The New Republic

North Carolina doesn't exactly have a history of electing blacks to
high political office. So it was considered a sign of progress when,
in 1991, a black Democratic legislator named Dan Blue was chosen by
his colleagues to be speaker of the North Carolina House of
Representatives. "For the first time," Raleigh's The News %amp%
Observer declared, "North Carolina voters will get to see a black
man wielding real power in state government." And it was widely
predicted that Blue--who was only 41 at the time--would go on to
wield even more power in the future. Former Governor and
then-Senator Terry Sanford, at the time the most prominent Democrat
in North Carolina, touted Blue as a future governor. "Dan Blue,"
Sanford said, "has been a first-rate man."But little more than a decade later, Blue's political career hasn't
quite turned out as planned. Although he is still a state
legislator, and Democrats control North Carolina's House of
Representatives, Blue is no longer speaker. And while he is running
in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by
Jesse Helms, he's a decided underdog--abandoned by the same
Democratic establishment that once applauded his upward progress.
North Carolina's House speaker and Senate leader are both publicly
supporting Blue's main rival for the nomination, former Clinton
administration official Erskine Bowles. (North Carolina Secretary
of State Elaine Marshall is the other major Democratic candidate in
the race.) Behind the scenes, a host of other prominent
Democrats--including many close to current Governor Mike Easley and
former Governor Jim Hunt--are helping Bowles. Even the state
AFL-CIO has endorsed Bowles--an odd move considering that in the
Clinton administration Bowles vocally supported NAFTA, which labor
blames for North Carolina's loss of more than 100,000 textile and
manufacturing jobs. (Prior to receiving the endorsement, Bowles
changed his position on the trade agreement.) This lack of
establishment support has hurt Blue's fund-raising. While Bowles has
raked in $1.73 million, according to the most recent campaign
finance filings, Blue has raised only $201,000. Summing up Blue's
plight, one Democrat says succinctly, "He is an outcast."

Of course, lots of rising political stars don't fulfill their
potential. But it's been a particular problem for black Democrats.
In 1991, when Blue was elected speaker, he was part of what seemed
a whole new generation of black Democrats amassing the political
credentials needed to run for high office. (Between 1970 and 1990,
the number of black elected officials in the United States
increased from 1,469 to 7,370.) The year before Blue was elected
speaker, Virginia's L. Douglas Wilder became the nation's first
black to be elected governor; and one year after Blue's ascension,
Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois became the first African American
woman elected to the Senate. Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke was
considered a good bet to soon join Wilder and Moseley-Braun on the
larger political stage. "Perhaps this decade," political analyst
William Schneider predicted in 1990, "we'll have a black on the
national ticket."

Not only has that not happened, but by some measures black political
power has actually regressed since Schneider's words. While black
Democrats continue to win city, county, and down-ticket statewide
offices, there are currently no African Americans in governor's
mansions or in the U.S. Senate. And it doesn't look like that's
going to change anytime soon. Just this week, Roland Burris-- who
in 1991 became Illinois's first black attorney general--lost that
state's Democratic gubernatorial primary to a white challenger. And
in New York, Carl McCall--a black Democrat who's served two terms
as state comptroller--is in a fierce gubernatorial primary fight
against Andrew Cuomo, who's never held elected office. In
Louisiana, outgoing New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial unsuccessfully
tried to amend his city's charter so he could serve a third term-
-reportedly because he knew that, despite two successful terms, his
race meant he had little chance of winning higher office.

Indeed, the glass ceiling that black politicians appear to be
hitting could eventually undo an implicit bargain the Democratic
Party struck with African Americans years ago. In many states,
particularly in the South, Democrats cannot win statewide unless
they receive the overwhelming support of black voters. In exchange
for this support, black voters--and, perhaps more importantly, the
black Democratic politicians who bring black voters to the polls on
behalf of their white colleagues--expected this biracial coalition
to eventually elect black Democrats to high office as well. But so
far it hasn't, and some black Democrats are getting frustrated.
Take Mickey Michaux, a black North Carolina state representative
who supports Blue's Senate bid. "Dan has really paid his dues as
far as the Democratic Party is concerned. I don't think they're
really giving him the credit that's due to him," says Michaux.
"They want our vote, but when it comes to dividing up the spoils,
they forget about that. They forget about our vote, that it was us
who helped put them there." And if Democratic politicians keep
forgetting, it's anyone's guess how long black voters will continue
putting them there.

Dan Blue likes to portray himself as a typical North Carolinian--and
with good reason. The son of a tenant farmer, he grew up in rural
Eastern North Carolina before leaving home to attend one of the
state's public universities-- the historically black North Carolina
Central in Durham. After college, Blue moved across the city to
attend law school at Duke, and then settled in nearby Raleigh,
where he built a successful legal practice. His life story--
progressing from rural, blue-collar roots to metropolitan,
white-collar success- -is a common one in North Carolina. "Just as
North Carolina has emerged," Blue has said, "so have I."

But Blue is typical in another way as well: His is the story of a
generation of black Democrats. Blue left for college in 1966
intending to become a scientist. (Indeed, he majored in chemistry
and math.) But the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and
Robert Kennedy turned his mind to politics. At N. C. Central, Blue
was swept up by the civil rights movement, and he began leading
sit-ins and protests. And, like many civil rights activists--John
Lewis, Marion Barry, James Clyburn--Blue became a committed
Democrat. He volunteered on his first Democratic campaign in 1968
and has poured himself into the party ever since. "I've served from
the precinct committee to the county executive committee to the
state executive committee to the Democratic National Committee, "
Blue boasts. In 1992 and 1996, he chaired the Clinton-Gore campaign
in North Carolina. And, of course, Blue has worked on his own
campaigns: He was first elected to the state House of
Representatives in 1980.

Unlike some black Democrats, though, Blue has tried to appeal to
more than just a narrow ethnic base. Although he currently
represents a majority-black district, Blue was originally elected
to the state House as an at-large candidate in predominately white
Wake County. (Ironically, in 1984 a federal court ruled that the
at-large seats in Wake County violated the Voting Rights Act and
mandated that the six representatives from Wake County run in
single- member districts, leading to the creation of Blue's
majority-black district.) And to be elected speaker in 1991, Blue
had to win over rural, white legislators who, although Democrats,
represented districts that routinely voted for Jesse Helms. Blue,
as one state representative explained to The New York Times on the
occasion of his election as speaker, was a "Democrat [who] is
neither liberal nor conservative, but moderate, mainstream in his
viewpoint."

By all accounts, Blue was a good speaker of the House, negotiating a
grand compromise--$600 million in spending cuts; $600 million in
increased taxes-- that solved the state's $1.2 billion deficit in
1991. He was easily reelected speaker in 1993; but the following
year the Gingrich Revolution swept the Democrats from power in the
North Carolina State House, and Blue lost his speakership. What
happened next is open to interpretation: Some say Blue absented
himself from the Democratic caucus during its wilderness years;
others contend that the caucus, spooked by its loss in 1994,
drifted rightward and essentially abandoned Blue.

Either way, the result was that in 1998, after Democrats took back
the North Carolina House, the caucus passed over Blue and selected
a white, conservative legislator named Jim Black as its choice for
speaker. Blue launched a renegade bid for the speakership with
support from a handful of black Democrats--who argued that their
party owed its reclaimed House majority to high turnout among
blacks and thus owed Blue the job--and a number of Republicans, who
had worked out a power-sharing deal in exchange for their votes.
But Blue ended up losing by one vote. Since then, he has been a
thorn in the side of the Democratic leadership in the statehouse.
Last year Blue--along with some of the other renegade Democrats who
supported his failed speaker bid--blocked a Democratic tax increase
plan and delayed passage of the budget for one month.

This, claim some Democrats, is why the party establishment has not
backed Blue's Senate campaign. "The word's out," says one Democrat,
"and the word is that Dan's been disloyal." But something else is
giving Democrats pause as well: Blue's race. In 1990 and again in
1996, North Carolina Democrats nominated a black candidate, Harvey
Gantt, for Helms's Senate seat; Gantt lost both times. And while
black candidates have since won statewide races for down- ticket
posts like state auditor, some wonder whether North Carolina is
ready to elect a black candidate to a top-of-the-ticket office. "A
lot of folks have said that we've already run Dan Blue [i.e., a
black candidate] twice and got beaten twice," explains one
Democrat, who notes that before Bowles decided to run in the
primary against Blue, the party establishment was beseeching white
politicians like former Governor Jim Hunt and Representative Bob
Etheridge to throw their hats in the ring. "People are spooked by
what happened to Gantt.... Race is still a factor in this state.
Shame on North Carolina, but it's true." Georgia Democrats came to
a similar conclusion in 1990 when they picked Zell Miller over
Andrew Young as their gubernatorial nominee; and Illinois
Democrats, in passing over Burris in this week's gubernatorial
primary, seemed to as well.

Blue rejects such thinking, noting that in losing to Helms, Gantt
was in good company: Helms, after all, vanquished plenty of
Democratic challengers during his 30 years in the Senate. "That's
like saying we should never have somebody like Jim Hunt [who lost
to Helms in 1984]--a white male from Eastern North Carolina who had
been governor--run again statewide because he couldn't get
elected," says Blue. But even with Helms out of the picture, and
the supposedly kinder-and-gentler Liddy Dole a shoo-in to win the
Republican nomination, some Democrats aren't so sure Blue's race
wouldn't be an issue. "I can already see the thirty-second spot
Dole runs against Dan," frets one Democrat. "There would be
pictures of her standing with Reagan and Bush. She would say,
`While I was standing firm with Ronald Reagan, Dan Blue was
standing with his candidate of choice.' And guess who that was?
Jesse Jackson! That would be devastating."

Perhaps trying to make a virtue of necessity, Blue is running to the
left. He attacks Bowles for his past support of NAFTA and
insufficient opposition to vouchers--the latter stance won Blue the
endorsement of the North Carolina teachers' union--and argues that
the murky middle, which Bowles is obviously seeking to occupy, is
no place to beat Dole. "There's a genuine contrast between my
consistent positions and those of the presumptive Republican
nominee's," Blue says.

Blue has even tried to turn his lack of cash into a populist pitch.
"I don't have a bunch of investment bankers to finance my
campaign," he says. "[But] we don't need the kind of money that
Erskine Bowles is going to spend.... I don't want to just be
shooting slick thirty-second TV ads at people.... I'll deal
directly with voters on a one-on-one basis, in small groups, to
empower the voters to take back their democracy."

On a recent day in March, Blue was trying to do exactly that,
visiting a Durham high school at 7:30 a.m.--this, after getting
back from a much-needed Washington fund-raiser only five hours
earlier--to eat a breakfast cooked by culinary-arts students. He
then gave a talk on black history to a group of elementary school
students. And after that he toured a Baptist-church-run charter
school in a rundown section of Durham. Blue was indeed meeting with
people one-on-one; the problem was that, save for a few teachers and
parents, none of them were voters. Standing in the middle of a
computer lab, the candidate was mobbed by inquisitive children. It
was the kind of scene that would have been perfect for one of those
slick 30-second TV ads Blue disparages- -if only there had been a
video crew on hand to film it. Instead, Blue's campaign manager
took pictures with a disposable camera; his wife, meanwhile, gave
some campaign literature to one of the youngsters. "My husband's
running for Senate," she told him. "Here, you can take this home to
your parents."

Later that day, Blue did finally meet up with some people who were
old enough to vote, addressing a group of about 20 senior citizens
at a Durham senior center. Speaking in the 15-minute slot after
bingo and before lunch, Blue made his pitch. "I've done as much as
I can do at the state level. I've put in my time," he said. "And I
want to go to Washington to take the seat that's currently occupied
by Jesse Helms." He then asked the group for more than their votes.
"I need all of you to sign up and volunteer and tell people to vote
for Dan Blue on May seventh." (Because of a court case, the
Democratic primary has since been postponed and will likely be held
in the summer.) Blue's campaign manager passed around a legal pad
for people to write down their names and phone numbers, and a
number of the seniors complied. But when I approached one
woman--who earlier had told Blue she had admired him for 22
years--to ask what kind of volunteer work she planned to do, she
shook her head and said none. "I'm on dialysis three days a week,"
she explained. "It takes a lot out of you. " Once again, it seemed
that Dan Blue was on his own.

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