Author: Michael Barone

It irritates members of both groups when I note the similarities of the tea party movement that swept the nation in the 2010 election and the peace movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. But they are similar. Both movements represent the surge in political activity by hundreds of thousands, even millions, of previously […]

Some of my friends in the conservative blogosphere have been ridiculing a New Yorker named Joe Therrien. I want to put in a good word for him. Therrien appears in the lead paragraph of a story in The Nation on Occupy Wall Street. He’s an example, writer Richard Kim wants us to know, of the […]

Herman Cain, beleaguered by charges of sexual harassment, was all over Washington last week — an odd choice of venue, considering that the Iowa precinct caucuses are now just 58 days away and the New Hampshire primary 65. But as I learned when I sat next to Cain Friday morning during a long-scheduled taping of […]

Washington was all a-Twitter (literally) Monday over Politico’s story about the sexual harassment charges against Herman Cain — and about Cain’s serial self-contradictions. Faithful Fox News viewers saw him in the afternoon saying he didn’t know the terms of a settlement reached with the complainants and then saw him tell Greta Van Susteren in the […]

The argument is being made in some quarters that, however unsuccessful Barack Obama’s domestic policies have been, his record in foreign policy has been successful. But when you examine the claims of success, they seem a bit peculiar. Take the widely read New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Last week, he argued that Obama’s “lead […]

At the moment, national polls show Herman Cain leading or tied for the lead in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. This, despite the fact that he has never won an election, has never held public office (except on a regional Federal Reserve advisory panel), and has shown prodigious ignorance on some important foreign […]

Religious faith is a source of strength in many people’s lives. But religious faith when taken too far can prove ludicrous — or disastrous. On Oct. 22, 1844, thousand of Millerites, having sold all their possessions, climbed to the top of hills in Upstate New York to await the return of Jesus and the end […]

We’ve been hearing a lot about immigration on the campaign trail, most of it based on outdated assumptions and echoing the arguments made when Congress was considering so-called comprehensive immigration reform bills in 2006 and 2007. But up on Capitol Hill, there appears to be progress — bipartisan progress, even — toward changing our immigration […]