Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
A couple of Republican friends confess to their nightmare scenario: a collapse by both Mitt Romney and Pat McCrory. Conservative Republicans have long worried that Romney might fail to stir the base. That turnout was key to the 2010 election and the gay-marriage amendment. Now McCrory’s petty, panicked and petulant mishandling of the…
Before the legislators trooped back to town the News and Observer ran an ‘expose’ about how public hospitals receive millions of dollars in tax breaks to help them care for the indigent but how those tax breaks put millions more in the hospitals’ pockets than they are spending on the poor. Governor Perdue, when…
Political consultants have a way of getting carried away and saying things they quickly regret. Believe me, I’ve been there. So it was with Dustin Ingalls, assistant director of Public Policy Polling, who told a Cumberland County Democratic group: “We have to absolutely eviscerate McCrory….It’s going to have to be a very negative…
This time Mitt Romney has gone too far. He has sunk to the lowest, basest political attack ever seen in our country. His latest negative assault on President Obama goes beyond anything the birthers, the haters and the Jeremiah Wright-baiters ever thought of. Romney attacked the President for playing golf. Romney’s campaign…
Back in the old days when Marc Basnight and Tony Rand ran the General Assembly a cohort of Democratic lobbyists who controlled scads of money their clients could give candidates had the legislature wired up;–though no one quite realized it at the time that world came crashing down on Election Day in 2010 when the…
Carter pointed out (“Counting His Luck Stars,” below) how Pat McCrory unwisely opened himself up to a counterstrike by Democratic lawyers. In that same press conference, McCrory unwisely picked another fight: with the media. The N&O reported that “McCrory chastised reporters at his news conference, saying their stations should pull the ad.” He…
Not all the spin in politics comes out of the mouths of politicians;―just about every day or so there’s a poll in the News and Observer and the N&O is pretty careful to identify PPP as a ‘left-leaning’ pollster but PPP’s pollsters will also argue their politics don’t interfere with their polling or, in other…
I opened the newspaper the other morning and stared at the headline, Afghan War to end by 2014, and thought, How could anyone know that? Imagine opening the newspaper one May morning in 1943 and reading: ‘War to end by 1945’ – you’d have thought someone had lost their mind. But, of course, the…
For decades no matter how hard our Republican legislators in Raleigh tried they just couldn’t get themselves into trouble with a lobbyist – they just didn’t have the umph in the General Assembly to pull it off. But now they do and, suddenly, Republicans are learning some hard lessons. The greater your power…
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…