This is my last column, but not the last you’ll hear from me. I’m going to slip the bonds of a weekly deadline and write a book about my life and experiences in North Carolina politics. Writing a book takes work. I learned that when I wrote Jim Hunt: A Biography, published in 2010. (Copies are still available online, at fine bookstores and in my garage.) I started writing these weekly columns for North Carolina newspapers, plus occasional extra blogs, on August 27, 2019 – two years ago. Counting this one, that’s 138 posts. Many papers and news outlets published the columns. They were emailed t ..read more

I used to get my news in the driveway every morning, from print editions of The News & Observer and The New York Times. Now I scroll through a half-dozen news digests on my iPhone while I digest my cereal. Even though I’m an old newspaper guy, I like many of the changes in the news business. But will the future bring good news or bad news? Newspapers are struggling financially. More and more are owned by hedge funds, nonprofit foundations or billionaires. Newsrooms have been decimated and deserted. I came up in the glory days of state-capital news. When I was Governor Jim Hunt’s press secr ..read more

Crime issues have bedeviled Democrats for decades. Every time they get painted as soft on crime, they lose elections. In 1968, it was “law and order” campaigns by George Wallace and Richard Nixon. In 1988, it was the Willie Horton ad that George H.W. Bush and Lee Atwater used against Michael Dukakis. In 2020, it was “Defund the Police,” which some Democrats say kept them from winning a majority in the North Carolina House or Senate. There’s always a racial edge. “Defund the Police” came out of Black Lives Matter protests. “Law and order” came in the wake of the civil rights movement and urban ..read more

Former Governor Pat McCrory is something of a political punching bag in North Carolina. But he could go from chump to champ in 2022 if he shatters the conventional wisdom that the state Republican Party belongs to Donald Trump. In June, Trump endorsed Congressman Ted Budd in the 2022 Republican Senate primary. Conventional wisdom saw that as a mortal blow to McCrory. But two Republican strategists in North Carolina – Paul Shumaker and Carter Wrenn – think McCrory, like Toto in The Wizard of Oz, might expose the man behind the curtain. The Charlotte Observer reported that Shumaker, who is worki ..read more

The headline raised the dreaded c-word that deeply divides Democrats – Centrist: “Jackson projects centrist platform in NC campaign for Senate.” Jackson is state Senator Jeff Jackson of Charlotte. The story was by Will Wright in The News & Observer/The Charlotte Observer, who wrote: “(Jackson’s) primary message is rooted in the idea that he can restore a sense of professionalism and honesty to Washington that some feel has been lost. He couples that message with policy points that most moderate Democrats support: passing new voting rights legislation; ending gerrymandering; and supporting ..read more

It’s clear how the two political parties want to define the debate in next year’s elections, in North Carolina and nationally. Republicans want to argue about race and culture. Democrats want to argue that government can work and can help people. The dueling agendas show how far apart the parties are today. They inhabit separate worlds spinning faster and farther away from each other like matter after the Big Bang. I’ve got bad news for my fellow Democrats: race-based campaigns have a history of working. And I’ve got good news: America – and North Carolina – may be different next year. We’ll w ..read more

North Carolina may go a third straight year without a new state budget. We definitely will go an 11th straight year without a budget written by Democrats. What would such a creature look like? Democratic Governor Roy Cooper has shown us. His plan is sweeping and starkly different from budgets passed by Republicans since 2011. Cooper would transform North Carolina’s healthcare, education, energy use, infrastructure, job training, pandemic assistance and approach to racial issues. But few North Carolinians know that. News tends to focus on the legislature; something newsworthy happens there near ..read more

We Americans have a contradictory history when it comes to tolerating, or not tolerating, dissent. The latest chapter is the Nikole Hannah-Jones controversy at UNC-Chapel Hill. The fight, fittingly, played out around July 4th, the most American of holidays. We take off work, grill hot dogs and set off fireworks to celebrate our Declaration of Independence – and, supposedly, our dedication to independence of speech and thought. That dedication has been tested from the nation’s beginning. In 1798, Congress and President John Adams passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. The sedition law outlawed an ..read more

As an N.C. State alum and avid fan, I was dismayed and disappointed when the NCAA threw the Wolfpack baseball team out of the College World Series. Then it got political. “Politics” was the word Head Coach Elliot Avent used when pressed about his team’s Covid vaccinations: “If you want to talk baseball, we can talk baseball. If you want to talk politics or stuff like that, you can go talk to my head of sports medicine.” Then the politicians piled on. Former Republican Governor Pat McCrory, who is running for U.S. Senate, started a petition: “The NCAA may have tried to CANCEL the NC State Wolfp ..read more

Conservative evangelical Christians in America haven’t always been all-out supporters of Israel. They once were downright hostile. That changed in 1984 when North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms ran for reelection against Governor Jim Hunt. Helms’s flip-flop on Israel had nothing to do with religion. It was about campaign contributions. During his first two terms in the Senate, 1972-1984, Helms was a staunch foe of Israel. He proposed a resolution demanding that Israel return the West Bank to Jordan. He said Palestinian Arabs deserved a “just settlement of their grievances.” He called for breakin ..read more