Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
The Big O
Oprah Winfrey has shown she can make best-sellers out of books, fads out of diet plans and Dr. Phil out of Dr. Phil. But can she make a front-runner out of Obama? Mr. Conventional Wisdom says no: Celebrity endorsements don’t move voters. But that’s not what Oprah does. She creates The Buzz of The New.…
Hackney Steps Up
After I posted my blog yesterday calling on Speaker Joe Hackney to clean the House of Thomas Wright, the Speaker did the right thing. (I don’t have any illusion that my blog is responsible, by the way.) By speaking out quickly – calling for an ethics investigation and a special session – Hackney met the…
When Campaigns Change Direction
In a campaign, the first rule when you change strategy is: Don’t admit you’re changing strategy. But when a campaign dramatically changes what it’s saying, it’s changing strategy. Witness John Edwards and Beverly Perdue this week. Edwards introduced a new stump speech in Iowa: “America Rising.” It’s a return to the positive, optimistic Edwards who…
Blind Dumb Luck?
Here’s how Presidential campaigns work: We put a candidate on a pedestal, strip off his clothes and let anyone who wants to beat on him with a cudgel – then we see how he reacts. Like trial by ordeal it’s brutal but whoever survives is probably tough enough to be President. The only way a…
The Sledgehammer Falls Again
Whenever I’m asked about the impact of bloggers on politics, I point to Joe (The Sledgehammer) Sinsheimer. This week, largely because of Sinsheimer, another protruding legislative nail got pounded. A Wake County grand jury indicted state Rep. Thomas E. Wright, a Democrat, on five felony charges of swindling banks, corporations and campaign contributors out of…
Senate Democrats
A political constant for years in Raleigh has been Democratic dominance of the state Senate. Maybe not so much now. Marc Basnight’s hold on the Senate has relied on a number of old Democratic bulls who kept their seats in tough districts. Now, one of them has announced he won’t run again: John Kerr. And…
Huckabee’s Hymnal
I didn’t realize it until it was too late but on Sunday morning some devil, or to put it in more modern (but less meaningful) terms, some spirit of masochism infected me. In retrospect it was just there. There was no old movie on television – so I turned on the morning talk shows. The…
Start and Stop on School Reform
Just before he left office, former Governor Jim Hunt wrote (with a little bit of help from me, I’m proud to say) a book about education. He said in it that North Carolina’s education-reform efforts had been hampered for decades by a start-and-stop approach. The state would start a good initiative, then lose interest and…
Presidential Firing Line
Mike Huckabee is learning the inexorable rule of presidential campaigns – one that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani learned the hard way: Whoever stands out gets shot at. Huckabee, the self-proclaimed Christian Leader, finds himself in the crosshairs now that he’s jumped up in polls in Iowa, South Carolina and nationally.…