This, as a North Carolinian,( and racing lover back in the day) just blows my mind. Johnson is an icon here, and from an area that is pretty conservative. He obviously put a lot of thought into this endorsement, and it goes against what one would think as the normal grain of his fans.
I’ve copied his endorsement from the e-mail sent out by the Obama campaign, editing out the links to campaign sites. When I looked online for news sources, they were slim, and only had pieces of the endorsement; I thought it better to have the whole text, but, in interest of full disclosure, it came from the Obama e-mail:
On Oct 27, 2008, at 7:35 AM, Junior Johnson wrote:
This is really tremendous for Obama’s NC campaign, and could make a difference in undecided voters. Qualifies as an October surprise for NC.
[del]Pending confirmation in GQ, I’m going to lock this. We don’t need three conversations about it at once when we don’t know if it happened at all.[/del]
Changed my mind. We’ve got two different Dopers saying they got this email now. If it comes out that there was no endorsement the thread will sink on its own.
askeptic, Johnson appears to maintain zero Web presence - there are no comments in his site’s guest book since 2004 - and he may not be enough of a name for news groups to bother confirming. Does Obama’s site typically carry endorsements from non-politicians or political figures?
Given the popularity of Johnson in some key battleground states, I find it baffling that it can’t be confirmed anywhere. I don’t doubt that two Dopers got the e-mail I just can’t understand why something of this magnitude can’t be confirmed. And if you don’t think this is something of magnitude then you haven’t spent much time in the South.
A couple of weeks, not counting time in Florida, but that isn’t the point, since I was talking about whether, say, CNN would think he’s a big enough name, not what I think.