Author: Michael Barone

Sometimes off-year elections provide insight into national political trends and voters’ views on issues. That was true in 2009, when the issues in the governor elections in New Jersey and Virginia were congruent with the issues facing Congress and the president. In both states the Republicans campaigned for lower spending and taxes, in contrast to […]

What is the most intellectually dishonest profession around? My nomination: the admissions officers at highly selective colleges and universities. Evidence in support of this comes from, of all places, a recent article in The New York Times. The writer is Ruth Starkman, and the subject is her experience as a reader of applications to the […]

Nothing is free in politics, but there is some question when you pay the price. That’s been a saying of mine for many years, though I may have unconsciously plagiarized it from someone else. I think it applies to Obamacare. My American Enterprise Institute colleague Norman Ornstein has been shellacking Republicans for trying to undercut […]

Why are so many people so desperate to hold onto the idea that America is as racist as it has ever been? The phenomenon is apparent in much of the commentary on the George Zimmerman case. Facts were blithely ignored — the fact that Zimmerman is Hispanic, not white, by current standards; the evidence that […]

Since last November’s election there has been a lot of punditry about the fissures and schisms in the Republican Party. The divisions are real, and some of the commentary has been revealing. There has been less of a look at fissures and schisms in the Democratic Party. They’re real, as well. Most House Democrats voted […]

We have a president who loves to give campaign speeches to adoring crowds, but who doesn’t seem to have much interest in governing. That was apparent Wednesday, when Barack Obama delivered the first of several promised “pivot to the economy” speeches at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., where he spoke eight years ago as a […]

The first volume of Charles Moore’s authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher, covering her life up to Britain’s victory in the Falklands, is out, just weeks after her death. It takes its place among the finest political biographies of all time. Thatcher gave Moore full access to her papers and to all her friends and relatives, […]

You can get agreement from almost all points on the political spectrum that the worst aspect of our political system is the presidential nomination process. It is perhaps no coincidence that it is the one part of the system not treated in the Constitution. That’s because the Founding Fathers abhorred political parties and hoped that […]

On Obamacare, as on immigration enforcement and welfare requirements, Barack Obama is following the course that cost King James II his throne. He is dispensing with the law. James II was ousted in the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, in large part for claiming that he could in particular cases dispense with — that is, ignore […]

What’s the outlook for the 2014 Senate elections? The Republicans once again have a chance to overturn the Democrats’ majority, as they did in 2010 and 2012. Much attention has been focused on whether Republicans this time will nominate candidates capable of winning key races, as they failed to do in those two elections. But […]

The Fourth of July is always an occasion to think about what the United States of America has been, is and will be. A good way to reflect on that is to pick up a copy of “America 3.0” by James Bennett and Michael Lotus and ponder its lessons. As the title suggests, Bennett and […]

A trip to London provides an occasion to compare and contrast British politics and attitudes with those in America. Both have, in different ways, divided government. The Democratic president has been frustrated by the Republican House of Representatives and is likely but not certain to be until January 2017. Britain’s ruling coalition has been occasionally […]

This has been a big week for the Supreme Court. In four separate cases, it applied stricter scrutiny to racial quotas and preferences in higher education, overturned part of the Voting Rights Act, ruled unconstitutional the Defense of Marriage Act and dismissed an appeal of a case overturning California voters’ ban on same-sex marriage. At […]

The two political parties are in disarray. The Democrats are disheartened. The Republicans are disunited. Start with (because they’re first in alphabetical order) the Democrats. The Barack Obama they were so enthusiastic about in 2008 has been disappointing many of them lately. Not many happy Obama voters envisioned last November that his presidency would be […]

Does having health insurance make people healthier? It’s widely assumed that it does. Obamacare advocates repeatedly said that its expansion of Medicaid would save thousands of lives a year. Obamacare critics seldom challenged the idea that increased insurance coverage would improve at least some people’s health. Now, out of Oregon, comes a study that casts […]

Are Americans becoming more libertarian on cultural issues? I see evidence that they are, in poll findings and election results on three unrelated issues — marijuana legalization, same-sex marriage and gun rights. Start with pot. Last November voters in the states of Colorado and Washington voted to legalize marijuana, by a 55 to 45 percent […]

“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” That’s what Secretary of State Henry Stimson said to explain why he shut down the government’s cryptanalysis operations in 1929. Edward Snowden, who leaked National Security Agency surveillance projects to Britain’s Guardian, evidently feels the same way. “I can’t in good conscience allow the U.S. government,” he explained, […]

Barack Obama’s appointments of Susan Rice as national security adviser and Samantha Power as ambassador to the United Nations have naturally triggered speculation about changes in foreign policy. Rice and Power have been proponents of humanitarian military intervention, a course that Obama followed, gingerly, in Libya — “leading from behind,” as one of his aides […]

Over the last seven decades, 115 veterans of World War II have served in the United States Senate. This week, the last of them, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, died. Two World War II veterans still serve in the House — Ralph Hall of Texas, who was a Navy pilot, and John Dingell, who joined […]

Detroit, once one of the nation’s most vibrant cities, faces imminent bankruptcy. That’s the headline from the report last month of emergency fiscal manager Kevyn Orr, issued 45 days after he was appointed this spring by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to take over the city’s government. “The path Detroit has followed for more than 40 […]

There is one problem with the entirely justified if self-interested media squawking about the Justice Department snooping into the phone records of multiple Associated Press reporters and Fox News’s James Rosen. The problem is that what the AP reporters and Rosen did arguably violates the letter of the law. The search warrant in the Rosen […]

Would you like to have a “skinny” health insurance policy? Probably not. But if you’re employed by a large company, you may get one, thanks to Obamacare. That’s the conclusion of Wall Street Journal reporters Christopher Weaver and Anna Wilde Mathews. They report that insurance brokers are pitching and selling “low-benefit” policies across the country. […]

Chilling effect. That’s the term lawyers and judges use to describe the result of government actions that deter people from exercising their right of free speech. There have been plenty of examples in the past 10 days. The Obama administration’s Justice Department issued a sweeping demand for two months of office, cellular and home telephone […]

What do the Benghazi cover-up and the IRS scandal have in common? They were both about winning elections, under false pretenses. Winning elections, after all, is something Barack Obama is good at. He obviously loves campaigning and delivering grand orations to enormous adoring crowds. He loves it so much that he flew off to Las […]

What were Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton thinking? Why did they keep pitching the line that the 9/11/12 Benghazi attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans started as a spontaneous protest against an anti-Muslim video? One possible explanation is confusion. There was such an attack on our embassy in Cairo earlier that […]

Markets work. But sometimes they take time. That’s the uncomfortable lesson that proprietors of America’s colleges and universities are learning. For many years, market forces didn’t seem to apply to them. There was a widespread societal consensus that a college education was a good economic investment. Politicians gave lip service to the idea that everyone […]

Many loud voices in the debate over immigration have been insisting that effective border enforcement must precede any steps that legalize the status of current illegal immigrants. Some analysts, including my Washington Examiner colleague Byron York, have been reading the fine print in the 800-page draft prepared by the Senate Gang of Eight (or Gang […]