State & Local Politics

Tobin Harshaw, the Opinionator at The New York Times, can’t resist the woman in the red dress. He cites a report by Politico’s Andy Barr that Georgia Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss credited Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin with firing up his base.

“I can’t overstate the impact she had down here,” Chambliss told Fox News. “When she walks in a room, folks just explode.”

This could be a significant historic turning. There are now two schools of Republicans: The traditional H.W. Bush conservatives, whom young son Jeb will likely lead again into the Senate in 2010, and the others: those who just explode when the governor of Alaska walks into the room. Read more...

The Drudge Report has made the Obama $20,000 ring a household topic. Now, Congress may make deficit-financed $700,000 bathrooms the next kitchen-table issue.

At the end of many Congresses, lawmakers will wrap any remaining spending bills that finance the government into one big piece of legislation called an omnibus spending bill, or they will pass a large temporary CR — continuing resolution — until a date certain when they expect the jammed spending bills to have passed. This is generally when nasty little pork-barrel projects — earmarks — get stuffed into the legislation that most people don’t find out about until days, weeks or even months later, when it is too late. Read more...

First there was one; now there are twice as many.

When Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina, appeared before the House Ways and Means Committee last month and respectfully begged the panel to please stop sending money to his state, he was greeted with outright hostility. Sandy Levin, Democratic representative from Michigan, hovered over him: “You’re preaching to the wrong choir,” he said.

But when y’all build stuff and make things in our state, said Sanford, it’s always stuff we don’t want or need and you never do stuff we do need. Then you make us pay back all the money for the stuff we didn’t want in the first place. Read more...

Last week, The Washington Times published a piece I wrote after looking at the election returns in all 100 North Carolina counties this cycle and in 2004. (Sorry it took me a few days to post, I was actually in North Carolina catching up on turkey, barbecue and basketball.)

A few stats: Read more...

Before President-elect Barack Obama was elected, he was, among other things, a community organizer. He helped organize others to help themselves — not to rely on the government for handouts, but to learn about what the law states and to take advantage of what the law dictated in their favor.

Oftentimes the law may have rewards and stimuli for people who are trying to make a difference, or even just protect their own property, but some diligence may be required to learn about it. While the government may have ordinances and infrastructure in place to support you in your position, if you don't know about it, no one is necessarily required to inform you. Read more...

Republicans, still smarting and searching for leadership in a leaderless party, should take a look at Mitt Romney's latest flip-flop. Sure, bailouts are unpopular with Republican voters, and most voters across the spectrum these days. So Romney, as you may have seen, penned an editorial in The New York Times opposing a federal rescue for Detroit.

"If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the automotive industry goodbye. It won't go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed," wrote Romney. "Don't ask Washington to give shareholders and bondholders a free pass — they bet on management and they lost." Read more...

Governments usually place their capitals in the center of the country. It is natural to do so, as people naturally divide between head and heart (yin/yang, Logos/Eros, particle/wave), much as the head-based urbanites of the North and the heart-based pastoralists in the South did here at the beginning.

They usually war because head and heart are organically in opposition and the heart always loses because war is primarily logistical and logistics is a tool of the head. (The heart fights with élan and courage. The head fights with machines.) The heart is not good at doing the things the head is good at: George W. Bush, of heart-based Texas, was a good man but not a good governor. He would have made a good priest or preacher. Read more...

The news that former senator and two-time presidential candidate John Edwards gave a speech at Indiana University and will participate in a public debate against Karl Rove in San Francisco this evening took many by surprise.

The revelation that Edwards engaged in an extramarital affair with a former campaign staffer, possibly fathering a child with her at a time when Elizabeth Edwards very publicly suffered from cancer, rocked the political world. Former Edwards campaign staffers still shudder when his name is mentioned in their presence. For many, their former boss — someone they admired and whose campaign they poured their hearts and souls into — is persona non grata. Read more...

In the first 48 hours after Barack Obama won his historic bid for the presidency, I had — like the rest of you — many spontaneous conversations about the ceiling that had just been broken and the joyous reaction around the world.

But within days I was surprised to find that the subject had changed to Sarah Palin. Everywhere I went, from the grocery store to my allergy doctor's office to a reception after a memorial service all the way across the country, people kept bringing up Palin.

Which is funny, because at the very same time, Sarah wanted to start talking. And she hasn't stopped, in nonstop media appearances since just after the polling station lights went off last week. In my column this week — below — I concluded that though she is finally talking and talking and talking, it is becoming clear there are still only a few things Palin really wants to tell us: Read more...

Buffalo Bill’s defunct . . .
— E.E. Cummings

There can be no question now that we have come to the end of certain things that have made us what we are. As of Nov. 4, there are no longer any Republicans in office here in New England. The substance and sensibility of what was once considered a Yankee no longer exists.

But here in the North we have long been a very old house with empty rooms, as Andrew Wyeth presented our place before the war. Our most honored poet hails from San Francisco. And we clearly saw it coming a few years back when the Old Man of the Mountain’s head fell off during Little League practice. Actually, most Yanks left well over a hundred years ago. Read more...