North Carolina voters are poised to pass a constitutional amendment next week that would bar all government recognition of same-sex couples, putting pressure on President Barack Obama to address marriage equality in his platform at the September Democratic National Convention in Charlotte.

According to the latest Public Policy Polling survey of the state, Amendment One could pass by a double-digit margin even though 55 percent of  North Carolina residents support some form of legal recognition for gay couples.

“Voters who understand what the amendment does are opposed to it,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “But there’s a lot of education left to be done in this final week of the campaign.”

State Senator and Democratic Whip Josh Stein, who has led the charge against the amendment, agrees that the problem is most voters lack an understanding of the stakes.

“When people have information about the amendment and how unnecessary it is, they don’t support it,” Stein told The National Memo. “The key is, do we have enough resources to communicate, to inform voters?”

Richard Socarides, former special adviser to President Bill Clinton on LGBT issues and a Democratic strategist, expressed confidence opponents of discrimination could close the gap in the final days.

“The momentum is with us and the ads are very good on our side,” he said. PPP’s data seems to back him up: when voters are informed of what the amendment would do (and not do), they reject it 46 to 38 percent, according to the survey.

But if the numbers do not flip before the primary on Tuesday, national Democrats — some of whom had already suggested Obama’s equivocation on marriage would need to change before November — will put increased pressure on the president to use the power and prestige of the his office to make a case for marriage equality in what he is telling supporters will be his “last campaign.”

“If it does pass, it’s more pressure on Obama and the DNC to address the marriage issue head-on in the platform,” said Socarides. “But really either way I don’t see how they avoid it.”

NEW YORK — Occupy Wall Street protesters will fan out across Manhattan and the nation on Tuesday in an effort to breathe new life into a movement that has sputtered since bursting onto the national stage last September.

The “nationwide emergency outcry” by activists intent on showing America what a day would be like without the “99 percent” — workers of all stripes who don’t rake in millions at financial firms — represents something of a gamble, as months of anticipation and hype have raised expectations and put the burden on Occupiers to demonstrate continued, broad appeal.

“The lazy narrative is Occupy Wall Street is dead because we haven’t been having as many large demonstrations,” said Mark Bray, a member of the Occupy Wall Street press team. “We want to get across the message that it’s the labor of the 99 percent that makes this country run, makes it tick.”

The action comes after several months of hibernation for Occupy Wall Street, where the focus has shifted from civil disobedience to targeted actions, like halting home foreclosures and protesting rising student debt.

Events are planned in over 100 cities, and in New York, there will be 99 pickets at banks and other institutions to “disrupt the one percent.” There have been reports that major bridges and roadways will be blocked and that activists will attempt to shut down the city, but while acknowledging civil disobedience and direct action were likely, Bray indicated they were not on the formal agenda.

“It’s not something that was planned at any official capacity or any public meeting,” he said.

Cognizant of the risks associated with potentially delaying commuters and alienating workers — most national unions have officially declined to take part in the May Day action even if locals like the powerful 1199-SEIU in New York have pledged support — ‘Occupy’ has determined that to shake things up and get some of its magic back, a show of force is necessary.

“We sympathize with people who are trying to get somewhere who are delayed,” Bray said. “If simply petitioning the government were sufficient to get the kinds of political changes we’re looking for, we wouldn’t be bothering with all of this. You need to look at in the context of crisis and desperation; the normal means of political change aren’t getting the job done. That’s the way groups have responded to similar crises in the past. It was not uncommon in the Civil Rights era to block bridges. We’re simply tapping into that tradition because that’s how we can grab people’s attention, and show our collective action.”

A direct action on the Brooklyn Bridge not long after the first Occupiers entered Zuccotti Park in September ended with 700 arrests, but it also seemed to garner the kind of press coverage necessary to grow the movement and create buzz. The best case scenario for die-hard activists is that May Day brings a similar infusion of new blood.

“It’s going to be important for the morale one way or the other of the movement,” said Todd Gitlin, a social movement historian and Columbia professor who led Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s and is the author of a new book on Occupy Wall Street. “If you want to convince people who are not inside the circle of the committed that the movement is back then you have to be able to make a case to them. Numbers are the easiest way to do that.”

If righteous indignation is the lifeblood of popular social movements, it doesn’t hurt that bankers have enlisted Pinkerton security consultants — yes, that Pinkerton — to help them prepare for May Day, one top Pinkerton analyst comparing banks bracing for occupation to elk fending off wolves in Yellowstone National Park.

Demonstrations will focus on midtown banks for the morning and early afternoon, when activists will march from a pop-up occupation of Bryant Park to Union Square and hold a 4 p.m. rally. Later, there is a city-approved march from Union Square to Lower Manhattan, where Goldman Sachs’ headquarters could be targeted for protest.

“A success would be relatively good press and relatively decent numbers,” said Gitlin. “If the numbers in New York turn out to be much smaller than the numbers from the big marches in October and November, it will be hard to spin that.”

Eight years after he released an inflammatory video just days before election day that may have helped George W. Bush win a second term, the late Osama bin Laden has become a political talisman for Barack Obama and the Democrats — a reminder of the president’s most tangible accomplishment since taking office.

Between the video of Bill Clinton praising Obama for ordering the Navy SEAL mission a year ago that found and killed bin Laden in Pakistan, and Vice President Joe Biden’s new slogan, “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive,” it’s clear the White House has decided the killing is a legitimate — and especially useful — campaign weapon, as the AP reports:

Obama’s re-election campaign is portraying his risky decision to go after America’s top enemy as a defining difference with his Republican presidential opponent, suggesting Mitt Romney might not have had the guts to order a mission that put lives and perhaps a presidency at stake.

Obama himself is opening up on the raid again — and opening the secretive White House Situation Room as an interview stage — to hail the one-year anniversary.

The broader goal for Obama, whether through campaign web videos or the trappings of the White House, is not to just to remind voters of an enormous victory on his watch. It is to maximize a political narrative that he has the courage to make tough calls that his opponent might not.

“Does anybody doubt that had the mission failed, it would have written the beginning of the end of the president’s first term?” Vice President Joe Biden says in laying out Obama’s foreign policy campaign message. “We know what President Obama did. We can’t say for certain what Governor Romney would have done.”

Sick of negative press, Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino mogul best known for donating over $20 million to a Super PAC backing Newt Gingrich’s failed presidential bid, teased his plan for the rest of 2012 Friday: funneling money to Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, which is not required to disclose its donors and could help him take out his nemesis, Nevada Senate candidate Rep. Shelley Berkley.

Adelson told Jon Ralston at The Las Vegas Sun, “I’m going to give one more small donation — you might not think it’s that small — to a SuperPAC and then if I give it will be to a c4,” a reference to 501(c)(4) “social welfare” nonprofits that are tax-exempt and can keep donors secret. Ralston said that Adelson must be referring to Crossroads GPS, the 501(c)(4) arm of Rove’s American Crossroads, a clearinghouse for outside Republican political spending.

“Do you know how many c4s there are?” Adelson replied. But as Ralston notes, Crossroads is the biggest game in town, and the 78-year-old Israel hawk expressed “gushing admiration” for Rove in the same interview. Crossroads has already sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into attack ads against Shelley Berkley, Adelson’s one-time employee with whom he had a major falling out just before she began her first congressional run in 1997.

And this may just be the beginning of a trend away from Super PACs — which despite pathetic disclosure requirements, do tend to draw scrutiny to their benefactors — toward 501(c)(4)s, which can avoid any sunlight at all until after the election.

“We’re now living in a world where someone who wants to influence an election can do so through a group that doesn’t have to disclose it’s donors,” said Bill Allison, editorial director at the Sunlight Foundation, a good government group. “That’s the really troubling thing here.”

All 501(c)(4)s have to do to retain their special protected status is spend less than 50 percent of funds on expressly political activity, a blurry line that will almost surely get crossed sometime between now and November.

“How the IRS defines that is pretty shaky, and because these are “social welfare” organizations, a lot of their issue advertising counts toward the 50 percent that is not supposed to go to political activity,” said Allison, referring to ads attacking policy initiatives of the White House like the 2010 healthcare law. “They can say, ‘Our mission is educating the public about this particular issue.'”

Vice President Joe Biden delivered the latest in a series of speeches intended to frame the fall campaign against Mitt Romney with a foreign policy address at New York University Thursday, slamming the presumptive Republican presidential nominee as a “CEO” out of his depth.

Touting the Obama administration’s successful mission to assassinate 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden and the relatively smooth withdrawal of combat forces from Iraq, Biden repeated what will likely be his signature refrain of the campaign.

“If you’re looking for a bumper sticker to sum up how President Obama has handled what we inherited, it’s pretty simple: Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive,” he said to the audience of 500 law students and national security experts. “You have to ask yourself, if Gov. Romney had been president, could he have used the same slogan…in reverse?”

Arguing that Romney would bring a return to the “go it alone” strategy of George W. Bush, who began the Iraq War with few allies less than two years after invading Afghanistan as part of a NATO coalition, Biden said Romney’s years as a business executive delegating tasks to subordinates was no fit for the nuanced foreign policy challenges facing America’s next president.

“He starts with a profound misunderstanding of the responsibilities of a President and the Commander-in-Chief,” Biden said. “Here’s what he said, and I want to quote him exactly. And I quote: ‘If we want someone who has a lot of experience in foreign policy, we can simply go to the State Department.’ He went on to say, and I quote, ‘But that’s not how we choose a President. A President is not a foreign policy expert.'”

“In my view,” Biden continued, “the last thing we need is a President who believes that he can subcontract our foreign policy to experts at the State Department, or for that matter, any other department or agency.”

Holding a conference call with reporters to rebut the charges, one of which was that Romney is stuck in Cold War-era thinking, Republican foreign policy experts seemed to buttress the Vice President’s case, using archaic terminology on more than one occasion. Former Reagan Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman said that the “Soviets” were taking advantage of a weaker U.S. military, and a Bush-era ambassador cited scuttled plans to place missile defense sites in “Czechoslovakia,” which has been called the Czech Republic for two decades.

Biden drew laughs when he cited the example of President Theodore Roosevelt as an inspiration for Obama.

“Now is the time to heed the timeless advice from Teddy Roosevelt: ‘speak softly and carry a big stick.’  I promise you the President has a big stick.  I promise you.”

Whereas George W. Bush and his father both got the better of Democrats on national security issues, Barack Obama effectively neutralized them in 2008. To be sure, the financial collapse that fall did draw attention away from foreign affairs and focus it on the failure of the Republican Party’s economic policies, but Obama appears to have won the debate over the Iraq War and split the votes of those concerned about another attack on the country evenly with John McCain, quite the accomplishment for a first-term senator with no military background going up against a war hero and Senate veteran.

It will be interesting to see how and when the Obama campaign attempts to insert national security issues into his re-election bid, an issue they know is a sure winner for them this time around. The elder Bush tried — and failed — to get Americans frightened about Bill Clinton’s weak foreign policy chops and lack of military record. It didn’t work, Clinton riding economic frustration to an easy win in the 1992 presidential race.

Check out the video of the “Big Stick” moment: