DUNN, N.C. — For Burns Strider, this was something close to heaven on earth. The smoke from the roasting pig was wafting over him, the Carolina sunshine was pouring down and he had a small-town preacher in his grasp.
Propped against a white Chevy pickup truck with a plastic-foam plate of barbeque in his hand, he leaned in. “Brother, let me ask you this,” he said to the Rev. Ron Spears, pastor of the 150-member Faith and Power Christian Center in Dunn, a town astride Interstate 95 in southeast North Carolina. “In the black community here, is there a meth problem? I know it’s eating these towns up. My brother is a sheriff over in Mississippi, and when they get on this stuff, they can’t get off.”
The visit went on in this vein for 20 minutes, while former President Bill Clinton addressed a small crowd 30 yards away. Mr. Strider, an aide to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton who was touring rural North Carolina with Mr. Clinton this week, wanted to know if the pastor’s church could afford to provide him health care (it cannot), if he was bi-vocational (no, he did not have another job), if he had ties to the military (his father was a Green Beret).
He did not ask whom Mr. Spears was supporting in the Democratic presidential contest. Mr. Strider is a political operator, no doubt, but this is the soft sell, the only kind he knows.
Mr. Strider carries the title of senior adviser and director of faith-based operations for the Clinton campaign, but that only begins to describe his mission. A native of Grenada, Miss., he is the emissary from and to rural and religious voters, particularly in the South. His job is to close the God Gap and the Bubba Gap, helping Mrs. Clinton connect with evangelicals and veterans and Nascar fans, the kind of voters that Senator Barack Obama clumsily referred to as bitter small-towners who cling to their God and their guns in times of economic hardship.
It's worth reading the whole thing.
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