Author: Michael Barone

You don’t have to wander long in the liberal commentariat to find projections that the Republican Party is in a death spiral, doomed by demographics, discredited by the dissension among House Republicans, disenchanted with its experienced presidential candidates and despised by the great mass of voters. There is something to be said for each of […]

“‘Shut up,’ he explained.” That’s a sentence from Ring Lardner’s short story “The Young Immigrunts.” It’s an exasperated father’s response from the driver’s seat to his child’s question, “Are you lost, Daddy?” They also can be taken as the emblematic response of today’s liberals to anyone questioning their certitudes. As with the father in the […]

What happens when an irresistible force meets an immoveable object?That’s one question raised by the 2016 presidential campaign. The immoveable object is the close and bitter partisan division that has prevailed in general elections for the last two decades. The irresistible force is the corrosive discontent of American voters, their sense that the nation is […]

Free college! That’s what the Democratic candidates were offering in their presidential debate. And it’s likely that, if the subject had come up, they would have offered something like free home mortgages as well, to judge from Hillary Clinton’s statement that she had urged Wall Street to stop mortgage foreclosures. Sounds a lot like free […]

Nothing new there. Nothing to see here. Time to move on for good. That was the attitude of most in the mainstream media to the 11-hour questioning of Hillary Clinton by the House Select Committee on Benghazi. It was not the prevailing attitude, as I remember, toward the hearings of the Senate Watergate Committee or […]

Joe Biden has made it official: He is not running for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. It’s the latest development in a presidential campaign cycle that has not been going according to script. Biden said that personal factors played a part in his decision. At a time when few children die before their parents, he […]

You may not have noticed, but Lincoln Chafee, the erstwhile Republican U.S. senator and Independent-turned-Democratic governor, had one penetrating comment at the Democrats’ debate Tuesday night. “But let me just say this about income inequality,” he said toward the end. “We’ve had a lot of talk over the last few minutes, hours or tens of […]

Going into the Democrats’ first presidential debate Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton seems to have banked on one thing: that far fewer Americans would be watching than watched the Republican debates in August and September. That assumption proved correct. Early Nielsen ratings indicate that 13 million viewers tuned in. That’s more than the previous Democratic record […]

Important parts of our two great political parties seem bent on demonstrating that their parties are incapable of governing coherently. House Republican rebels have pushed Speaker John Boehner out the door without advancing a plausible successor and have risked leaving the speaker’s chair vacant. Hillary Clinton has backpedaled and flip-flopped to fortify her flagging campaign […]

You win the presidency, Richard Nixon supposedly observed, by tacking to the right in the primaries and to the center in the general election. Hillary Clinton seems to be following that strategy except, as a Democrat, she is tacking to the left. This strategy has risks, as Nixon, who lost the presidency once and won […]

Not all important public policy reforms come from Washington. Really lasting reforms can percolate from the bottom up, brewed by citizens with a grievance pushing state and local governments to act. Consider the case of Right to Try legislation. These are state laws that allow doctors to prescribe investigational medicines being safely used in clinical […]

Sherlock Holmes famously solved the mystery of the Silver Blaze by noting the dog that didn’t bark in the night. It strikes me that in this wild and woolly campaign cycle there have been numerous dogs not barking in the night, or in the daytime either. Start with the race for the Democratic nomination, which […]

In November 1964 a crowd of 5,000 attended the opening of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, then the longest suspension bridge in the world. Presiding were New York Mayor Robert Wagner, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and transportation and parks czar Robert Moses. Also in the crowd was a teenager named Donald Trump. Trump later told a New […]

Scott Walker’s abrupt withdrawal from the Republican presidential race Monday afternoon shows how different, in ways noticed and unnoticed, this campaign cycle is from those of recent years. One obvious difference is the size of the Republican field — 17, before Walker’s withdrawal and Rick Perry’s withdrawal 10 days before. That has made debates unwieldy […]

As the 2016 presidential selection process proceeds, there is increasing evidence that the political patterns we have grown used to, that we have come to consider permanent, might be suddenly changing. Those patterns include a polarized and closely divided electorate, with partisan preferences highly correlated with degree of religiosity, with clearly defined demographic constituencies within […]

Human beings are hard-wired to protect young children. That’s the easiest explanation of the rush of Europeans — especially, but not only, elites — to welcome huge numbers of refugees after publication of the picture of a dead three-year-old boy on a Turkish beach. In response, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany would take in 800,000 […]

In this presidential cycle, voters in both parties, to the surprise of the punditocracy, are rejecting experienced political leaders. They’re willfully suspending disbelief in challengers who would have been considered laughable in earlier years. Polls show more Republicans preferring three candidates who have never held elective office over 14 candidates who have served a combined […]

Some time in the early evening of Wednesday, London time, Queen Elizabeth II broke a record: she became the longest-serving monarch in British history, beating her great-great-grandmother Victoria’s reign of 63 years and 216 days. She is also, at 89, by a solid stretch the longest-lived British monarch. And still busy at work, with hundreds […]

I’ve seen this movie before. And for the last 25 years, I thought I’d never have to watch it again. But now it’s playing, not in theaters, but all over mainstream media, with something like rave reviews from the president and his administration. The theme of the movie is that there is an epidemic of […]

Aside from the court-ordered dribbling out of Hillary Clinton’s classified-material-filled emails, the big presidential campaign news of the summer has been the boom for Donald Trump in the race for the Republican nomination. Trump has risen from 3 percent in the polls (when he announced on June 16) to where he now stands at 26 […]

In my last column, I looked at the possibility of two impossible things — impossible things in the sense used by Alice and the Red Queen — happening in the already turbulent 2016 presidential cycle. Here I’ll look at another: the possibility that the partisan division lines that have endured with little change for two […]

“One can’t believe impossible things,” Alice objected. “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” the Red Queen replied. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” You may be reading this sometime after breakfast, and six […]

Reporters and voters have so far gotten few glimpses of Hillary Clinton speaking candidly. One of the few examples available is in the videotape and transcript of her meeting with Black Lives Matter protesters in New Hampshire last week. Clinton handled herself adeptly, but her effort to propitiate the protesters spotlights a problem Democrats face […]

Donald Trump’s six-page platform on immigration may not be, as Ann Coulter wrote, “the greatest political document since the Magna Carta.” But given the issue’s role in elevating the candidate to leading Republican polls, it merits serious attention. And at least some of the platform’s planks are serious. Trump calls for nationwide use, presumably mandatory, […]

In 1935 George Dangerfield published “The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910-1914,” a vivid account of how Britain’s center-left Liberal Party, dominant for a century, collapsed amid conflicts it could not resolve. The Liberal Party had appeared impregnable. Its cabinet in 1910 included Herbert Asquith (in the midst of the longest consecutive prime ministership since […]

August is traditionally a vacation month, and East Coast elites, following European tradition, are thick on the ground in the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard (the Obamas’ choice) and Nantucket. But news — in some cases, shattering news — keeps breaking out all over, at home and abroad this August. Actually that’s not unusual. Saddam Hussein overran […]

Thursday was the biggest night of the political year so far, for what happened on the stage at Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena and for what happened offstage as well. The stage was the scene of the first two Republican presidential debates, hosted by Fox News, which together lasted some 200 minutes between 5 and 11 […]

“Faute de mieux.” That means “for want of something better” in Secretary of State John Kerry’s second language. It’s also the best case made by its journalistic defenders for approval of the nuclear weapons deal Kerry negotiated with Iran. Or to be more exact, for rallying 34 votes in the Senate or 146 votes in […]

As the presidential campaign heats up, and we head into the first debate among the 16 declared Republican candidates, there is an asymmetry between the two political parties. Republican voters have been seething with discontent toward their party’s officeholders and have not become enchanted with any one of 15 more or less conventional politicians who […]

Forty-seven years ago, the musical “Hair” opened on Broadway. Elderly mavens — the core theater audience then, unlike the throngs of tourists flocking to cheap movie adaptations today — were instructed that America was entering an “Age of Aquarius.” The old moral rules were extinct: we were entering a new era of freedom, experimentation and […]