When it comes to brute cunning it’s hard to match the Wake County School Board – it’s budget time and they’ve met the County Commissioners in fiscal battle head-on. The Board says it can cut dropout rates and graduate ninety percent of its students by 2013 – but there’s a catch. It needs more money.…
Read MoreEvery time a fellow opens his mouth he tells you something about himself – though politicians try harder than most folks to fool you. Senator John McCain spoke for a solid hour on Fox News Primary Night – and it was tough sledding. He read his speech from a teleprompter – and it was not…
Read MoreBecause the choice between Obama and McCain will come down to Change versus Race. And Team Obama is smart enough to make McCain pay for a race-based campaign. Obama owns Change. It’s one big reason he beat Clinton, Edwards, et al. That one-word Change message gets ridiculed. It would be worthy of ridicule if change…
Read MoreScott McClellan: Truth teller or dirty rat? Whatever the truth is McClellan’s sent the political pundits on MSNBC and Fox into the kind of feeding frenzy you usually see reserved for Hollywood, say, when Britney Spears has one of her meltdowns. Keith Oberman is ecstatic. Sean Hannity is outraged. The political pundits are stampeding like…
Read MoreFrank Daniels, the acid-tongued former N&O publisher, greeted a Raleigh reporter recently thusly: “Still got a job?” It’s a question of lot of newspaper employees are asking these days. Two big trees fell last week: Paul O’Connor with the Winston-Salem Journal and Chuck Riesz with the Wilmington Star took buyouts. Word is that more axes…
Read MoreRaleigh hasn’t seen a good fight between an editor and a Governor in 20 years. John Drescher, Executive Editor of the N&O, has a good one going now with Governor Easley. Witness these zingers from Drescher’s Sunday column: “He’s a big-picture guy detached from his own government.” “It’s not that we don’t like Easley and…
Read MoreI’m back from a week in California (Big Sur and San Francisco), where I soaked up good food, good wine and Nancy Pelosi values. Deprived of my usual North Carolina political diet, I indulged in HBO’s “Recount” about the 2000 Florida election theft. On the flight back Sunday, I read The New Yorker profile of…
Read MoreBarack Obama needs a Manhattan Project. No, not a bomb. But an intensive strategic and research project like the one the Clinton campaign undertook in 1992, when they figured out why Clinton was running third (behind Bush and Perot) – and how to fix the problem. The ’92 Clinton campaign is more famous for its…
Read MoreIt seems to me, over the years, I’ve witnessed two political earthquakes that changed the ground rules in American politics and gave birth to new political movements. The pictures on TV of American soldiers and refugees fleeing Saigon on the skids of helicopters said to the generation of men and women who’d fought in and…
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