Salon has an interesting outsider's take on the prospect of an Obama win (and Dole loss) in N.C.

Here's some of the more interesting snippets:

"As for the incumbent, Dole seems to be running a much more somnambulant campaign. She dodged five proposed debates, passive-aggressively failing to commit to them rather than outright refusing. Voters are seeing her on her terms, not theirs — her campaign Web site doesn’t have a public calendar of events, and her Senate calendar is three and a half years out of date."

"This is still North Carolina, after all, and race will still probably play a part in how the presidential election finishes here. 'I don’t think the United States is ready for a black person to be president,' said Lucille Anderson, 73, from Lawsonville. 'I think the blacks would be mean to us … they’d probably take us over.' But sitting across the picnic table from her at the Dixie Classic Fair in Winston-Salem Saturday, Anderson’s daughter, Cathy Grantham, said the economy was too miserable to worry about race. 'We need a change,' said Grantham, 50.”