Posts By Author » Michael Barone

Obama Pursues Higher Tax Rates, Growth Be Damned
21 May 2012 12:09 am

In the run-up to this weekend’s G-8 summit at Camp David, journalists have unfavorably compared European “austerity” with Barack Obama’s economic policies.
European spending cuts, the argument goes, have hurt people and are arousing political opposition, while Obama’s proposals to keep federal spending at 24 percent of gross domestic product indefinitely are likely to succeed.
Evil Republican spending cuts, in contrast, would deny the economy needed stimulus and wreak havoc on ordinary people.
But the facts undermine the storyline. Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University took a look …

Recent News Could Cause Panic for Obama Campaign
17 May 2012 12:01 am

Is it panic time at Obama headquarters in Chicago? You might get that impression from watching events — and the polls — over the past few weeks.
In matchups against Mitt Romney, the president is leading by only 47 to 45 percent in the realclearpolitics.com average of recent polls. A CBS/New York Times panelback poll, in which interviewers call back respondents to a previous survey, showed Romney leading 46 to 43 percent — and leading among women.
That’s despite the Democrats’ charge that Republicans are waging a “war on women” by opposing …

Three Different Ways to Look at the 2012 Campaign
12 May 2012 12:02 am

Last week, I wrote about the standings in the presidential race and said it looked like a long, hard slog through about a dozen clearly identified target states, much like the contests in 2000 and 2004. Call it the 2000/2004 long, hard slog scenario.
But I said there were other possible scenarios. I can think of three.
The 1964/1972 scenario: Challenger disqualifies himself. Barry Goldwater and George McGovern were idealistic, intelligent senators who took positions on issues that made them unacceptable to most voters in years favorable to incumbents.
This could happen to …

Long, Hard Slog Ahead in Presidential Race
10 May 2012 12:01 am

Just as the political air is filled with talk of the inevitability of Barack Obama’s re-election — we are told that the kids at his Chicago headquarters are brimming with confidence — in come some poll numbers showing him behind.
Not by anything statistically significant, mind you. But when you get the Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls and the Politico/George Washington University Battleground poll all showing Mitt Romney leading Obama by 1 point, an Obama victory seems far from inevitable.
These results came in at a time when the realclearpolitics.com average of …

Racial Preferences: Unfair and Ridiculous
7 May 2012 12:01 am

Washington Post editorial writer and liberal blogger Jonathan Capehart is puzzled. Why does the “non-issue” of Harvard Law professor and Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s Native American ancestry “require so much attention?” he asked last week.
When Warren was teaching at Pennsylvania, Texas and Houston law schools, she identified herself as Indian — or, to be politically correct, Native American.
Then she was hired at Harvard and dropped the Native American from her biographical description. Harvard Law today says it has one faculty member of Native American heritage. But it won’t say …

Obama’s Chicago Politics: Thuggery Not Civility
3 May 2012 12:01 am

It has been reported that the Obama campaign this year, as in 2008, has disabled or chosen not to use AVS in screening contributions made by credit card.
That doesn’t sound very important. But it’s evidence of a modus operandi that strikes me as thuggish.
AVS stands for Address Verification System. It’s the software that checks whether the name of the cardholder matches his or her address.
If a campaign doesn’t use AVS, it can wind up accepting contributions from phony names or accepting contributions from foreigners, both of which are illegal.
The 2008 …

Obama Losing Rock-star Status Among Young Voters
30 Apr 2012 12:01 am

Last week, Barack Obama delivered speeches at universities in Chapel Hill, N.C., Iowa City, Iowa, and Boulder, Colo. The trip was, press secretary Jay Carney assured us, official government business, not political campaigning.
It’s part of a pattern. Neil Munro of the Daily Caller has counted 130 appearances by the president, vice president, their spouses, White House officials, and Cabinet secretaries at colleges and universities since spring 2011.
Obviously, the Obama campaign strategists are worried that he cannot duplicate his 66 to 32 percent margin among young voters back in 2008.
Recent surveys …

Shrinking Problem: Illegal Immigration From Mexico
26 Apr 2012 12:01 am

The illegal immigration problem is going away.
That’s the conclusion I draw from the latest report of the Pew Hispanic Center on Mexican immigration to the United States.
Pew’s demographers have carefully combed through statistics compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, the Department of Homeland Security and the Mexican government, and have come up with estimates of the flow of migrants from and back to Mexico. Their work seems to be as close to definitive as possible.
They conclude that from 2005 to 2010 some 1.39 million people came from Mexico to the …

Liberal Nostalgiacs Don’t Understand Jobs of the Future
23 Apr 2012 12:01 am

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen liberal commentators look back with nostalgia to the days when a young man fresh out of high school or military service could get a well-paying job on an assembly line at a unionized auto factory that could carry him through to a comfortable retirement.
As it happens, I grew up in Detroit and for a time lived next door to factory workers. And I know something that has eluded the liberal nostalgiacs. Which is that people hated those jobs.
The assembly-line work was boring …

To Win Burbs, Romney May Pick ‘Double-vanilla’ Veep
19 Apr 2012 12:01 am

Some 20 million Americans in primaries and caucuses will take part in selecting the Republican presidential nominee. One person will choose the vice presidential nominee.
This has long struck me as absurd: One person choosing someone who, as a result, might become president for as long as 10 years. But just about everyone in politics says it’s the only proper way.
Over the last 25 years, presidential nominees of both parties have engaged in conscientious consultation and have mostly made pretty good choices. No more picks at five o’clock in the morning …

Ouch! Decade of Obamacare Will Cost $1,160 billion
14 Apr 2012 12:01 am

How much will Obamacare — call it the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act if you like — cost over the next 10 years?
More than you’ve been led to believe, reports Charles Blahous of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. To be specific, he projects it will add $1,160 billion to net federal spending over the next 10 years and at least $340 billion to federal budget deficits in that time.
Blahous was appointed by Barack Obama as one of two public trustees of the Social Security and Medicare programs. He worked …

Romney Trails Obama, but Key Numbers Break His Way
12 Apr 2012 12:01 am

Now that Rick Santorum has “suspended” his campaign, we can stop pretending and can say what has been clear for weeks: Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee for president. The general election campaign has begun.
In some quarters, it is assumed that Barack Obama will be re-elected without too much difficulty. There are reports that staffers at Obama’s Chicago headquarters consider Romney’s candidacy a joke.
One suspects the adults there take a different view. For the fundamentals say that this will be a seriously contested race, with many outcomes possible. Obama’s …

Can Romney Show Voters That Obama Is Out of Date?
9 Apr 2012 12:01 am

Time for a postmortem on the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
Yes, I know Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich are still out there saying interesting things. And that Rick Santorum says it’s only halftime and argues he can somehow overtake Mitt Romney by carrying his home state of Pennsylvania.
But polls there show a close race. And the idea that, if Romney falls short of a delegate majority, superdelegates will throng to a proudly unscripted, shoot-from-the-lip alternative is delusional.
The interesting questions are what the primaries and caucuses tell us about the …

Colleges Skimp on Science, Spend Big on Diversity
5 Apr 2012 12:01 am

How many times have you heard Barack Obama talk about “investing” in education? Quite a few, if you’ve been listening to the president at all.
In fact, Americans have been investing more and more in education over the years, led by presidents Democratic and Republican. But it’s become glaringly clear that we’re getting pretty lousy return on these investments.
That’s been evident at the K-12 level for a long time. Teacher unions and education-school types have had custody of most of our public schools for more than three decades, during which test …

Americans Are Worrying About the Constitution Again
2 Apr 2012 12:01 am

“I don’t worry about the Constitution,” said Rep. Phil Hare, Democrat of Illinois, at a town hall meeting where voters questioned his support of the legislation that became Obamacare. You can find the clip on youtube.com, where it has 462,084 hits.
That was before the 2010 election, in which Hare, running for a third term in a district designed by Democrats to elect a Democrat, was defeated 53 to 43 percent by Bobby Schilling, proprietor of a pizza parlor in East Moline.
A lot of politicians are worrying about the Constitution these …

Obama’s Gaffe Hints at Hidden Agenda in Second Term
29 Mar 2012 12:01 am

“I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”
So said John Kerry, in Huntington, W.V., on Tuesday, March 16, 2004, two weeks after he had clinched the Democratic presidential nomination by carrying every state but Vermont in the Super Tuesday primaries.
Kerry was responding to an ad run by George W. Bush’s campaign criticizing his 2003 vote against an $87 billion supplemental appropriation for the Iraq war. Two days later, the Bush campaign ran an edited version of the ad with the “actually did vote” footage added.
Kerry …

In Obama Campaign Video, It’s Not Morning in America
26 Mar 2012 12:01 am

President Barack Obama’s 17-minute video, “The Road We’ve Traveled,” gives us an idea of how he wants to frame the issues in the fall election.
The first thing you notice about the video is that the atmosphere is dark, wintry, minor key. You see but don’t hear the election night crowd in Grant Park, and then the video switches to graphics about the economic meltdown that followed the financial crisis of 2008.
There are gloomy scenes throughout. Obama’s economic advisers arrive in a bleak Chicago after a snowstorm. The president is shown …

Ryan’s Budget Kicks the Can at Timorous Democrats
22 Mar 2012 12:01 am

As I listened to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan describe his latest budget plan in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute this week, I couldn’t help thinking how different things will be in Britain when Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne steps out of No. 11 Downing St. with a battered red briefcase holding his budget for the forthcoming year.
Ryan’s budget will almost surely be passed by the House of Representatives, all but four of whose Republican members voted for his budget last year. But it will not …

Redistricting Not a Big Story in 2012
19 Mar 2012 12:01 am

The 2012 congressional redistricting cycle following the 2010 Census is just about over and done with. And it seems likely to make much less difference than many of us expected.
Redistricting is when state legislatures, governors and/or commissions draw new lines for congressional districts after the 435 seats in the U.S. House are reapportioned according to a statutory formula into which are plugged the figures from the 2010 census.
I predicted that this cycle, like the 2002 cycle, would produce significant gains for Republicans. Their success in electing governors and legislators in …

Pundits Gasp as Economy Dents Obama’s Poll Numbers
15 Mar 2012 12:01 am

You can almost hear the note of surprise in their voices when you read the Washington Post and New York Times reporters’ stories on their papers’ latest political polls.
Surprise! Just when they thought that Barack Obama was pulling ahead, with positive job ratings, and just after the mainstream media have been savaging Republicans for two words Rush Limbaugh uttered on his radio program, Obama’s numbers seem to be tanking.
Actually, the numbers are not so striking or so surprising. The media narrative for the last four weeks has been that the …

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