North Carolina’s Cal Cunningham for U.S. Senate

It was Mudcat Saunders’s South; the old South, the new South, the same South
coming into the republic and bringing with it heart and substance. It awakened
in North Carolina when Kay Hagan clicked her ruby slippers and sent Elizabeth
Dole back to Kansas in 2008. It advances again with Cal Cunningham’s run
against Richard Burr for the Senate in North Carolina. Cunningham, a captain in
the Army Reserve and an Iraq war veteran who won a Bronze Star for his efforts,
brings authentic leadership to North Carolina. He has recently been endorsed by
Gen. Wesley Clark.

“Cal would be the first veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to
serve in the U.S. Senate. He would bring a veteran’s unique perspective to
policymaking in Washington,” said Clark.

When we were rearing our kids on our little farm in Tobaccoville, N.C., the
venerable Jesse Helms was our senator. He came from the ’50s and refused to let
go. Like one of those old Japanese soldiers from World War II who refused to
surrender and were still coming out of the jungle decades after the war had
ended. But the South had already let go decades before and had joined the
world, even led the world, while Jesse was still holding fast to the past. And
in a monumental shift in sensibility, my Baptist, Democrat precinct, which had
voted Democrat for 120 years, suddenly made a tectonic shift and 85 percent followed
Jesse to the Republican Party in the early 1980s.

But Warner and Webb returned it. They, with Gen. Clark and a few others,
brought a new face to the Democrats and a new face to the South, “a Democratic
Team with Management Values.” Wesley Clark brought a uniform sense of honor,
dignity, intelligence and duty to the country in the oldest tradition of the
South and to the Democratic Party. Like Hagan, Cunningham fits in this new
model, which forms an auspiciously rising paradigm and one which returns North
Carolina back to its Democratic roots.

During 2008, Cunningham served as a military prosecutor in the Multi-National
Corps – Iraq. During his tour, he was government counsel in the first court-martial
of a contractor under military law since 1968. In addition to the Bronze Star
Medal, he received the Gen. Douglas MacArthur Award for his leadership.

In November 2000, Cal was elected to the North Carolina state Senate,
representing Davidson, Rowan and Iredell counties. In the Senate, Cal worked on
privacy legislation, campaign reform, the patients’ bill of rights, the clean-smokestacks
bill, class-size reductions and preservation of farmland. He served as vice chairman
of the Senate Judiciary Committee and on the Senate’s education committees. He
has since served on the Executive Committee of the North Carolina Democratic
Party.

Visit Mr. Quigley’s website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.