Author: Michael Barone

There has been a great ruckus about Indiana’s recently passed religious freedom law. Some, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, see it as endorsing anti-gay bigotry. Democratic Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy has banned state employees from traveling to Indiana, even though Connecticut has a similar law even more favorable to claims of religious objectors. Perhaps he […]

Our kids, at least many of them, are not doing very well. The reason, writes Harvard professor Robert Putnam in his just-published “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,” is the “two-tier pattern of family structure” that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s and continues to prevail today. Starting in the late 1960s, rates of […]

Rahm Emanuel heads into a runoff April 7 in his bid for a second term as mayor of Chicago. He’s the favorite going in, having won 46 percent in the Feb. 24 first round against longtime local officeholder Chuy Garcia’s 34 percent and topping 50 percent in recent polls. Emanuel, President Obama’s first White House […]

“Firing up America” is the cover line on the March 20 issue of The Economist, heralding a 16-page special report on America’s Latinos. Its tone is resolutely upbeat — perhaps a bit too much so. “America is lucky to have millions of energetic young people filling its schools with kids who will eventually pay taxes […]

In her brief press conference at the United Nations, Hillary Clinton led off with a denunciation of the letter to Iranian leaders signed by 47 of the 54 Republican senators. This was in line with Democratic talking points — a sign that the former secretary of state was, perhaps a bit nervously, taking care to […]

The controversy over Hillary Clinton’s emails and her unconvincing press conference at the United Nations have gotten many Democrats and others thinking the unthinkable: Clinton may not be the Democrats’ 2016 nominee for president. And it has many asking the question — scary for Democrats — of who else could be. It’s not a strong […]

On Wednesday the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in King v. Burwell, the case challenging the IRS’s decision to pay subsidies to lower-income health insurance buyers in states with federal insurance exchanges — even though the Obamacare legislation authorizes subsidies only in states with exchanges “established by the state.” The Obama administration is thus in […]

If anyone had any doubts that most members of Congress oppose the Obama administration’s proposed nuclear deal with Iran, they can put them aside after viewing the response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress Tuesday. Fifty-some Democratic members chose not to attend. Joe Biden arranged to be out of town, and Barack […]

“Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus,” wrote Robert Kagan in “Of Paradise and Power,” published in 2003, just as the United States went into Iraq. Americans, he wrote, see themselves in “an anarchic Hobbesian world,” where security and a liberal order depend on military might, while Europe is “moving beyond power into […]

In reflecting on relations between the United States and China, Henry Kissinger in his 2011 book, “On China,” notes that since he and Richard Nixon ventured to Beijing more than 40 years ago, “Eight American presidents and four generations of Chinese leaders have managed this delicate relationship in an astonishingly consistent manner, considering the difference […]

Reckless disregard. It’s a phrase in legal writing that means “gross negligence without concern for danger to others.” And it’s a phrase that characterizes much of the attitude toward law of an administration headed by a man sometimes described as a constitutional scholar. The most recent case in point is the decision by federal district […]

Do Republicans have a realistic chance to win the next presidential election? Some analysts suggest the answer is no. They argue that there is a 240-electoral-vote “blue wall” of 18 states and D.C. that have gone Democratic in the last six presidential elections. A Democratic nominee needs only 30 more electoral votes to win the […]

“We will extend a hand if you are unwilling to unclench your fist,” President Obama proclaimed in his inaugural address in January 2009. He characterized those to whom this was addressed in negative terms, but the implication was that this president, unlike his predecessor, would be willing to negotiate with and make concessions to unfriendly […]

John Judis, co-author of the book “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” now says in an article in National Journal that that majority has disappeared. His title: “The Emerging Republican Advantage.” The original book, published in the Republican year of 2002, forecast accurately the groups that would make up the Democratic majority coalition that emerged in the […]

Can a single speech at an Iowa political event change the course of a presidential nomination race? Maybe. It actually has happened. Barack Obama’s November 2007 speech at a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines is generally credited with giving him a lift toward winning the caucuses there two months later and putting him on […]

Some columnists write New Year’s columns chronicling the mistakes over the last year. I don’t, but as this January has rolled on, it’s become clear I’ve made many about the 2016 presidential race. One is that I assumed Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush wouldn’t run. Now it seems both are. I thought that Romney would […]

Public policymakers and political pundits tend to focus on problems — understandably, because if things are going right they aren’t thought to need attention. Yet positive developments can teach us things as well, when, for reasons not necessarily clear, great masses of people start to behave more constructively. One such trend is the better behavior […]

It’s not in the printed text, but the most revealing words in President Obama’s seventh State of the Union address came near the end. After the scripted line, “I have no more campaigns to run,” elicited Republican applause, Obama ad libbed, “I know, because I won both of them.” Thus the last quarter of Obama’s […]

What caused the financial crisis? How can we prevent another one from happening again? The answers you most often hear to those questions are (1) greed and deregulation and (2) the Dodd-Frank law. But they’re patently inadequate. Greed — or the desire for monetary gain — has always been with us and always will be. […]

How far should a tolerant society tolerate intolerance? It’s a difficult issue, one without any entirely satisfactory answer. And it’s a current issue in the days after 40 world leaders and the U.S. ambassador to France marched together in Paris against the jihadist Muslim murderers who targeted the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. English-speaking peoples, […]

There are likely to be many surprises in a race for the Republican presidential nomination that has something like 20 plausible potential candidates. The first of those surprises came in the last hours before New Year’s when Jeb Bush announced he was setting up an exploratory committee to consider running for president. The website of […]

Lou Cannon has a nice remembrance in RealClearPolitics of Martin Anderson, the economist and adviser to Ronald Reagan who died last week at 78. He touches on all of Anderson’s accomplishments, from his successful advocacy in the Nixon White House to abolish the military draft to his unearthing, with his wife Annelise Anderson and Kiron […]

How big a problem is family fragmentation? “Immense,” says Mitch Pearlstein, head of the Minnesota think tank Center of the American Experiment. “The biggest domestic problem facing this country.” So big he went out and interviewed 40 experts of varying ideology across the nation and relayed their answers in his book “Broken Bonds: What Family […]

There is a widespread assumption that President Obama has expanded the electorate and inspired booming voter turnout. One could make a case for that based on the 2008 election. But since then, not so much. Looking back over the past 15 years, the biggest surge in voter turnout came during George W. Bush’s presidency. In […]

Before Christmas, Arizona finished its 2nd Congressional District recount, showing Republican Martha McSally beating incumbent Democrat Ron Barber by 167 votes. This means there will be 247 Republicans in the House in the 114th Congress — one more than was elected to the House in the 80th Congress in 1946. It’s the most Republican House […]

Too much power being grabbed by Washington — Obamacare, environmental regulations, education standards. That’s a constant complaint of conservatives not only during Barack Obama’s presidency but during George W. Bush’s as well. But power is also flowing out of Washington, largely unnoticed, and back to the states and localities. You can see that if you […]

The total discrediting of Rolling Stone’s story on rape at the University of Virginia has shined a light on one of the least palatable features of American life: the so-called epidemic of rape on campus. Authorities from Barack Obama on down have cited the phony statistic that one in five college women is raped. Phony […]

Earlier this week, Jeb Bush announced he was setting up a political committee to explore a presidential candidacy. Hillary Clinton has been exploring a presidential candidacy for months and perhaps years. Polls show Clinton with a wide lead for the Democratic nomination and Bush as a leading competitor for the Republican nomination. All of which […]

In an earlier column, I looked at the role the abortion issue would play in the 2016 election — not very much, I concluded — and promised another column on other cultural issues. Here goes. On anyone’s list of cultural issues that have been debated over the last decade, same-sex marriage ranks just behind abortion. […]

The defeat of Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu by Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy in last weekend’s Louisiana runoff ends an election year that has been very successful for Republicans — and has implications for 2016. Some observations: (1) Democrats relied heavily on legacy candidates — and lost nevertheless. Mary Landrieu’s father, Moon Landrieu, was elected to […]