Author: Michael Barone

How is it possible that Barack Obama did not know that his beloved healthcare.gov: website was a botch? That’s a question many thoughtful people (including thoughtful Democrats) are asking. We heard him say that he wouldn’t have boasted that it would be as easy to use as: amazon.comor: obitz.com: had he known that it wouldn’t. I’m not “stupid enough,” […]

Are Republican politicians trying to frame a policy agenda stuck in a Reagan rut? A good case can be made that they are — or have been. Tax cuts have been a staple of Republican platforms since Jack Kemp persuaded Ronald Reagan to back a 30 percent tax rate cut in the 1980 campaign. Republicans, […]

The defects of the Obamacare website have become well known. But the problems with the law go further than the website. These problems are not incidental, but central to its design and the intentions of its architects. Many Obamacare backers, including Barack Obama, would prefer “single-payer” health insurance. The government would pay for everything and […]

“The Affordable Care Act’s political position has deteriorated dramatically over the last week.” That, coming from longtime Obamacare cheerleader and Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein, was pretty strong language. And it was only Wednesday. That was the day after the release of a devastating Quinnipiac national poll. It showed Barack Obama’s approval rating at 39 […]

Colorado, writes National Journal’s always insightful Ronald Brownstein, is “America, writ small.” “A microcosm,” he goes on, “of the forces destabilizing American politics.” Of course, Colorado is not entirely typical of the nation. It has America’s lowest rates of obesity, for example — because of a young population and because most Coloradans live a mile […]

When American politicians get around to reforming their immigration laws, they tend to look backwards. They seek to address immigration problems in the past rather than look ahead and set policy that will strengthen the nation in the future. That’s true, in my opinion, of the bipartisan majority that supported the immigration bill passed by […]

In an August Washington Examiner column, I argued that this year’s governor elections in New Jersey and Virginia would have little precedential significance, unlike some other off-year elections in those states. Boiled down, my argument was that in New Jersey you had a governor who could not lose and in Virginia you had two governor […]

Capitalism, said economist Joseph Schumpeter seven decades ago, is a process of creative destruction. New inventions, new processes, new methods of organization lead to the creation of new profitable and efficient businesses and to the destruction of old ones unable to compete. There are few accounts of the creative side of Schumpeter’s phrase more vivid […]

Where are Americans moving, and why? Timothy Noah, writing in the Washington Monthly, professes to be puzzled. He points out that people have been moving out of states with high per capita incomes — Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland — to states with lower income levels. “Why are Americans by and large moving away from […]

“The examination of war from an exclusively military perspective, isolated from its social and political context, leads to false conclusions and poor strategy.” That is the conclusion of Emile Simpson, a former infantry officer in the Royal Gurkha Rifles, who served three tours of duty in Afghanistan, in his book, War From the Ground Up. […]

Sherlock Holmes famously solved a mystery by noticing the dog that did not bark. In the recent government shutdown/debt ceiling fight, there was a five-letter dog that didn’t bark: T-A-X-E-S. Democrats insisted they wouldn’t negotiate until they negotiated, and they insisted that a government shutdown was unprecedented although it was the 17th such shutdown since […]

It’s not just Republicans who are unhappy with Obamacare. Labor union leaders have been complaining too. In July, the presidents of the Teamsters, United Food Commercial Workers union and UNITE-HERE (combined membership: 2.9 million) wrote a letter to congressional Democrats saying that Obamacare will “destroy the very health and well-being of our members along with […]

Amid all the tussling over the government shutdown and the debt ceiling, a couple of bombshells went off in the blogosphere that may prove of more enduring importance. They suggest that there is a nontrivial possibility that Obamacare may implode. The first bombshell went off on Tuesday, from Ezra Klein of the Washington Post’s Wonkblog. […]

Some bad news for America, not on the political front this time, but on what corporate executives call human resources. It’s from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s report on adult skills, based on 166,000 interviews in 24 economically advanced countries in 2011 and 2012. The verdict on the United States: “weak in literacy, […]

What to make of all the polls on the government shutdown? You know, the ones that say that, to varying degrees, congressional Republicans are being blamed more than Democrats and Barack Obama. Let me give a roundabout answer, based on a theory that people sometimes try to send messages through their responses to poll questions. […]

“This book is far from all good news.” So writes Tyler Cowen at the beginning of his latest book, “Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of The Great Stagnation.” Cowen is an economist at George Mason University who is generally classified as libertarian and whose interests range far afield. His most recent books […]

The problem was caused by James Madison. And by the 39 other men who signed the Constitution in 1787. The problem, of course, is the government shutdown. It was caused because the Framers of the Constitution wisely provided for separation of powers among the three branches of government. The president would faithfully execute the laws […]

Many Democrats are genuinely puzzled about Republicans’ continuing opposition to Obamacare. It is the law of the land, these Democrats say. Critics should accept it, as critics accepted Medicare. They should work constructively and across the aisle with Democrats to repair any flaws and make the law work to help people. Historical analogies are often […]

Events have failed to fulfill the prophecy. Preachers have suddenly been struck dumb by uncertainty. Believers are understandably nervous and some, under their breath, are abandoning the dogma. These sentences could have been written at the end of the day on Oct. 22, 1844, about the Millerites, a religious sect started in upstate New York. […]

America has gone back to isolationism, many commentators are saying. Not just the dovish Democrats, but also Republicans who were so hawkish a decade ago are turning away from the world. There is something to this, but it’s more complicated than that. To understand where we are, it’s helpful to put today’s developments in historic […]

Presidents tend to set the agenda for their parties. Most of the party’s members of Congress tend to go along. This has been increasingly the case as Americans over the last two decades have got out of the habit of splitting their tickets and have voted, in proportions not seen since the 1940s, entirely for […]

Republicans have been getting a lot of advice on how they should change their party ever since Mitt Romney’s defeat in November 2012. They need it. They are in more than the usual disarray that afflicts parties out of the White House. Many members of their majority in the House of Representatives are out of […]

Here’s how the Obama folks have been starting to spin Syria. The president made a credible threat to use military force in Syria. At the same time, he worked behind the scenes to get Russia’s Vladimir Putin to push Bashir al-Assad to give up chemical weapons. These two seemingly discordant initiatives, brilliantly coordinated, combined to […]

Hovering over the congressional debate on whether to authorize the use of military force in Syria is the specter of Iraq. It hung even more menacingly over the debate in the British House of Commons Aug. 29 when a 285-272 majority voted against granting the government such authority. The prevalent idea is that America and […]

Blunder after blunder. That’s been the story of President Barack Obama’s policy toward Syria. In April 2011, Obama said dictator Bashir al-Assad “had to go.” But he did little or nothing to speed him on his way. At an Aug. 20, 2012, press conference, in campaign season, he was asked about Syria’s chemical weapons and […]

Americans change their minds on some issues. One of them is crime and punishment. It’s an interesting issue because, while it’s sometimes a subject of discussion in national politics, state legislatures and governors, county prosecutors (usually elected and often prominent figures in their communities), and local government law enforcement handle it in a largely decentralized […]

Evidence of the astonishing incompetence of the Obama administration continues to roll in. It started with the stimulus package. One-third of the money went to public employee union members — a political payoff not very stimulating to anyone else. Billions went to green energy loans, like the $500 million that the government lost in backing […]

New York City seems on the verge of making the same mistake that Detroit made 40 years ago. The mistake is to abolish the NYPD practice referred to as stop and frisk. It’s more accurately called stop, question and frisk. People were stopped and questioned 4.4 million times between 2004 and 2012. But the large […]

This Congress has been criticized for not passing many laws — and praised for that in some quarters. And it’s true that in quantitative terms its productivity has been low. A major case in point is transportation. Neither the Democratic-majority Senate nor the Republican-controlled House has passed a reauthorization of what was once known as […]

In the Industrial Midwest, the city government of Detroit went into bankruptcy in July. Out in California, the city governments of Stockton and San Bernardino entered bankruptcy proceedings in 2012. But the Detroit and California bankruptcies, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, are not alike. They suffer from quite different ailments. You can see the difference by […]