North Carolina – Democrats
The Island
Gene Nichol, who’s the former Dean of the UNC Law School, and who may be the most politically correct man in North Carolina, tore into the new UNC Board of Governors saying right wing politics is taking over the university and the Board is to blame. It’s difficult to tell whether Dean Nichol’s broadside…
Read MoreA Chess Game
When a politician takes a poll most folks figure he means to figure out how he can bamboozle people and there’s truth in that but a poll’s also a picture of the powers – like fear, revenge, blindness and rage – shaking the political world and even through a poll won’t show you angels and…
Read MoreOne Question
Listening to him as he stood on the floor of the State Senate speaking, I wondered whether he believed what he was saying or whether he’d simply decided to spin a tale. He sounded like a history professor giving a lecture, talking about the new Senate maps, explaining meticulously why those maps were not a…
Read MoreGerrymandering games
How bad are the new Republican legislative maps? An analysis by the Campaign Legal Center says Republicans would give themselves a “large and durable” advantage in the districts” “Assuming a statewide uniform swing in the vote, in order for there to be a Republican majority in the House, Republicans will only need a statewide vote…
Read MoreIt 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…
Read MoreQuick 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…
Read MoreBob Havely
Bob Havely, who died August 9 at age 65, was a Jim Hunt alumnus, a multi-faceted political and public affairs consultant, and a good friend to many of us. Bob was the rare player who could hit from both sides of the plate: He could do both policy and politics. He was issues director for…
Read MoreClean Hands
The General Assembly is redrawing State House and Senate Districts and it’s like the circus came back in town: Six years ago, last time they drew districts, Republican legislators used ‘race’ as one criteria and Democrats sued them. This time Republican legislators said they wouldn’t even look at or go near ‘race’ and the Democrats…
Read MoreA Carnival Air
The protests just keep getting crazier: Friday morning the attorney for the eight ‘Antifa’ protestors arrested for toppling a Confederate statute in Durham tweeted: First appearances are done. White supremacists arrive at noon. Hundreds of anti-Klan counter-protestors rushed to Main Street in Durham, blocking traffic, chanting, No KKK! No Fascist USA! At five minutes past…
Read MoreCommon Ground
Yesterday I described how Gary and I met in 1984 (to negotiate the Helms-Hunt debates) and how I didn’t lay eyes on Gary again for eight years – until the morning he walked into the boardroom of a law firm downtown to negotiate a debate between Lauch Faircloth and Terry Sanford, saw me sitting there,…
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