The big national story that wasn't

Anthony Foxx makes victory speech Tuesday. Former Mayor Harvey Gantt is at right.

Amid the wingnut self fellatio-fest following Tuesday's election, Charlotte's mayoral election flew under the national political radar.

Wrap your mind around this: A young African-American Democrat, raised by a single mom and his grandparents, now a successful lawyer, aims for a seat that's been repugicans for years. He mobilizes young and African-American voters and wins in a strong showing. Sound familiar?

If that isn't a good enough political story, consider that the last Democratic mayor in this Southern banking citadel was Harvey Gantt, the African-American architect who won fame for trying, twice, to unseat the black prince of darkness himself, Jesse Helms.

The national media didn't notice. A Nexis.com check of news reports found a few paragraphs in USA Today and the Washington Times, a few political blog mentions and a paragraph in the Lewiston (Idaho) Morning Tribune from a roundup on how streetcar advocates did in mayoral races. (They won, including here).

Yet Democrat Anthony Foxx's win over repugican John Lassiter is not an insignificant anthill on the political landscape. The largest city in the nation's 10th largest state elected its first Democratic mayor in 22 years, an African-American in a majority-white Southern city, a progressive mass transit supporter and an environmentalist.

Many naive repugicans, of course, quickly began pretending the city of Charlotte had ducked under Harry Potter's invisibility cloak. They focused on repugican gubernatorial wins in New Jersey and Virginia. N.C. repugican party chair Tom Fetzer, in spinning Tuesday's results, also pointed to wins by conservative candidates for Wake County school board and repugican mayoral victories in Greensboro and Kinston. He didn't mention his state's largest city. (He had said in September that the state repugican party was closely watching the Foxx-Lassiter race, and that a Lassiter loss would be a blow to the party.)

One theory in wingnut circles is that the election's relatively low turnout here (21 percent, compared with 24 percent in 2007) proves Lassiter lost because he wasn't wingnut enough. A bit delusional on their part - after all, the three wingnut repugicans who ran for City Council at-large seats lost as well.

"All politics is local," the late U.S. House Speaker Tip O'Neill said. Of course national issues color local and state elections, but elections also reflect local personalities and situations. That often doesn't dovetail with whatever prevailing national political narratives are being offered up by the Sunday morning talking heads.