Hillary Clinton went hard after Barack Obama in Monday’s debate. In front of the Congressional Black Caucus. On Martin Luther King Day. She even got jeered. Why? Because the Clintons’ strategy is to shake, rattle and roll Obama. Take him away from the set-piece orations where he is a master. Put him on the defensive.…
Read MoreThe worst wounds in politics are self-inflicted. Beverly Perdue was starting to draw blood by linking Richard Moore to the Randy Parton fiasco. Then The N&O got a copy of an email from one of her fundraisers soliciting $20,000 from the Parton crowd. It’s easy to say somebody should have seen this coming. As in:…
Read MoreDuring the Republican debate last week, Pat McCrory said “twenty percent of the inmates” in the Charlotte jail are illegal immigrants. He also said in a speech last week over fifty-percent of the babies born at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte are Latino. McCrory didn’t make the numbers up. But it turns out he was…
Read MoreThis presidential race will leave in its wake a long trail of losers. One may be the myth of the unions’ voter-turnout power. John Edwards bet his campaign on the union myth. Then he lost Iowa, his must-win state. Then came Nevada. The TV talkheads told us Nevada was sewn up for Obama because he…
Read MoreThis year’s Republican presidential primaries haven’t been debates about issues. They’ve been about character. Not character as in honesty and integrity. But character as in biography. Who you are. Not where you stand. Mike Huckabee is an example. There are, roughly, three groups of voters in the Republican primaries: Evangelicals. Economic Conservatives. And Moderates. Huckabee…
Read MoreLast week’s Republican debate started out as a sleeper. No controversial stands. No sparring. No real debate at all. Fred Smith said he was best qualified because of his life experience. Pat McCrory said he was the man to deal with a crisis. Bill Graham said he’d listen to the people. Bob Orr explained he’s…
Read MoreThe jinx was on Pat McCrory last week. When his campaign emailed out a press release and misspelled the word governor (spelling it governer) a little contrition would have solved the problem. But McCrory’s Campaign Manager, Victoria Smith, compounded the error with a second mistake, saying the misspelling was sabotage – they’d been ‘hacked.’ Then,…
Read MoreFred Smith didn’t waste any time welcoming Charlotte Mayer Pat McCrory to the governor’s race. His response to McCrory’s announcement: He called McCrory a “tax and spend liberal” who “probably ought to be in the other party.” There’s a point to Smith’s bluntness. Pat McCrory is largely known outside Charlotte. Smith means to correct that.…
Read MoreForty years ago, the Democratic Party blew up over race. Can it happen again? In 1968, Richard Nixon and George Wallace invited conservative whites to leave the Democratic Party. They did – in droves. Today, Democrats seem at risk of fracturing over race again. It got this bad: Some Democrats seriously suspect that Hillary Clinton…
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