Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
Mitt Tillis
Thom Tillis’ campaign paid too much attention to what he said and not enough to what you see in his new TV ad. It’s a perfect set-up for his opponents, whether Republicans or Kay Hagan. Tillis looks and sounds like the Mitt Romney that people hated in 2012: a wealthy corporate boardroom guy surrounded…
Declaration of Independents
A “record-high 42 percent of Americans identify as Independents: Republican identification lowest in at least 25 years,” Gallup breathlessly tells us. But those numbers may obscure the truth about politics today. It’s not that four in 10 Americans swing bath and forth between the two parties – carefully studying the issues, judiciously judging the…
Clay for Congress
Don’t underestimate a candidate who already won 12 million Americans’ votes on TV. Clay Aiken may be a surprising candidate for Congress, but he may be just what Democrats need: a new face and fresh blood that energizes new voters, especially young voters. The social-media response to his possible candidacy in the 2nd…
The Old Two-Step
Like a lot of politicians, Governor McCrory wants to blame somebody else for all things bad and claim credit for all things good. Yesterday, he set a land speed record by doing both within a matter of minutes. First, speaking to a business group, he claimed credit for North Carolina’s unemployment rate dropping 2…
A Problem Congress Can Solve
Years ago a doctor asked my mother her definition of happiness and without batting an eye she said: Love and money. When it came to fundamentals mother got right down to brass tacks. A while back up in Washington a piece of the federal government – theNational Academy of Sciences – decided Congress needed to…
2014
Millions of dollars will be spent and billions of words spilled, but only one thing will decide this election: Will voters be madder at President Obama or at Republicans in the legislature? On today’s market, the outlook for Democrats is as chilling as a New Year’s Day Polar Bear Plunge. For two months, the…
E.T.
When I saw the headline I thought it must be a hoax but it turned out to be true: Congress, which hasn’t passed a budget in memory, had held a dead-serious, high-level, official hearing to establish whether there is extra-terrestrial intelligence in the universe. As one wit quipped on the Washington Post’s website, First, they…
Pickpockets
You would think by now out of sheer boredom Congressmen would be looking for new ways to fool voters but, undeterred at using the same old worn-out trick again, just before Christmas eager-beaver Paul Ryan rolled out his new budget, saying how he’d made a deal with the Democrats to cut spending and cut the…
A Symbol
The newspaper headline read: Dome, full of cracks. And the newspaper reported: The aging iron dome ‘is slowly crumbling…riddled with hundreds of cracks and rust.’ The dome is the Capitol Dome. But the newspaper could just as easily have been writing about Congress itself.