Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
If history is any guide, Mitt Romney will win the Republican presidential nomination. For some reason, Republicans nominate presidential candidates who ran unsuccessfully before – like Romney this year. See Ronald Reagan (the GOP gold standard) in 1980, George H.W. Bush in 1988, Bob Dole in 1996 and John McCain in 2008. The exception,…
A friend who watches politics for a trade association makes an apt observation: Voters don’t always behave the way the experts expect them to. Republicans are still celebrating their 2010 victory in North Carolina. They’re certain their redistricting schemes will give them a lock on the state for the decade – or maybe the…
The other morning at breakfast Richard the Intellectual (who’s a retired banker) stared at the newspaper headline – Europe Debt Crisis Shakes Stock Market – and laughed: Well, it’s beginning to look like thirty years ago the Wall Street Masters of the Universe sold us a bill of goods. Free Trade, he said, was…
Something about the combination of barbeque and politics makes political reporters salivate over writing a down-home story about how we’uns in Nawth Ca’lina don’t cotton to outsiders insulting our proud pork product. There has been a run of these stories since news broke that Rick Perry once dismissed North Carolina barbeque as tasting like…
How’s that for a headline to get your attention? But, seriously. One reason I enjoy this blog is I get insight into viewpoints that differ from mine. This week, I learned something about the attitude toward the gay-marriage amendment and, more to the point, gay people. I blogged (click here): “A business friend…
We’re $14 going on $16 trillion in debt, the economy’s in the tank and the only way out is to cut government spending – so it didn’t seem unreasonable to save $2.8 million by closing the 134 year old Post Office downtown (when there’s a newer Post Office a few blocks away). But not…
Rep. Bill Faison said out loud what Raleigh is whispering when he told WRAL’s Laura Leslie: “I certainly am aware that Perdue has her own problems, including the possibility of imminent indictments against some of her very close associates.” The rumor mill is churning: Will the Governor decide not to run in 2012? Then…
The other day at lunch a Democratic friend of old Will Patton’s was giving Mr. Patton down the river about Thom Tillis and Phil Berger cutting all the Democratic ‘Sacred Cows’ like ‘More at 4’ and ‘Smart Start’ and laying off teachers and when he’d heard enough Mr. Patton shot back, Well, one thing’s for…
In the 1980s, Democrats were in disarray and Ronald Reagan stood astride the political world like a colossus. Then, as today, Democrats comforted themselves by saying: “Polls show the American people agree with us, not him, on the issues.” Yep, they did. Go through a list of issues, just like today, and the…
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…