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We're getting more like Miami than Atlanta
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Published: November 19, 2008
As North Carolina crept into the Blue State column week before last, one notable feature of the change was that Bev Perdue narrowly beat the popular Pat McCrory in Mecklenburg, his home county.
Straight-ticket Democrats, washing even the popular McCrory downstream in the Obama flood, told us something new about Charlotte's sibling rivalry with big sister city Atlanta. If the new queen bee carried the Hornet's Nest narrowly against McCrory, then the score against a Republican from Wilmington or Winston-Salem would have been an all-out route.
In envy or disdain, depending on the point being made, Atlanta has always been the mark on the doorjamb that Charlotteans and their neighboring communities measure by. If a visit to Charlotte includes an hour spent in a traffic jam, the complaint will be, "Charlotte's getting to be just like Atlanta."
But it may be that Charlotte's getting to be just like Miami.
Like Miami in the 1950's, Charlotte is a Southern town being separated from its roots by an influx of refugees from the Frost Belt and the Rust Belt. And like Miami in the 1970's, many of Charlotte's newcomers came fleeing consolidation of power by the Left on their home turf.
Like refugees the world over, those coming to Charlotte are torn between aversion so strong that it drove them away and a reflexive nostalgia for home that can be engaged and exploited by a savvy pols.
With a shove from Bushophobia, nostalgia prevailed this year. A lot of snowbirds voted as homesick Democrats.
Like Miami, with its hoards of Cuban and Haitian expatriates, Charlotte has also become something of a polyglot metropolis. Charlotte's Hispanic community is less a Mexican guest worker enclave than a place where Spanish-speaking professionals from many countries converge for economic opportunity.
Writing in The Charlotte Observer's annual "Living Here" insert, Rogelio Aranda lists no less than four business associations for Hispanic professionals and ten Spanish-targeted print and broadcast media.
Unlike Miami, whose character was changed by a sudden, resentful exodus from Castro's Cuba and Duvalier's Haiti, Charlotte's émigré communities are drawn to better prospects than home affords.
This translates to a sense of permanence and willing assimilation that contrasts with the exile mindset and clannishness that English-speaking Miamians often attribute to their Cuban neighbors.
The envy-driven folly of Castro's revolution skimmed off the cream of Cuban productivity and professionalism, delivering it in concentrated form to Miami where, predictably, it prospered.
There, two dynamics were at work: Nietzsche-fashion, what did not destroy the Cuban elite made them stronger. And fate, knocking the Cuban soil off their roots, made the transplants all the more vigorous in their new, free soil.
In Charlotte, the dynamics of attraction have had the same results that refugee dynamics had in Miami. Like the Pilgrim Fathers, the new Charlotteans have confidence born of having made the leap and burned their bridges plus the unique affinity for an adopted land that a totally new beginning mandates.
Charlotte has a long tradition of celebrating its émigrés, largely because it's vibrant Greek community blazed an admirable trail. Growing up in Charlotte, I learned to take for granted the respect and admiration that the Greeks among us earned and enjoyed. Then as now, the annual Greek Festival was a highlight of the year.
When Charlotte's large corporations contributed foot soldiers for United Way campaigns, I was often among them. I remember the generous "give something back" attitude of Greek business owners in marked contrast with a grudging reluctance often encountered elsewhere. Charlotte's good experience with its Greeks may have eased the way for the nationalities that followed.
This fall's election results indicate that white, Protestant, social-conservative media messages shoved a huge and growing Charlotte segment into the open, brown-like-us arms of the Obama camp and tossed in the Governor's mansion as part of the bargain.
Atlanta, a black city within corporate limits, has more in common with D.C. than with white Charlotte.
And Charlotte, attracting much of its recent growth from the North and from the offshore South, more nearly resembles reconstituted Miami than grown-in-place Atlanta.
There are major differences, of course. One of the most important is that many Miami expats, including second and third generation Cubans born in the USA, will want to go home when the regime changes or relents (maybe sooner if Obama opens Cuba as Nixon opened China). Today's bleak housing market is a stark preview of Miami's if that happens.
Charlotte's expatriates were lured -- not chased -- to N.C.. They seem to have unpacked their political baggage for a long stay.
Mooresville's Stan Thompson is a retired strategic planner and environmental futurist for BellSouth Telecommunications. His column appears every other week in the Tribune. Email him at: HST2nd@aol.com
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