As many of you know, North Carolina state house speaker Thom Tillis is in a bit of trouble after a 2012 interview surfaced that caught him in a macaca moment. Tillis, who is trying to derail Kay Hagan's bid for a second term, said the Republican Party needed to do a better job of selling itself to minorities, especially since the "traditional"--read, white--population of both North Carolina and the nation is stagnant. It was a classic case of a dog whistle being blown into a megaphone. But you wouldn't know it if you read a major North Carolina newspaper or watched television in this state. While this story has been burning up the national political press, unless I'm very wrong it hasn't been mentioned by a single mainstream outlet in North Carolina.
Simply put, this is a colossal fail. How in the world can you adequately cover this race and not mention such a blatant gaffe? The press here was asleep at the switch when this interview ran just over a month before the 2012 elections. Had this been known, it's safe to say that Tillis and his friends wouldn't have their precious supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature. After all, things like this can overcome even gerrymanders as blatant as the one they created after taking control of the legislature in 2010. And it looks like this state's mainstream press is still asleep at the switch. Can you imagine if Virginia's press had failed to cover George Allen calling S. R. Sidharth a "macaca"?
If the local press won't cover this story, it's up to us in North Carolina and the nation to make sure Tillis can't run from it. Hagan is narrowly ahead in most polling, and we need to make sure this blows up in Tillis' face the way Liddy Dole's "Godless Americans" ad backfired in 2008.