Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
One thing I appreciate about Jim Hunt is that he still drives Republicans crazy. I see that – and enjoy it – in their comments on my blog. Now comes Tom Fetzer. With a straight face, he blames everything that’s wrong in Raleigh today with Jim Hunt passing succession 32 years ago. …
Democrats got a thumping in Virginia and New Jersey. But they don’t need to take a long walk off a short pier yet. Republicans will be whooping that the party’s over for Obama. With any luck, they’ll proceed on that assumption – and wreck their chances of a real comeback in 2010 and…
Mark Johnson noted in Under the Dome that – counting her 2000 campaign – Bev Perdue had five communications directors as lieutenant governor. Now David Kochman is leaving that job in the governor’s office. The problem isn’t the staff. It’s that – after a dozen years in the legislature, eight years as lieutenant…
A lot of my Democratic friends and a fair amount of the media were raving last week about how cool and unflappable Mike Easley was at his hearing before the State Board of Elections;—but how many times can a fellow fall for the same con job? Sergeant Shultz was German and pedantic while…
Jack Betts wrote Sunday about the contrast between Mike Easley being grilled by the Board of Elections and Jim Hunt breaking ground for the new Hunt Library: “It was hard not to draw comparisons between Hunt’s visionary rhetoric and Easley’s labored accounts about the past.” What accounts for the difference? Why did Hunt…
Ferrel Guillory – political expert extraordinaire and director of the Program on Public Life at UNC-Chapel Hill – offers a good perspective to my question (see below) about coordinated campaigns. He cites an article by two of his students about the 2004 coordinated campaign. Ferrel notes: “As you know, Jim Hunt used to…
Are reporters and reformers skirting the truth by suggesting – and even stating flatly – that the Easley campaign and the Democratic Party skirted the law? As I understand it, coordinated campaigns are not a loophole – or a way around the law. They are actually encouraged by the law. The law was…
There was one odd sidelight in former Governor Easley’s testimony. He was busy as governor and candidate, too busy to go to headquarters or keep up with flight invoices. But he was home vacuuming his chimney?
The old amateur boxer sure won yesterday’s round. Of course, the match isn’t over. And Governor Easley has more fights ahead. But he showed yesterday he can slip a punch – and land a few of his own. If I was a federal prosecutor, I’d think twice about going in the ring with…
How do you get your news? Our statewide poll asked North Carolina voters what their primary…
Thom Tillis and Phil Berger fed the MAGA alligator. Then it ate them. Thomas Mills wrote…
Exactly 80 years ago, in 1946, Republicans took control of Congress with a simple message: “Had…