Author: Michael Barone

“More tears are shed over answered prayers,” the 16th century nun St. Teresa of Avila is supposed to have said, “than over unanswered ones.” So it may be appropriate to shed a tear for two or three generations of American political scientists whose prayers have been answered — in a way that most political scientists […]

“Without legislative language,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy declared in a statement March 20, “there is nothing for the Judiciary Committee to consider this week at our markup.” The subject of the statement was immigration legislation, and his irritation was understandable. “For months, I have urged the president to send his proposal for comprehensive […]

“Divisive.” That’s a word that appeared, often prominently, in many news stories reporting the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. One senses the writers’ disapproval. You’re not likely to find “divisive” in stories reporting the deaths of liberal leaders, although every electoral politician divides voters. “Divisive” here refers to something specific. It was […]

We Americans are lucky, though we seldom reflect on it, that we have good neighbors. In East Asia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines face challenges from China over islands they have long claimed in the East China Sea. In Europe, Germany and other prosperous nations face demands for subsidies from debt-ridden nations to […]

Forty years ago, American railroads were in trouble. The Penn Central, the largest railroad, had recently gone bankrupt. American freight rail was technologically obsolescent and hamstrung by union rules and government rate regulation. American passenger rail was unprofitable and unreliable. Freight rail was losing business to trucking firms. Passenger rail was losing out to cars […]

Are Republicans no longer the party more inclined to military interventions and an assertive foreign policy? It’s a question raised by the enthusiastic response to Sen. Rand Paul’s 13-hour filibuster and to his not-very-interventionist foreign policy. It’s raised also by House Republicans’ willingness to accept the budget sequester, which includes defense cuts that former Defense […]

What parts of America have been growing during these years of sluggish economic growth? Answers come from comparing the Census Bureau’s just-released estimates of metropolitan area populations in July 2012 with the results of the Census conducted in 2010. The focus here is on the 51 metro areas with populations of more than 1 million […]

Rarely does a political party issue a document so scathingly critical of itself and its most recent presidential nominee as the report of the five-member Growth and Opportunity Project of the Republican National Committee. It refers to Mitt Romney on occasion as “our presidential nominee” and notes disapprovingly of his reference, in the debate about […]

In an opinion article in the Columbus Dispatch, Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman announced that he has changed his mind and now supports same-sex marriage. He wrote that on learning that one of his sons is gay he “wrestled with how to reconcile my Christian faith with my desire for Will to have the same […]

The College of Cardinals met in conclave on Tuesday to begin the process of electing a new pope. The cardinals have been getting plenty of advice from American journalists. The Catholic Church, they say, should open up the priesthood to women and allow priests to marry. It should abandon its ban on contraception and endorse […]

They’re flailing. That’s the impression I get from watching Barack Obama and his White House over the past week. Things haven’t gone as they expected. The House Republicans were supposed to cave in on the sequester, as they did on the fiscal cliff at the beginning of the year. They would be so desperate to […]

The Dow set a new high on Tuesday, but the larger economy is a different story. What if today’s sluggish economic growth turns out to be the new normal? That’s the unsettling question asked by some of our most creative economic thinkers. And the people asking it are not necessarily partisan opponents of the Obama […]

Do we have a president or a perpetual candidate? It’s not an entirely unfair question. Even as Barack Obama was warning of the dreadful consequences of the budget sequester looming on March 1, he spent days away from Washington, apparently out of touch with Democratic as well as Republican congressional leaders. In the meantime, Obama […]

Barack Obama is said to believe that he can win the political fight over the sequester. That’s certainly the conventional wisdom. And there is some evidence to support it. When you ask voters who will be to blame if the sequester occurs, Obama or “congressional Republicans,” they’re much more likely to say they’ll blame the […]

For years, most Americans’ vision of history has been shaped by the New Deal historians. Writing soon after Franklin Roosevelt’s death, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and others celebrated his accomplishments and denigrated his opponents. They were gifted writers, and many of their books were bestsellers. And they have persuaded many Americans — Barack Obama definitely included […]

One of the interesting things about recent elections is that Republicans have tended to do better the farther you go down the ballot. They’ve lost the presidency twice in a row, and in four of the last six contests. They’ve failed to win a majority in the U.S. Senate, something they accomplished in five election […]

Barack Obama has said that he wants to help Democrats win back a majority in the House of Representatives. He says he looks forward to Nancy Pelosi being speaker again. If he does work hard to elect House Democrats, it will be a change from 2010 and 2012, when he didn’t do much at all […]

Presidents’ State of the Union addresses are delivered in the chamber of the House of Representatives in the Capitol. The classical majesty of this building where laws are made symbolizes the idea that we live under the rule of law. Unfortunately, the 44th president is running an administration that too often seems to ignore the […]

There were two extraordinary disclosures in Thursday’s testimony of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey before the Senate Armed Services Committee. One is that there was no communication between them and Barack Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the seven hours of Sept. 11, 2012, when Ambassador to Libya […]

The House Republicans, in serious trouble with public opinion as they blinked facing the “fiscal cliff” over New Year’s, seem suddenly to be playing a more successful game — or rather, games — an inside game and an outside game. The inside game can be described by the Washington phrase “regular order.” What that means […]

Our major public policies are based on the assumption that America will continue to enjoy growth. Economic growth and population growth. Through most of our history, this assumption has proved to be correct. These days, not so much. Last week, the Commerce Department announced that the gross domestic product shrunk by 0.1 percent in the […]

Yesterday, as Barack Obama called for a bipartisan immigration bill in Las Vegas and Sen. Marco Rubio called for one on Rush Limbaugh’s program, the chances for passage look surprisingly good. But in some quarters — mostly from the right, but also from liberals like blogger Mickey Kaus — comes a complaint that deserves to […]

These days, our political parties are defined by their presidents. Their policies and their programs tend to become their respective parties’ orthodoxies. And the perceived success or failure of those policies and programs tends to determine how the parties’ candidates, even those who don’t support many of them, do at the polls. This has been […]

Commentators both left and right agree that Barack Obama’s second inaugural speech Monday was highly partisan, with shoutouts to his constituencies on the left and defiance of his critics on the right. Obama quoted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and made brief reference to Abraham Lincoln’s sublime Second Inaugural (“blood drawn by lash […]

Have the House Republicans come up with a winning strategy on the debt ceiling and spending cuts? Or just a viable one? Maybe so. They certainly need one that is at least the latter, if not the former. Barack Obama is up in the polls since the election, as most re-elected presidents have been. The […]

To judge from his surly demeanor and defiant words at his press conference on Monday, Barack Obama begins his second term with a strategy to defeat and humiliate Republicans rather than a strategy to govern. His point blank refusal to negotiate over the debt ceiling was clearly designed to make the House Republicans look bad. […]

It’s often good fun and sometimes revealing to divide American history into distinct periods of uniform length. In working on my forthcoming book on American migrations, internal and immigrant, it occurred to me that you could do this using the American-sounding interval of 76 years, just a few years more than the Biblical lifespan of […]

It’s often good fun and sometimes revealing to divide American history into distinct periods of uniform length. In working on my forthcoming book on American migrations, internal and immigrant, it occurred to me that you could do this using the American-sounding interval of 76 years, just a few years more than the Biblical lifespan of […]