Nov. 4 | Election day in United States

A7

By LEE-ANNE GOODMAN
The Canadian Press

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Speak Up

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - Shahid Muhammad is a taxi driver who can speak with passion and authority for hours about politics, the economy and what's ailing the country.

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AP

two more weeks: Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama holds a baby during a rally at Legends Field in Tampa, Fla., on Monday.

Yet he's voting for the first time this year in the presidential election. He's 52.

"I am voting for Barack Obama for one reason and one reason only," said Muhammad, who was born Willie Allen

but changed his name years ago.

"Because he wants to get us out of the war," he said in a recent interview after dropping off some tourists at the Memphis Zoo.

"I have lost friends in Iraq. I have friends who have lost sons and daughters,'' said Muhammad. "And the money the government has spent on that war; they could have paid off all their debts ... This was our money that they've wasted."

Muhammad is an African-American who, like millions of other black men and women across the United States, has registered to vote for the first time this election.

"Obama is not going to be able to do everything he wants to do. But I don't think he's going to lie about it, and people will see that he's a good man,'' he said.

Obama's headway in North Carolina and Virginia is giving his supporters in other

southern states cause for optimism.

Both North Carolina and Virginia have voted Republican in every presidential election of the past 40 years, and only once since 1948 has Virginia put its electoral college votes behind a Democratic presidential nominee - Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Some polls have Obama ahead by as many as 10 points in Virginia, and with a narrow lead in North Carolina.

He's also making serious inroads in Georgia.

"Tennessee's a state that voted for Bill Clinton twice," said Valerie Richardson, a native Tennessean in Memphis to attend a wedding.

"Obama's sort of written it off, but I think people in western Tennessee and central Tennessee are going to vote for him, and it could be closer than anyone's expecting," said Richardson, a longtime Democrat volunteer who now practises law in South Carolina.