Barlow Herget is a commentator and host on SGR Today. He has been a commentator on UNC public radio and an instructor in continuing education at Duke University. Herget was a Nieman Fellow ('70) at Harvard University, has worked for the Daily Press of Paragould, Ark., the Detroit Free Press, and the News & Observer of Raleigh. His articles have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times and numerous other publications. Have something to say to Barlow? Contact him by email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it  

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Well.  Wasn’t that special, as Dana Carvey’s Church Lady might say.

North Carolina’s Primary Election was special.  Frist, it drew a near record number of voters, 34 percent or 2.16 million votes.  By contrast, the heated 2000 Primary Election drew 18 percent.

Second, the most voters, 2.13 million, came to decide not who was running for president or governor but to adopt a constitutional amendment to ban homosexual marriage and civil unions.

More Republicans than Democrats voted in the presidential election.  The total Republican Primary vote was 966,609 of which Mitt Romney received 65.6 percent.  Democrats numbered 958,906, and President Obama managed 79.2 percent against “no preference’s” 20.8 percent.

It was the reverse in the governor’s race.  More Democrats showed up for the short but spirited contest that nominated Lt. Governor Walter Dalton than the Republican’s coronation of former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory, 927,060 voters to 891,446.  Mr. Dalton beat former Congressman Bob Etheridge with 46 percent of the vote to Etheridge’s 38 percent.  Mr. McCrory won with an impressive 83 percent.

There was nothing special about the influence of money in this primary.  Typically, the candidate with the most money wins between 85 to 94 percent of the time.

That axiom held fast in the Dalton-Etheridge race, the 13th Congressional GOP primary between former federal prosecutor George Holding and Wake County Commissioner Paul Coble, and the Democratic primary between former legislator Linda Coleman and state Senator Eric Mansfield.

The new presence of Super PACs will make it more difficult for candidates without access to wealthy patrons.

Incumbents, all won their nominations except for two Democrats, Brad Miller and Heath Schuler, who were gerrymandered into Republican leaning districts and chose not to run.

What was special was the margin of victory by Amendment One supporters.  Most political observers believed the amendment would be adopted, but not by the landslide 61 percent.

That vote propelled North Carolina into the lead story on Wednesday and was a factor in President Obama’s subsequent support of homosexual civil unions.

Less noticed was Mr. Obama’s tepid support of 79 percent.  But the White House surely noticed.  So did the New York Times, which recently removed North Carolina from its list of critical swing states.

The White House also watched North Carolina’s Democratic Party David Parker continue his destructive campaign to split the party in this crucial election.

Mr. Parker and the primary results on Amendment One and Mr. Obama’s vote might persuade the Obama Campaign to send its vaunted organization resources elsewhere.  That would be special indeed for the state’s Democratic candidates in November. 

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

When I hear people talk about the presidential election, I hear a distant whisper from my college days.  It says, “I am an invisible man.  I am a man of substance of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind.  I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

That was Ralph Ellison writing in his 1952, best-selling classic, “The Invisible Man.”  Mr. Ellison was a black man, a black American who was describing his plight in his own country.

Much has changed since 1952 regarding race and racial attitudes.  But as a white Southerner who lived through the Civil Rights Revolution with high hopes, I am low in spirit looking at the 2012 presidential election.

Race, like Mr. Ellison’s invisible man, is the unspoken topic in most of the discussions about this year’s election.  The television and print commentators talk about the economy and jobs as they should.  They talk about federal debt.  They talk about the candidates’ religions.  Illegal immigrants.  Homosexual rights.

But race seems to be taboo or to be dismissed as old news.  We’ve moved beyond race because Mr. Obama conquered that issue in 2008.

Yes he did.  But his victory stirred up old fears.  The fact that the country elected a multi-racial, black man as President of the United States has not been accepted by many white citizens.

They are people caught in a major power and demographic shift in America, from a white, mostly male dominated society to something different.  Some may not be racists like those I knew growing up in the South, but they, as their protest signs cry, “want their country back.”

They began immediately to claim that Mr. Obama wasn’t a legitimate American.  “Birthers” declared Mr. Obama was born in Kenya. 

His politics weren’t American; he was a socialist.  He should be tried for treason.  He hated white people.  Proof and history meant nothing to these people.

A relative in Arkansas tells me the story of his breakfast buddies, all white, conservative Christians, suspicious of outsiders.  They would not vote for Mitt Romney, no matter what.  To them, he belonged to a religious cult, Mormonism.  My relative asked, but what if the election came down to Mr. Romney and President Obama?

Oh, they wouldn’t hesitate to vote for the white cultist.  Never a black.

My pollster friends tell me it is very difficult to survey for racism.  No one wants to admit out loud (except to their own) that they are racists.  With no polls to support or discredit their positions on race in this election, commentators dare not talk about it.

But it’s there, just below the skin.  We saw it erupt from both sides in the Trayvon Martin shooting and then from white, night-riders in Oklahoma weeks later.

It’s there.  Just like the issue of race in this election.  The question is, will it carry the day? 

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

North Carolina’s primary election Tuesday has lost some of its fizzle.

When former Senator Rick Santorum and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich decided to suspend their campaigns, the air began to leak out of the Republican Presidential Primary race.  No cherry bomb speeches.  No flood of negative TV ads.

The Democratic race for governor has heated to a slow simmer.  Lt. Governor Walter Dalton has proved himself to be the best fundraiser of the top two candidates, and his TV advertisements account for his quick rise in the polls, from 15 percent three months ago to 36 percent last week.  Former Congressman Bob Etheridge is the other serious candidate.

State House Representative Bill Faison never got past the starting blocks, despite a decent and feisty showing in the three televised debates.

Etheridge, 70, had a veteran’s command in the debates, but the party’s money people apparently never showed up for him.  The thinking is that the party is looking to a younger generation, and heavy-hitters such as Bob Eubanks in Chapel Hill, former Chief Justice Burley Mitchell, and publisher Frank Daniels Jr. are supporting Dalton, 62.  He has raised about $1.4 million to Etheridge’s $310,000.

Any Democrat will have a formidable opponent in former Charlotte Mayor and 2008 Republican nominee Pat McCrory.  He’s on the payroll of a big Charlotte law firm, but he’s been allowed to use the past three or four years to run for governor.  And he has.

McCrory raised about $1.5 million at the end of 2011, and he has raised another $1.7 million in the last quarter.  He’s well known compared to his Democratic opponents and comfortable with TV.  He likes campaigning and that comes across to voters.  McCrory will breeze through this primary.

There are a number of new names on the primary ballot for other Council of State offices and some familiar ones such as Linda Coleman for the Democratic lieutenant governor position and Wake County Commissioner Tony Gurley and House member Dale Folwell for the Republicans.

In the Triangle, two Jesse Helms’ protégés, Republicans Paul Coble and George Holding, are battling over the 13th Congressional District with 2010 nominee Bill Randall.  There’s a spirited fight among Republicans to succeed Congresswoman Sue Myrick in Charlotte’s 9th District.
 
The race that seems to have the most energy and is spending the most money is the contest to approve or reject Amendment One, the ban on gay marriage.  It has drawn notice from the New York Times and money from all over.  Opponents have raised over $700,000 and the proponents half that.

Some political observers believe the Amendment One campaign will draw more conservative and liberal voters to the polls than the candidate races.  One can hope the conversation stays polite even if it’s a bald case of mixing religion and politics. 

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The News & Observer and Charlotte Observer have teamed up to peel the covers back on the beds of the state’s hospitals.  The revelations are enough to make one yell for a Code Blue.

The sub-headline on the first article in the five-part series summed up the newspapers’ findings.  It read:  “They are nonprofits in name, but not in practice.  How your hospital helps drive up the cost of health care.”

I would add to that description a bigger question:  What exactly is a nonprofit, and does that status confer some obligation to the public in return for nonprofits’ tax exemption?

For anyone keeping score, two of the state’s largest nonprofit hospitals, UNC Hospitals in Chapel Hill and Duke University Health System in Durham, each showed a total profit including investment income of over 20 percent in 2011.  In the Great Recession.

The reporters looked at figures from 25 hospitals or, in current parlance, hospital systems.  The biggest systems were the two mentioned above, Carolina HealthCare System in Charlotte, and Novant, a system that includes 13 hospitals, big and small based in Winston-Salem.

The most-read part of the series is sure to be the executive salaries of these hospital systems.  They’re in what the N&O called the “Million-Dollar Club.”  The high was $4.2 million annually for Michael Tarwater, CEO of Carolina HealthCare and the low, $1.06 million for Russ Guerin, executive vice president of Carolina HealthCare.

For the record, Duke’s CEO Victor Dzau is paid $2.2 million; UNC’s William Roper, over $717,000 in 2010; WakeMed’s William Atkinson, $940,000.  It’s difficult to gripe at this compensation when a Wall Street Hedge Fund Manager John Paulson made $4.9 billion in 2011.

What is outrageous is the billing of the nonprofit institutions for procedures and drugs.  A typical CT scan at Duke is $6,208; the average cost is $498.  UNC Hospitals charged a patient $193.97 for medicines that N&O reporters priced at $6.34 retail.

Jason Bean, CEO of Rising Medical Solutions of Chicago, looked at bills from a number of hospitals and found markups as high as 500 percent.  The list goes on.

Hospitals routinely must treat poor patients who cannot pay their bills.  That probably accounts for WakeMed’s modest 4.3 percent profit.  Even so, the state’s hospitals reported $631 million in bad debt in 2010 against $1.98 billion in total profits.

But why do nonprofits make profits?  And who is there to question the spending, especially on expenses such as one hospital’s luxurious “Quiet Room” for visitors and employees?

The nonprofit health systems save millions of dollars in tax exemptions.  In my youth, I believed such tax breaks meant a nonprofit kept expenses, from executives’ pay to services, low.  But that was in my youth.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

We can dress it up and beat our chests about protecting the sanctity of the ballot box, but the truth is that many legislators across the land, mostly Republicans, are trying to limit people’s right to vote.

No, there are no Jim Crow laws as in the past; no poll taxes to be paid before one can vote, and no prohibiting the landless and illiterate from voting.

The current voter suppression movement is sneakier and more camouflaged.  The intent is the same.

Research shows that the poor, the poor elderly, the young (18-29), and African American and Hispanic voters in the last 40 years tend to vote Democratic.  Ninety-six percent of black voters cast ballots for President Obama in 2008; 67 percent of Hispanic voters; 66 percent of the young voters.

The Republican response is to adopt laws that limit voting among these targeted voter cohorts.

Columnist and historian Richard Reeves has tallied the score and found that 34 states have adopted or are trying to adopt voter ID laws.  One of those states is North Carolina whose Republican controlled legislature is waiting for a sly chance to override Democratic Governor Beverly Perdue’s veto of such a bill.

It’s the same for 15 states that want to require citizens to show a birth certificate or passport as proof of citizenship.  Twenty-one percent of the population, poor and elderly mostly, have no such photo identification.

Mr. Reeves reported 16 states are trying to make voter registration harder and nine states have or want to restrict voting early and absentee voting.  (Thirty-two percent of early voters in 2008 were 65 and older.)

There are reasonable arguments for each of these voting strictures.  The principal point is to reduce voter fraud.  Who can argue against that?

The record of poll station fraud in North Carolina is revealing.  According to State Elections Board Executive Director Gary Bartlett there has been one case in the past 10 years of someone presenting a false ID at his voting precinct.  One.  And he was judged mentally ill.

Over the past 20 years, North Carolina and other states have tried to make it easier to vote.  The 2008 Election was a demonstration of the success of laws extending the voting period, longer times to register, more places to register, and an overhaul of voting machinery.

They worked.  They worked for Republicans in 2010 and they worked in 2008 when North Carolina reported a record 70 percent turnout of voters.  Now is not the time for Republicans to aim for less. 

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

No good will come from the adoption of the constitutional amendment to ban homosexual marriages or civil unions, and, sadly, I believe it will be easily approved.

North Carolina voters will decide the issue May 8.  A simple majority vote is required for adoption of the amendment.

To be placed on the ballot, three-fifths of the state Senate and House had to vote for the amendment.  That happened in September; 30 to 16 in the Senate, 76 to 41 in the House.

The wording is simple enough:  “Constitutional amendment to provide that marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State.”

There already is a law that bans such marriages, so why is a constitutional amendment necessary?

My answer is not complicated but it is longer than today’s Tweetsters might tolerate.  With me, the fight goes back to the human rights revolutions of the 1960s.

It was a time of massive, cultural change on race, women and homosexuality.  Many Americans, Vice President Spiro Agnew called them the “silent majority,” resented the bloody protests and the long-haired protesters of that era.

In the conservative South, the resentment was stronger and deeper.  Most white Southerners were (and are) influenced by their rigid, if selective, reading of the Bible.

They also were protective of their peculiar cultural traditions, be they Jim Crow mores or beliefs that women be limited in ambition, education, and to the fortunes of their menfolk.

The sexual revolution and the distrust of the military in those times went against Southern upbringings.  And the more challenging the change, such as homosexual rights, the harder the resistance.

The country and its political parties have been responding to these resentments ever since.  Richard Nixon appealed to these feelings in his infamous and successful “Southern Strategy,” and the Republican Party today is a captive of the region.  Those who once championed states rights and what is now called “family values” are national in political reach today.

And they’re getting even.

Republican House Speaker Thom Tillis, in a remarkable admission to North Carolina State students, believes the amendment will be overturned in twenty years.

I commend him for his candor but condemn him for his cynicism.  He sees a constitutional amendment as just a temporary inconvenience to salve the long-simmering wrath of the old South that never forgets.

Those who abhor homosexuality and those who are simply offended by such a lifestyle will have their day on May 8.  But they won’t abolish gay people; they won’t cure heterosexual divorce; and in the end, they won’t feel better.  Few people do when they’re hurting their fellow humans.