The looming Republican disaster

North Carolina Republicans this year will get to experience what we Democrats went through in so many presidential elections: how to avoid going down with the Titanic. Because the S.S. Trump is going down, and it will be hard to avoid getting sucked into the vortex. The Republican convention is officially a disaster. It didn’t…

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Trump and Tricky Dick

You might not expect a presidential candidate to compare himself to America’s most crooked and disgraced President, but Donald Trump and his campaign chairman did just that this week. Trump and Chairman Paul Manafort said that, just as with Richard Nixon in 1968, Americans want a strong “law and order” leader at a time when…

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Trump vs. GOP

The last two Republican Presidents aren’t there. The last two Republican presidential candidates aren’t there. The Republican Governor of the state hosting the convention isn’t there. Pat McCrory isn’t there. And former Republican N.C. Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr says he can’t vote for Trump for the nomination or election because “I think he’s singularly…

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Lone star

As you watch the Republican convention, you see why Donald Trump picked Mike Pence as his running mate: There’s no chance Pence will steal the spotlight from the star. There’s only one star in this show, and it’s Donald Trump. And all the co-stars, like all his products and possessions, are also named Trump (Melania,…

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The Donald Trump Show

For a time, we all had high hopes for this Republican convention. Maybe it wouldn’t be the usual snooze-a-thon. Maybe it would fulfill the fantasy of all political junkies: an open convention! That would mean fireworks. A dump-Trump move. A party divided. Angry protests. A whiff of violence in the hall. Bitter fights between Establishment…

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Unforced errors

This election should be a slam dunk for Hillary Clinton. But turnovers are keeping the game too close. She is superbly qualified to be President. She has long fought on the right side of progress. Her opponent is one of the most despised, dreaded and dangerous men ever to run for President. But then (always)…

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Trump’s cap

When you come back from overseas, you look at American politics with fresh eyes. The first thing that caught my eye was the stupid cap Donald Trump wears. That’s reason enough to disqualify him from the Presidency. He wears the stupid cap, of course, to keep his stupid hairstyle from flying about wildly. Any man who…

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So it begins

As Donald Trump doubled down on the race card, Hillary Clinton didn’t just play the woman card, she dealt the whole damn deck. The Clinton campaign waited until she could claim victory to proclaim a historic first for women. And it happened just as a Stanford swimmer, his father and a judge reminded us how…

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Up on the roof

Last evening, a crew was putting a new roof on the house across the way. Three men worked steadily, climbing up and down a tall ladder and steeply pitched roof, hauling up shingles, hammering them in place and trimming the edges. On the ground, two women cleaned up, piling the trash into a wheelbarrow and…

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Bernout?

Hillary Clinton’s campaign will spend today and tomorrow proclaiming that the race is over and prodding Bernie Sanders to give up. She hopes he’ll fold easier than she did eight years ago and than Ted Kennedy did in 1980 (which gave us 12 years of Republican Presidents). You can bet there’s a bitter battle going…

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