Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
Democrats 30 years ago would be shocked at how Democrats today are extolling and eulogizing President George H.W. Bush. In 1988, while Bush talked about a “kinder, gentler” America and “a thousand points of light,” he let Lee Atwater run a viciously negative, racist (Willie Horton) campaign against the hapless Michael Dukakis. Atwater apologized on…
The news last night looked like a mashup remake of “The Godfather” and Watergate. Michael Cohen flipping on Trump is like consigliere Tom Hagen turning state’s witness against Don Corleone. Then Trump came on saying Cohen was “a weak person” whom he hired “because he did me a favor a long time ago.” Did Cohen…
Last July a Super PAC ran an ad telling voters George Holding wanted to deny insurance coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. Three weeks later, when Holding’s campaign polled, only a few voters had believed the ad. It hadn’t worked. But Linda Coleman and Democratic Super PACs didn’t give up. They continued to hammer away…
Two Worlds Before the election, two polls landed on my desk the same day. One was taken in a rural county. The other was taken in suburban Wake County (Raleigh). And reading them was like looking at two different worlds. One world was religious, traditional (not politically correct), and most voters had lived there all…
Women voters, women volunteers, women donors and women candidates made this the best year for Democrats since Watergate. Now some Democrats want to dump the highest-ranking female elected official in the nation? Nancy Pelosi has taken Hillary Clinton’s place as the most-demonized politician in America. That’s to be expected from Republicans. They hate her because…
I had resisted Beto-hype. I resist any hype about the next JFK-RFK-Obama. Then an old Democratic war horse (older than me, even!) called a few days before the election. He was watching Beto O’Rourke on MSNBC. “Check out Beto!” he enthused. “He’s our hope for 2020!” I still resisted, because the experts predicted Ted Cruz…
The Friday night before the election, walking to a table in a restaurant, I stopped to say hello to a lady I’ve known for years, and she asked, Well, tell me – what’s going to happen Tuesday? That was the question everyone was asking that week but, of course, there was no answer – so…
Governor Cooper has won the veto twice now. This year, he broke the Republican supermajority. More than 20 years ago, he helped pass the veto in the first place. Former Governor Jim Hunt reminded me of how that happened. Before 1995, North Carolina was the only one of the 50 states where the governor didn’t…
Yesterday I described how, when President Trump goes on a tear, Democratic activists go a little crazy and morph into mirror images of Trump only on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Just before the election Trump tweeted, I’m a nationalist, ok? I’m a nationalist. Then at a White House press conference a PBS…
A new nationwide poll shows that, if they could run against each other in 2028, Barack…
Senator Phil Berger was out of touch with voters in his district – and suffered the…
A reassuring lesson from our trip to Germany and Czechia is that dictators, despots and tyrants…