Melanie McNamara, in red, with Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.
Charlotte, N.C. — In 2008, North Carolina business owner Melanie McNamara, “believed in all that hope and change” and voted for Barack Obama. This cycle, frustrated by how Obama has governed, McNamara is going to vote for Mitt Romney.
“I really wanted our country to be able to move past some of the history and be able to feel that we could elect a black individual, and I thought that would be a wonderful thing for this country. And also, he spoke so eloquently,” McNamara tells me. “But I don’t feel inspired anymore by him at all. I feel like we’re worse off. What scares me the most is our national debt.”
And as a small-business owner, McNamara has a front-row seat to the devastating impact the lousy economy has had on people.
“I have a lot more people coming in my door looking for work. A lot more people,” says McNamara, who currently has about 30 employees working at her High Point, N.C., business, Absolute Style Furniture.
“People who are coming in, they’re begging for work. I mean, they’ll do anything,” she recounts. “even had a guy this week who said I’ll clean the toilets. I was an upholsterer, but if you don’t need an upholsterer, I’ll clean toilets. I’ll do anything.”
McNamara is also disappointed that Obama hasn’t delivered on his post-partisan campaign talk. “I think our country also is more divided,” she says, “and yet one of the reasons I wanted to vote for him was to make it more united and I haven’t found that.”
McNamara was featured in the RNC web video “These Hands: North Carolina” released this week:
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