It’s hot work to get people to talk about their political opinions during a muggy late spring week.

And it’s hard.

Because a lot of people in the western Wake area just didn’t want to talk.

This week I hit the streets trying to find out what locals thought about Barack Obama’s nomination to be the Democratic candidate for the 2008 presidential race, and about the race in general.

“No comment” I heard over and over again as I implored opinions in cafes, gas stations and in the steaming parking lots of big-box shopping centers.

People didn’t want to utter one red, white or blue thing. Some said they feared how letting loose of their political opinions would affect their business, or they simply wanted to keep their political views to themselves.

Or maybe they just found a short woman hollering at them from a subcompact car just a little off-putting.

Whatever the case, it discouraged me.

This whole democracy thing America has going on means we actually CAN talk about our political beliefs without too much fear of turning up missing or “sleeping with the fishes.”

And this presidential race — with a person of color now one of the main contenders for the nation’s top post — is one of the most exciting in history.

There’s lots to talk about, and thankfully I found some people — on both sides of the political fence — willing to gab.

Roger Barnes likes Obama, he told me as he rested on the tailgate of his pickup in Apex’s Peakway Market Square shopping center. The 62-year-old Apex resident describes his own political leanings as independent but likes Obama’s public speaking skills and ideas about helping the underprivileged.

Obama is a U.S. senator from Illinois. He assumed his office in 2005.

Barnes, a retired land surveyor, said he felt that Hillary Clinton didn’t get the Democratic nomination because for a lot of people the U.S. senator from New York represented the “same old, same old” Washington-establishment politics that people wanted to get away from.

But Cary resident Eileen Hnatuck, 45, supported Clinton exactly because she had solid political experience, both on her own and through her husband’s presidency in the 1990s.

“Experience is everything,” said the stay-at-home mother as she finished a shopping trip at the Beaver Creek Commons shopping center in Apex.

But she also thinks Obama represented more of a change in leadership, which is what so many people were looking for, especially those unhappy with the current leadership.

“People wanted a change and didn’t look beyond that,” she said.

She says Obama probably will get her vote. Though she also likes some of the qualities of Republican candidate John McCain, namely his experience in Washington.

The U.S. Senator from Arizona has been in office since 1987.

Karen Robinson is most definitely not an Obama fan.

“Obama scares me,” the Cary resident said over lunch at the Food Factory in downtown Cary.

The 45-year-old hairdresser felt there was a lack of substance behind Obama’s smooth speaking skills.

But she noted that she was thrilled that a black man and a woman were such high-profile contenders in the run for the presidency.

She joked that she liked McCain because he’s “the only Republican running,” but said that whoever wins the race, she’d like “for Middle America to be remembered.”