It Wasn’t Always This Way

The one thing you prayed for and lusted after in a political campaign in the old days was to catch your opponent in a lie – because a lie (caught on videotape) was as close to sure death as there was in politics. Back in 1984 I thought we had a pretty good chance of…

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Quick hits

So much is happening so fast. So let’s fire away at several juicy targets – er, topics. Trumped Just when you think he can’t get worse, he does. His 77-minute tirade in Phoenix was True Trump. The estimable Economist pegged him for who and what he is: “politically inept, morally barren and temperamentally unfit for…

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Have a Little Faith

The media may be in worse shape than we thought: Most of us have never laid eyes on a Neo-Nazi and who’d ever heard of an ‘Antifa’ before last week? So, can either be a deadly threat to America? Can CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times be right when they paint a…

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A Code

President Trump wanted Mexico’s President to stop saying Mexico wouldn’t pay for the wall so he called him but when Pena Nieto came on the line he told Trump the last thing Trump wanted to hear: He said he could never agree for Mexico to pay for the wall. Trump purred, told Pena Nieto he’d…

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Empathy, not policy

Democrats love policy. We dream of being policy advisers and writing policy papers. We just know that those working-class whites who voted for Trump would love us if they got a load of our worker-retraining policy. That’s the impulse behind the “Better Deal” policy agenda that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi rolled out this summer.…

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Trump, Hillbillies, Politics, Trump…

Carter and I had a good time, a great crowd and a rousing discussion last night at Quail Ridge Books’ “Bridging the Divide” program. If I was Trump, I’d say there were about a thousand people there. And that the bookstore manager called and said it was the biggest crowd they’d ever had. More than…

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Devilment

It’s called ‘leverage’ and last weekend President Trump tried it by tweeting: “If a new healthcare bill is not approved quickly BAILOUTS for insurance companies and BAILOUTS for members of Congress will end very soon!” The President was saying to the insurance lobby, Get onboard – or I’ll end $7 billion a year in subsidies…

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Bridge builders? Carter and me? Seriously?

Carter and I will be talking about books and politics this Wednesday (August 2) at 7 pm at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. (Support your local independent bookstore!) Join us. We’re part of the store’s “Bridging the Divide” series, designed to bring together people from the left and the right. Now, cynics might say Carter…

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Earthquake

Now and then in politics, you feel the ground shudder beneath your feet. The world isn’t shaking yet, but the tectonic plates are grinding, the pressure is growing and something big is coming. So it is these last couple of days. In the Senate, the Republican promise to repeal Obamacare collapses. In the White House,…

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Signs

Twenty-four years ago newly elected President Bill Clinton had a ‘Disapproval’ rating of 51%, and Democrats lost the next election in a landslide. In 1994 Republican gained 54 seats in Congress. President Trump has a ‘Disapproval’ rating of 58% – 7 points higher than Clinton’s – but, like most people, Republican politicians shrug, That won’t…

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