WILMINGTON, N.C. (NNPA) - Two weeks before his momentous Democratic National Convention appearance in Denver, Colorado, presumptive presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama knows he is in the fight of his life with GOP rival, Sen. John McCain, in their intense battle for the White House.

Senator Barack Obama After a barrage of negative attack ads that questioned the Illinois senator's experience and patriotism, and likened his celebrity to that of fluff princesses like Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton, Obama is counting on a 50- state strategy to force McCain to spread his resources.

That means going toe-totoe with the Arizona Republican in so-called GOPleaning states like North Carolina, which the Obama campaign has designated as a top tier target they intend to take from the Republicans this presidential election.

While North Carolina remains very much a Democratic state in terms of electing its governor and state Legislature, the Tar Heel state hasn't been won by a Democratic presidential candidate since a little known peanut farmer and governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, took it in 1976.

The Obama campaign says it plans to change that paradigm, and bringing more eligible Black voters into the process will be key.

According to Democracy North Carolina, the nonpartisan nonprofit public policy group, as of June 2008, of the 5,812,519 registered Democrats in the state, 21 percent, or 1,204,415 are African- American.

"If the Democrats are to have any chance at all of carrying this state, it will only be because of a much largerthan normal and completely united Black vote,'' David Rohde, a political science professor at Duke University, told Bloomberg News.

Thus far, according to published reports, the Obama campaign has opened at least 12 satellite campaign offices across the state, including in Durham and New Hanover counties.

The Raleigh office serves as the state headquarters for the Obama campaign.

Between June 3 and July 26, the Obama campaign, aware that many White working class voters are still weary of the Black candidate, has spent over $2 million dollars on advertising statewide to make inroads into Republican McCain's base of support.

In contrast, the McCain campaign hasn't spent a dime, thus far, in North Carolina, and yet still leads Obama in recent polls by an average of 3.7 percentage points, according to RealClearPolitics.com (RCP).

Some analysts say with the exception of Virginia (which hasn't voted for a Democratic president since LBJ in 1964), where popular Gov. Tim Kaine has endorsed Obama and is considered in the running as a vice presidential running mate, "…the odds get longer and longer as you go down the list" of the seven red states that Obama plans to be competitive in, including North Carolina, according to RealClearPolitics.

"There's scant evidence in the polls in Georgia and North Carolina that Obama's spending has had much of an effect, if any, in those states," wrote RCP's Tom Bevan.

In an analysis of Obama's Southern strategy last week, Howard Fineman of Newsweek wrote, "to generate a sky-high turnout among young voters and among the region's heavy concentration of African- Americans…skeptics call the projections unrealistic and the strategy a fool's errand." The Obama campaign disagrees.

There are 56 million unregistered voters nationwide, 32 percent of the total eligible voter ranks, the Obama campaign says. Of that number, eight million are Black (which is also 32 percent of eligible African- American voters).

Democrats don't want to repeat the Black voter shortfall they had in the 2004 presidential elections when Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry tried to unseat incumbent Republican President George Bush.

Because the Black vote in key regions underperformed based on what its potential was, battleground states like Ohio, Florida and Virginia were lost to the Democrats by single digits ranging from two to eight percent, primarily because of unregistered voters.

Kerry lost to Bush, 51 - 48%, where the key state of Ohio - where Democrats lost by 2% (110,000 votes), and there were 270,000 unregistered African-Americans - became the deciding factor.

Part of the strategy in turning North Carolina from Republican red back to Democratic blue for the presidential contest lies in a fullcourt press to bring new voters into the fold.