North Carolina – Democrats
Car deals
North Carolina offered $1.5 billion, but still couldn’t land Toyota-Mazda. It’s not the first time Alabama beat us on a car deal. Twenty-five years ago, in 1993, Governor Hunt was just beginning his third term. Mercedes-Benz was looking to build a new manufacturing plant in the Southeast. And Hunt was in hot pursuit. The Governor…
Read MoreCooped up
2017 was a cold first year for Governor Cooper. More heat is coming in 2018. Fittingly Cooper started both years on TV, managing snow and ice storms and wearing “disaster casual” (a tip of the TAP hat to Joe Stewart). In between, the Governor navigated an icy relationship with a power-crazed Republican legislature. He spent…
Read MoreAfter Six Years of Howling…
The politicians are hollering, again, about redistricting – about the new State House and Senate district maps drawn by the federal judges ‘Special Mapmaker.’ But look beneath the surface: What’s surprising is how few districts changed. And how little those districts changed. The News and Observer analyzed the new maps: One district changed from .4%…
Read MoreA Simple Fact
There’re a lot of reasons for blindness: Fear, Innocence and hard whiskey are three. For former UNC Law School Dean Gene Nichol, when he sat down to read exit polls in the Washington Post, I suspect the problem may have been Ideology. He’s Politically Correct – for example, when he was President of William and…
Read MoreYou Won’t Believe Who’s Not a Good Democrat
Well, Gary, I never dreamed I’d see it: I opened the newspaper and Democrats were saying Jim Hunt is not a good Democrat. The Democratic Party endorsed Nancy McFarlane, an Independent, in her previous races for Mayor but this time the party switched and endorsed Charles Francis – but Governor Hunt stayed with McFarlane, so…
Read MoreA tale of two cities
Prosperous, progressive and, yes, white West Raleigh prevailed over less-prosperous, left-out, left-behind and, yes, black East Raleigh in the mayor’s race. Now the job of newly reelected Mayor Nancy McFarlane and the new City Council is to bridge the divide. And that’s the challenge for North Carolina Democrats who hope for a replay of Virginia’s…
Read MorePaul Ryan is right
“We’re with Trump,” he said after Tuesday’s elections. Indeed you are. So is every Republican on the ballot next year. They’re lashed to Trump like Ahab to the whale. If they cross Trump, they lose a primary. If they’re with him, they lose the kind of suburban voters who made Tuesday a rout. Now, Democrats…
Read MoreThe 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…
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