five in campaign advertising spending are Wisconsin at $12.2 million, Minnesota with $11.4 million, $10.4 million in Arizona, $10.1 million in Nevada and $9.9 million in Oregon. By comparison, $2.1 million has been spent in North Carolina.

Conflicting polls notwithstanding, the on-the-edge campaign spending numbers in this state are why some political analysts have moved North Carolina into the battleground column while some have not.

Despite the state's recent history of electing Republican presidential candidates by large margins -- Bill Clinton lost here both times he ran and Al Gore lost by 13 points -- presidential campaigns that look closely at NC voter registration numbers are intrigued enough to spend a few million dollars here, and for good reason.

The foreign and national journalists covering the Kerry event last week who described Charlotte and Mecklenburg county as "conservative" clearly didn't bother to stop by the Mecklenburg County Board of Elections on their brief swing through the Queen City. Mecklenburg County can go either way in a tight race, and there are enough votes here to swing a close statewide election, making it the perfect spot for a Kerry stump speech.

At 42 percent, it's Democrats, not Republicans, who have the most registered voters here, followed by the GOP at 35 percent and unaffiliateds at 21.6 percent. In 1998, Edwards beat Republican Senator Lauch Faircloth here by 10 percentage points. In 2000, Bush barely won the county with 51 percent of the vote.

North Carolina's registered voter numbers are similar to Mecklenburg's. Some 47 percent of registered voters are Democrats, 34 percent are Republicans and 18 percent are unaffiliated. But those numbers can be tricky. Conservative Democrats in the eastern part of the state tend to split their tickets between the two parties in national races, and moderate Republican voters who have moved to the center of the state from up north do the same, making US Senate races in North Carolina increasingly unpredictable. All of which means it's definitely worth a swing through the state from time to time by wayward presidential candidates hoping to pick up, or hold onto, a handful of electoral votes.

Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com