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Amid the bloviation-fest following Tuesday's election, Charlotte's mayoral election seems to have kept on flying under the national political radar. Odd.
Think about it: A young African-American Democrat, raised by a single mom and his grandparents, now a successful lawyer, aims for a seat that's been Republicans for years. He mobilizes young and African-American voters and wins in a strong showing. Sound familiar?
If that isn't a good enough political story, consider that the last Democratic mayor in this Southern banking citadel was Harvey Gantt, the African-American architect who won fame for trying, twice, to unseat arch-conservative U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms. Here, I restrain myself from the phrases about kudzu and NASCAR that national political analysts would use, if they had noticed this story.
They didn't. A Nexis.com check of news reports found a few paragraphs in USA Today and the Washington Times, a few political blog mentions and a paragraph in the Lewiston (Idaho) Morning Tribune from a roundup on how streetcar advocates did in mayoral races. (They won, including here).
Yet Democrat Anthony Foxx's win over Republican John Lassiter is not an insignificant anthill on the political landscape. The largest city in the nation's 10th largest state elected its first Democratic mayor in 22 years, an African-American in a majority-white Southern city, a progressive mass transit supporter and an environmentalist.
Many ardent Republicans, of course, quickly began pretending the city of Charlotte had ducked under Harry Potter's invisibility cloak. They focused on Republican gubernatorial wins in New Jersey and Virginia. N.C. Republican Party chair Tom Fetzer, in spinning Tuesday's results, also pointed to wins by conservative candidates for Wake County school board and Republican mayoral victories in Greensboro and Kinston. He didn't mention his state's largest city. (He had told The Charlotte Observer's editorial board in September that the state GOP was closely watching the Foxx-Lassiter race, and that a Lassiter loss would be a blow to the party.)
One theory in conservative circles is that the election's relatively low turnout here (21 percent, compared with 24 percent in 2007) proves Lassiter lost because he wasn't conservative enough. I respect their right to that opinion, but to me it seems delusional. After all, the three conservative Republicans who ran for City Council at-large seats lost. (To be fair, none was incumbent or well known.)
Democrats, for their part, will proudly declare that traditionally Republican-leaning Charlotte is now firmly Democratic. This too, verges on delusional - as it did when Barack Obama's victory made them proclaim the whole country was suddenly liberal. Yes, Charlotte is trending Democratic, as its African-American population has inched up to 35 percent. But the City Council's new 8-3 Democratic majority exists because council districts were carefully devised (by Democratic councils) to overstate the party's power. Democrats are helped, too, by the local Republican Party's ethnic-cleansing-like campaign to purge all who aren't anti-immigrant, anti-gay/lesbian and anti-legal abortion. Moderate Republicans these days have nowhere to turn.
"All politics is local," the late U.S. House Speaker Tip O'Neill said. He was generally right. Of course national issues color local and state elections, but elections also reflect local personalities and situations. That often doesn't dovetail with whatever prevailing national political narratives are being offered up on the Sunday morning pontification shows.
How much of the Virginia GOP win was anti-Obama, how much was a lackluster Democrat? My Greensboro friends tell me that city's incumbent mayor was weak and vulnerable. In Charlotte, Foxx told me, his campaign knocked on 13,000 doors on Tuesday and made 6,000 calls. Does the strong get-out-the-vote effort mean Charlotte's now Democratic?
Maybe Lassiter was viewed as "more of the same," because of his friendship with retiring Mayor Pat McCrory. Maybe Lassiter just had the bad luck, which McCrory never did, of having a strong opponent.
Whatever the factors that shaped the result, Charlotte's 2009 mayoral campaign was a great political story. Even if the Big Boys never noticed.
