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The Other Clinton returns to Tar Heel State

26 Jan 2009, Posted by Naureen Khan in National Politics, News, North Carolina Politics, election 2008, 0 Comments


Updated 6:35 p.m., January 27

Former President Bill Clinton returned to North Carolina this morning for the first time since the now-mythic primary battle between his wife/current Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and President Barack Obama.

Shawn Rocco/The N&O
Shawn Rocco/The N&O

The (Raleigh) News and Observer reported this morning:

The last time Raleigh saw Bill Clinton, he was standing in the bed of an antique Ford pickup, wrapping up a furious 11-city barnstorm.

Gesturing with his fist, he insisted that North Carolina voters would start an earthquake that would send Hillary Rodham Clinton to the White House — a trick he suggested President Barack Obama couldn’t pull off.

Luckily, however, the former president, who got himself into hot water in the midst of the campaign for overstepping his bounds, seems to have let go of his past beef with the former Illinois Senator and changed his tone. Speaking in front a packed audience at North Carolina State University as part of the NCSU’s Millennium Lecture Series, organized by N.C.’s former first lady, Mary Easley, Clinton lauded the ascendency of the nation’s first black president.

The N&O reported:

“The number one fact of life in the modern world and the most important thing about the election of President Obama,” he said, is a sense of “communitarianism” that requires people to get along because their futures are bound together.

“It is possible to escape the burden of our history, because this is not a biracial country anymore, and we don’t see ourselves that way anymore,” he said. “We are we multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious. … We haven’t exactly moved to the left so much as we’ve moved forward together.”

For those who didn’t make it to the 10:30 event, the speech is being broadcast on UNC-TV tonight at 9 p.m.

Piece of Civil Rights history for sale

23 Jan 2009, Posted by Naureen Khan in Durham News, News, 0 Comments


Those in the Triangle area inspired by the Civil Rights legacy invoked by this week’s inauguration festivities may soon be able to lay claim to a small piece of that history….for a price.

A yellowing program autographed by a 29-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. in 1958 when he delivered the keynote address at a voter registration conference in Durham will go on the auction block in Raleigh this weekend. His now-famous “I Have a Dream” speech was then still five years in his future, but King had already become a figurehead for the Civil Rights campaign and had made several stops in the Bull City. The title of the Durham conference was “Serving God Through the Exercising of Civic Responsibilities,” perhaps the very first predecessors to the themes invoked by King’s close colleague, Rev. Joseph Lowery, in his address at Duke on MLK Day and in the benediction delivered at President Obama’s inauguration on Tuesday.

Jason McCoon of Tory Hill Auction Co. estimates that the autograph, in pencil across the front of the program, will sell from between $1500 to $2500.

Read the full story at the (Raleigh) News & Observer.

Poetic in many ways

20 Jan 2009, Posted by Chelsea Allison in News, 1 Comments


Toward the end of an interview with President Richard Brodhead last week, after he’d told me what books he read over break (for the record, among them were a biography of Obama and The Tender Bar) he confessed something:

“I taught the poet for Obama’s inauguration, you know.”

I hadn’t, but it makes sense. Brodhead, long-winded and long a lover of words, taught and chaired Yale’s English department, where Elizabeth Alexander is both a graduate and a professor. According to the Yale Daily News, Brodhead taught Alexander in a non-fiction prose writing class when she was a sophomore.

It seems that although she later turned her focus to poetry, she may have gleaned a bit about delivery from former professors, at least according to the group I was watching with. She spoke carefully, evoking the oft-mimicked cadence of the man himself.

And although Alexander was Obama’s official choice—marking only the fourth poet to be included in a presidential inauguration—The Associated Press also called on poets to compose poems to commemorate the occasion.

Alexander was selected for the 2007 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers by Lucille Clifton, Stephen Dunn, and Jane Hirshfield. Hirshfield spent a recent Fall weekend at Duke as the Blackburn visiting poet.

The poem will be released in a chapbook Feb. 6, according to the AP.

A dream deferred

20 Jan 2009, Posted by Douglas Hanna in National Politics, News, election 2008, 0 Comments


by Ryan Brown

They came from all over the United States: from Durham to Denver to Detroit, from George Bush’s Texas and Barack Obama’s Illinois, from every precinct and campaign office and state party headquarters. Many traveled for days by bus or train; others walked from as far away as Virginia and Maryland. All waited in line for hours Tuesday morning as the temperatures plunged below freezing in the nation’s capitol.

But for many would-be attendees of the 56th Presidential Inauguration, this tenacity would not be enough. While more than a million people flooded the National Mall for Barack Obama’s first speech as U.S. President, an unknown logistical snafu left tens of thousands of others stranded outside the Capital gates.

I was among the ticketed guests who never made it to the actual events, and witnessed the chaotic crowd mismanagement firsthand.

Like most Inauguration-goers, my day began early. I was on the Metro by 6 a.m., but it was already packed to standing-room only. As the train clattered toward downtown from the Maryland suburbs, a man near me yelled out “this train is headed for the promised land!” The car dissolved in laughter, but there was also a strange seriousness to the moment. We were, we all knew, about to witness history.

Well, that was my plan.

After getting off the train at Union Station, I followed the heavy crowds making for the National Mall. In my hand was a purple ticket–the coveted pass that put me among the 240,000 attendees granted access to the grassy area just beyond the Capital steps. As I got closer, I followed signs for purple ticket holders, but it wasn’t long before I was caught in a crush of people all after the same thing as me–a place to line up and wait.

We soon realized there was no such place. But it was no matter. All around me, throngs of the warmly dressed and over-caffeinated milled excitedly. We all had tickets. We had all been waiting since sunrise. The situation might look chaotic, but it would sort itself out.

So we thought. As minutes turned to hours, the crowd never moved, and it certainly never became the line we all thought it would. Instead, I watched nervously as 9 a.m.—the supposed opening time for the ticketed gates—passed, then 10, and finally 11. Four hours after getting in line, I finally hit the eject button and made for the exit. On my way out, I passed block after block of ticket-holders, some chanting “Barack Obama 2008, let us in the purple gate!”; others waving their unused tickets above their heads angrily.

Around noon, The Washington Post quoted Police Chief Phillip Morse saying, “There’s nobody that didn’t get to see the inauguration today who had a ticket.” Morse has since reversed his prognosis, but there is yet no official word on what went wrong this morning. As for me, I’m staying inside and out of the crowds for the rest of the day.

D.C. swarmed for “We Are One” Concert

18 Jan 2009, Posted by Naureen Khan in News, 0 Comments


Inauguration festivities began in earnest this afternoon as, Bono, Garth Brooks, Sheryl Crow, Renee Fleming, Josh Groban, Herbie Hancock, Heather Headley, John Legend, Jennifer Nettles, John Mellencamp, Usher Raymond IV, Shakira, Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, Will.I.Am and Stevie Wonder in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Celebrities Denzel Washington, Ashley Judd, Tom Hanks, Jack Black, Steve Carrell, Jamie Foxx, Kal Penn, Queen Latifah, Samuel L. Jackson, and Tiger Woods were also on hand to salute President and Vice President-elect Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who were in attendance with their families. The speakers repeatedly harked back to the historic presidencies of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, perhaps to hammer home the significance of the moment.

Obama, at the end of the event, kept his address to supporters short and sweet, both acknowledging the difficulty of the challenges lying ahead and the need for national unity to weather the storm.

“Only a handful of generations have been asked to confront challenges as serious as the ones we face right now,” Obama said. “Our nation is at war, our economy is in crisis millions of Americans are losing their jobs and their homes. … they are anxious and uncertain about the future, about whether this generation of Americans will be able to pass on what’s best about this country to our children and their children.”

As usual, fanfare greeted the celebrations with peddlers hawking all Obama-related paraphenelia imaginable– from T-shirts to buttons to boxer shorts. The Capitol Building has been decked out for the big day, the Mall encompassed by a media circus and dotted with jumbatrons, and security stationed at almost every block.

Check back to After the Jump for continuing coverage of the 56th presidential inauguration.