Washington diary: Democratic South?

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By Matt Frei BBC News, Washington

There are many battles being fought simultaneously in 2008.Mr Obama holds a narrow lead in North Carolina, polls suggest

But the most important one is perhaps between small town and big town America.

Sarah Palin has tried to portray the latter as the graveyard of the wholesome American soul.

Both are of course genuinely American.

The difference is that one is steeped in mythology, while the other is a raw, contemporary reality still searching for a myth.

That is the challenge embodied by the multi-racial Barack Obama: brought up by a single mom, the perpetual outsider, who went to three of the nation's top colleges and could only have thrived in the urban America.

Manicured pavements

This divide cuts across traditional boundaries of race and region and it is fluid thanks to the demographic transformation of places like Kannapolis, in the former Confederate state of North Carolina.

Walk down Main Street and you would be excused for thinking that you have intruded on a film set.

The red brick shops look like pop up cardboard facades. The pavements are manicured to perfection.

At the end of the road a vast building towers over the town centre. If Mr Obama squeaks through in North Carolina, do not be surprised to hear whispers of an impending landslide in Democratic ranks

From afar it looks like a palatial hotel, but inside it owes more to a mosque. It is in fact America's newest biotech research centre.

Doric columns flank the main entrance. The central lobby is clad in white marble, flown in from Italy and so bright it almost causes snow blindness.

Look up to the dome, 100ft above you, and what you see are giant fruits and vegetables.

The driving force behind the building is the food and real estate billionaire David Murdock, who bought up the entire town in 1984 when it was still home to one of the world's biggest textile mills, making pillow cases for middle America.

The textile jobs moved to China and India.

Kannapolis became the latest in a long string of US manufacturing towns destined for destitution and desertion.

Now Mr Murdock is trying to turn Kannapolis into America's premier research centre, devoted to nutritional science.

One local restaurant has been renamed Chromosome 48, former textile workers are being re-educated to work in the labs and the place is bracing itself for an influx of PhDs.

The project hopes to employ 30,000 scientists, students and researchers, many of them from outside the state.

New generation

It mirrors the transformation going on in nearby Charlotte, the once genteel and sleepy confederate backwater that has become America's second-biggest banking centre after New York.

The futuristic headquarters of Bank of America and Wachovia Bank dominate the skyline here.

In total, 350 out of the Fortune 500 companies have operations in the city, whose population has doubled since 1980.

The transformation of Charlotte is mirrored by the social changes in the so-called "research triangle" around Raleigh-Durham, where hi-tech jobs have attracted a new generation of educated voters.

These are the new citizens who Barack Obama hopes will turn this state blue for the first time since 1976, when Jimmy Carter won here.

North Carolina Senator Elizabeth Dole is fighting for her political life

But President Carter was a Southern Baptist, a peanut farmer and the popular governor of the neighbouring state of Georgia.

Can the African-American senator from Illinois pull it off?

The demographic changes in the state's big cities are in Mr Obama's favour.

In order to ensure the kind of margins that would neutralise the Republican support in the more rural counties, the Democrats have launched their - by-now familiar - ground offensive: dozens of offices, hundreds of paid staff, and thousands of volunteers, recruited mainly from one of the state's many colleges.

The airwaves have been bombarded with TV and radio ads.

Mr Obama has been to this state four times in one month, two more than his rival.

According to the latest polls, he now leads by four points.

Seismic shift

North Carolina is on a knife edge.

The Republican's most effective attack line is that a victory for Mr Obama in the White House would herald an era of one party rule (by the Democrats) in Washington.

To a state that has frequently elected a GOP president and a Democratic governor, such things ring true.

It is also the argument hammered home - with some desperation - by Republican Senator Elizabeth Dole, wife of former presidential nominee Robert Dole, who is fighting to hold onto her seat in the US Senate.

Losing to her Democratic rival Kay Hagan would illustrate the seismic shift against the Republican party, all in the backyard of the late Senator Jesse Helms.

It would be further proof of the toxicity of eight years of George W Bush and the parlous state of the Republican brand.

If Mr Obama also squeaks through in North Carolina, do not be surprised to hear whispers of an impending landslide in Democratic ranks.

If there is a landslide, North Carolina will be used as an example of how the demographic mobility of America has transformed the electoral landscape and undermined the Republican Party's "Southern strategy", which has kept the South in Republican hands since Richard Nixon.

The broad shifts of American society are already underway, but it may take a few thousand swing voters in Mecklenburg County around Charlotte to turn them into headlines.

<i>Matt Frei is the presenter of </i><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/world_news_america">BBC World News America</a><i>which airs every weekday at 1130 GMT on BBC News and at 1100 GMT (1900 ET / 1600 PT) on BBC World News and BBC America (for viewers outside the UK only).</i>

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