Clock will soon strike midnight
Enjoy these next few days, friends and neighbors, because by the end of Tuesday we Carolinians will end up feeling like the prom date who’s been unceremoniously dumped at her front door, left to watch the taillights of the limo disappear into the darkness as her beau screeches off in search of new thrills.
The pundits will stop writing about us. The talking heads will stop blabbering about us. Hillary and Barack will clear out of town and their armies of volunteers will move en masse to the next stop — wherever that is. Why should I even mention the glory-stealing hussy’s name?
All we’ll be left with is a collection of random mental snapshots of our brief moment in the limelight. Some of my favorites include:
* Obama playing basketball with the cream-of-the-crop UNC Tar Heels in Chapel Hill. Even though the players, as the Associated Press diplomatically put it, “gave Obama his shots,” the man from Illinois didn’t score a single point. In fact, after a few minutes, Obama benched himself.
* The photo of Clinton laughing with delight as she gets an endorsement from Gov. Mike Easley. You have to wonder at her joy, considering that Easley admitted his endorsement doesn’t exactly carry a lot of firepower: “I don’t have an apparatus, I don’t have machinery in every county that I can deliver like maybe an Ed Rendell could. All I can do is tell the people who have been supporting me now for 24 years of elective office what I believe and how strongly I feel about it.”
* Being called by a young woman who invited me to visit the Obama headquarters in downtown Raleigh, which could be found on Blount Street, she said — pronouncing it to rhyme with “count.” (Every local knows you say it “blunt.”)
* Learning that a hobbit was campaigning for Clinton in North Carolina.
We’ll never see the likes of all this again. Thanks, y’all, for the memories. Come back soon, hear?