Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
North Carolina’s most famous Democrat, Jim Hunt, ran for statewide office six times and each time gave the liberal Democrat running for President a wide berth – and so did Mike Easley when he ran in 2000 (Al Gore) and 2004 (John Kerry). And no one thought much of it. But now two Democratic…
President Obama is the LeBron James of politics. No one else in the game inspires the same passions – pro and con. No one else has the same political skills. No one else can put as many points on the board – for both sides. For all the talk about Mitt Romney –…
It probably seemed like a good idea at the time: A group of people building a swimming complex in Cary hired an architect, Kenn Gardner, who was also a County Commissioner, who as Commissioner had been advocating for a government subsidy for their complex. But, in the end, it didn’t work out well at…
When you’re running a political campaign, it’s hard to keep your perspective. It’s especially hard to remember that not everybody is paying as much attention as you are. Even worse, the voters who count the most – the truly undecided voters – aren’t paying any attention yet. Harrison Hickman, who was Governor Hunt’s pollster…
Mike Huckabee always struck me as a likeable Republican. So his critique of his party in The New York Times Sunday was striking. He was asked: “Is this different from the party that you know and love?” His answer: “Very much. It’s one of the reasons that I did not think this was…
In the old days there were only around a dozen political pollsters in the whole country and men like Lance Tarrance and Arthur Finkelstein spent years bent over poll books looking for trends and subtle enigmas and if you were in politics – like Tom Ellis and Jesse Helms and me – what they learned…
In 2010 Governor Perdue steered Democrats to defeat, in 2011 the Republicans in the Legislature pounded her, and in 2012 she announced she was not running for reelection. Speaker Thom Tillis has had his own problems: Two of his aides had affairs with lobbyists, Tillis declared nothing untoward (beyond adultery) was going on, then…
Summertime is historically when presidential candidates get defined in a way that cripples them in the fall. It happened to Michael Dukakis in 1988. After he locked up the nomination, he went back to Boston, rolled up his sleeves and work to work – on being governor. Meanwhile, Lee Atwater rolled up his…
How Washington went about setting health care policy is for more erudite minds than mine but here goes: Tom, Dick and Harry rolled into the ER in ambulances and each was having a heart attack – Tom’s so poor he couldn’t afford to buy health insurance, Dick could almost afford it but not quite,…
The political sniping began even as chaos still reigned at the White House Correspondents Dinner. My…
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…