Crazy In NC: Hands Of Time Edition

How North Carolina Turned So Red So Fast:

On a wall in Larry Hall’s North Carolina House office is a poster that welcomes visitors to the state. It’s in the style of an interstate highway sign and advises those who look at it to set their clocks back 50 years. That touch isn’t a demonstration of nostalgia -- it’s a reminder from the House Democratic leader of his belief that the Republican majority currently running North Carolina has undone 50 years of moderate-to-progressive state government.

Hall sees the last half-century as one of steady achievement that pulled the state ahead of most of its Southern neighbors in everything from voter participation to higher education. Democrats, who ran the state during most of those years, now find themselves on the sidelines, watching a Republican legislature turn back decades of Democratic priorities and enact a starkly conservative agenda in a state that helped elevate Barack Obama to the White House. “Right now the environment is so antagonistic, so confrontational, you don’t get to do those gradual changes,” he says...