Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
It’s right there on the front page of the newspaper: The governor’s got a $3.4 billion hole in the budget to wrestle to the ground and fill – so she’s cut spending $1.3 billion a year. But there are two other numbers in the newspaper that are peculiar. $21.4 billion – which is what the…
The blabbering classes are taking up pitchforks and torches over the AIG bonuses. The AIGate question now becomes: What did the President/Secretary of Treasury/Fed/Congress know and when did they know it? My question: Why didn’t David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs see this coming? Team Obama would not be the first winners to go to the…
Well, Obama’s after A.I.G. hammer and tongs. Which is fine. More than fine. But there’re also a couple of overlooked questions worth considering: Like why didn’t the Washington genius (and it’s beginning to look like it was Treasury Secretary Geithner) who poured $170 billion into A.I.G. have the good sense to tell A.I.G. up front,…
I give Governor Perdue and her staff an A+ on message management. They pulled off a neat three-step strategy: Spend weeks warning people how awful the budget cuts are going to be. Then devote her State of the State speech – and the next week’s media events – to saying education would get more money.…
I could never predict what will happen to the stock market. But I can predict that President Obama’s numbers will go down – soon. It’s inevitable. And it’s no reason for Democrats to panic. They just need to prepare themselves. Here’s why he is headed for a drop – maybe a precipitous one – in…
President Obama says flat out that his stimulus bill is going to create 3.5 million jobs – is that a fact or a political fiction? Can President Obama (or, for that matter, a team of Nobel Prize-winning economists) actually predict precisely that spending two trillion dollars is going to reignite prosperity – or will he…
Since the November election, I’ve been telling business people that the election marked a new cycle in politics: from pro-business government to pro-government – and potentially anti-business – government. That cycle has dominated American history since the Civil War. Government was pro-business in the 19th Century, leading to great fortunes and the Industrial Age. Then,…
News coverage of Ned Cline’s new book about Walter Davis – and his “bags of cash” – reminds me of my two encounters with Davis. The first was in the Senate Dining Room in Washington during one of Governor Hunt’s first two administrations. I don’t recall the occasion or anything else about the meeting. But…
Gary’s plenty kind to say back in 1984 the folks in Jesse’s campaign ‘were smarter’ than the folks in Hunt’s campaign but I suspect the better term is more experienced – by 1984 we’d been using direct mail to raise money for eight years and airing ‘negative ads’ for four years; Governor Hunt hadn’t but…
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…
Jim Hunt would like James Talarico winning the Democratic primary in Texas. Like Talarico, the late…