As our story points out this week (and we’ll be reminding you for the next several weeks), this is a rather complicated election.
There are new rules about registration, a new district system for county commissioners, a tax referendum, a contested race for North Carolina Senate, and a full statewide and national primary ballot that is competitive all the way up the ticket to U.S. President.
And while this is mainly a primary, if you live in the Orange County Schools district — pretty much everything north of I-40 and west of Calvander — you’ll also be electing your local school board.
To help you get ready, there is a wealth of information available at the Board of Elections web site at www.co.orange.nc.us/elect/.
And we’ll try to stay up on forums, important dates and, of course, results in The Citizen and on our elections and politics site at www.carrborocitizen.com/politics/.
For starters, please note that while you keep hearing that the election is on May 6, voting starts in one week with early voting poll sites opening next Thursday, April 17, in Hillsborough, Chapel Hill and Carrboro. And while it’s true that registration ends this Friday, April 11, you can register and vote on the same day at the early voting sites.
As for the national race and this state’s increasingly important role in the Democratic nomination, well, one thing to keep in mind is that the so-called mainstream media —especially the electronic version of it — think you’re an idiot. Be prepared to hear sweeping generalizations about this state and how it thinks explained by people who can’t even keep the North and South Carolina thing straight.
In this election, where Obama’s pastor has been the big story while McCain’s seeking the endorsement of apocalypse-embracing clergy is non-news, the press is following the same path of lazy reporting and cozying up to inside-the-beltway sources that helped make war with Iraq a slam dunk.
As Salon’s Glen Greenwald recently pointed out, there’ve been more than ten times as many stories in the past month about Barack Obama’s bowling score than stories about the recent revelation that, as Greenwald put it, “the Bush Administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to ‘domestic military operations’ within the U.S.â€
And we’ve no doubt that somewhere, an assignment editor is convinced you’re clamoring for a retrospective on the Clinton-Lewinsky affair.
If you’re still staring at the tube waiting for it to get any better then we suggest you follow Dear Abby’s advice and seek professional help. Short of that we suggest peeling yourself away and stopping by two places on the Web that are evidently inaccessible to all those pundits who claim that neither Democratic candidate has a position on anything.
Obama positions are at barackobama.com/issues and Clinton’s are at hillaryclinton.com/issues.
Before you march down to the polls and vote the way some blowhard tells you, take a moment at least to review the policies the candidates say they want to put into place.