Author: Michael Barone

Liberals just aren’t very liberal these days. The word “liberal” comes from the Latin word meaning freedom, and in the 19th century, liberals in this country and abroad stood for free speech, free exercise of religion, free markets, free trade — for minimal state interference in people’s lives. In the 20th-century, New Dealers revised this […]

The flood of underage — and non-underage — illegal immigrants from Central America coming across the border in Texas is, to paraphrase a former Obama administration official, a “man-caused disaster.” The man who caused it, more than anyone else, is Barack Obama. Speaking at political fundraisers in Dallas and Austin last week — he refused […]

Skitter, scamper, scuttle. That seems to be the mode of the Obama administration of late. Skitter away from your red line in Syria. Scamper off to a meeting you’d previously nixed with Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Scuttle as much as the Constitution as you can, at least until you get called on it by 9-0 […]

“New analyses of the human genome establish that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional,” writes Nicholas Wade in his recently published book, “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History.” That sounds reasonable, and Wade, a science reporter and editor for many years at Nature and the New York Times, seems an unimpeachable […]

Seldom in American history has the Supreme Court unanimously rejected positions advocated by presidents’ administrations. But in this respect at least, President Obama has produced the fundamental transformation he promised in his 2008 campaign. Over the last three years, the Court has rejected Obama administration positions repeatedly in unanimous 9-0 decisions. A review of these […]

Government just doesn’t work very well. That’s the persuasive thesis of three important books published this year. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge’s “The Fourth Revolution” takes a historical and international (and British) perspective. They argue that the welfare state, a creation of early 20th-century Brits, has become clunky in comparison to recent reforms in Scandinavia […]

What should Republican lawmakers do about immigration? That’s been a simmering source of controversy ever since George W. Bush’s push for so-called comprehensive immigration legislation, with legalization and enforcement provisions, in 2006. Most liberals and many economic conservatives argued that support for such legislation was a political imperative for Republicans. Otherwise, they would continue to […]

America’s two political parties seem to be coming apart. That’s in contrast to the relatively stable competition of the last 20 years, when Democrats have won four of six presidential elections and Republicans won House majorities in eight of 10 congressional contests, always by less than landslide margins. The parties’ stands on issues have remained […]

Polls show that most Americans wanted the United States to withdraw from Iraq. Barack Obama did indeed withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq, not troubling to negotiate a readily negotiable status of forces agreement that would have left a contingent of American soldiers there. Polls show that most Americans want the United States to withdraw from […]

President Obama evidently was caught by surprise by the scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs. So, apparently, was VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, who evidently took at face value the corrupt VA statistics — and who, after a distinguished military career, resigned last week. One who was probably not taken by surprise is longtime Yale […]

Last week I set out a 2016 nightmare scenario for Republicans — not one that seems likely, but one that can be extrapolated from current polling. In that spirit, let me set out a 2016 nightmare scenario for Democrats — again, not likely but a plausible extrapolation. It assumes, first of all, that Hillary Clinton […]

The opinion pages, economic journals and liberal websites are atwitter (a-Twitter?) these days over French economist Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” Left-wingers cite Piketty’s statistics showing growing wealth inequality — though some have been challenged by the Financial Times — in support of Piketty’s policy response, huge taxes on high incomes and accumulated […]

The 2016 presidential election is shaping up as another close race, like the last four. From 2000 to 2012, both major parties’ nominees received between 45 and 53 percent of the vote. Historically, that’s a narrow range, not seen since 1880-1892. It suggests something close to parity between two highly competitive parties. Polls for the […]

Gummit don’t work good. That conclusion, often that inelegantly expressed, seems to be more and more common, not only in the United States but around the world. It is certainly the verdict of John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in their new book “The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State,” although expressed, as […]

LONDON — British politics has a familiar look to Americans, with a center-right Conservative Party and a center-left Labour Party resembling America’s Republicans and Democrats.   Britain’s parliamentary system, however, presents a contrast with the U.S. Constitution on the surface. A prime minister whose party has a majority in the House of Commons can pass […]

In recent times, British and American politics have often flowed in parallel currents. Margaret Thatcher’s election as prime minister in 1979 was followed by Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980. As Charles Moore notes in his biography of Thatcher, the two worked together, albeit with some friction, reversing the tide of statism at home […]

Demography is destiny, we are often told, and rightly — up to a point. The American electorate is made up of multiple identifiable segments, defined in various ways, by race and ethnicity, by age cohort, by region and religiosity (or lack thereof), by economic status and interest. Over time, some segments become larger and some […]

Results of Tuesday’s primaries, particularly the victory of state House Speaker Thom Tillis in North Carolina’s Republican Senate primary, are being hailed — or decried — as a victory for the Republican establishment over the Tea Party movement. There’s something to that. Tillis benefited from support from Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and the U.S. Chamber […]

Second-term presidencies are an opportunity for bipartisan compromise. The institutional stars are in alignment to address long-range problems not amenable in other circumstances. The president is barred from running for a third term and thus does not have to worry about his next campaign. In Congress, members of the president’s party, with some reason to […]

  For a president who hasn’t enjoyed many foreign policy successes lately, Barack Obama did pretty well on his just completed trip to Asia.   In Japan, he reiterated in no uncertain terms the American defense commitment, including on the Senkaku islands in the East China Sea, which China also claims and calls the Diaoyus. […]

French economist Thomas Piketty’s book “Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century” has been inspiring a lot of comment and controversy. The English translation published last month zipped to No. 1 on: amazon.com. It has given a lift to economists on the Left who have cheered on Barack Obama’s flagging attempts to make income inequality a voting issue. […]

Schuette v. BAMN shouldn’t have been a hard case. The Fourteenth Amendment outlaws racial discrimination. Racial quotas and preferences are, by definition, racial discrimination. Fifty-eight percent of Michigan voters in 2006 voted to prohibit racial quotas and preferences in admission to state colleges and universities. As Justice Antonin Scalia asked in his concurring opinion in […]

Have the Republicans become the white man’s party? Are the depth and bitterness of Republicans’ opposition to Barack Obama and his administration the product of racism? Those are questions you hear in the clash of political argument, and you will hear plenty of answers in the affirmative if you click onto MSNBC or: salon.com: with any regularity. […]

Last week, masked men in camouflage garb with no insignia, dressed and equipped like Russian special forces, started taking over police stations and other government buildings in the Donets basin in Eastern Ukraine. They appeared to be working in tandem with local militias in defying the Ukrainian government. This week, the Ukrainian government has responded […]

An economist serving on a second-term president’s Council of Economic Advisers might expect to weigh in on fundamental issues, restructuring the tax system or making entitlement programs sustainable over the long term. Barack Obama once talked of addressing such issues, and Republican leaders such as House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp are doing so. […]

Forty years is roughly the length of a working lifetime — and long enough for history to have taken some unexpected turns. And to have proved that long-term forecasts based on extrapolations of existing trends usually end up wide of the mark. The list of failed prophecies from the 1970s is rather long. The conventional […]

If you’ve been following events in Ukraine closely, you may have seen maps, available at electoralgeography.com,: showing how the ethnic Russian areas voted heavily for one candidate and the ethnic Ukrainian areas for another. However, as the eminent historians of Eastern Europe Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum have written, the division is not simply based on […]

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1830, he was struck by how many Americans were participating in voluntary associations. It was quite a contrast with his native France, where power was centralized in Paris and people did not trust each other enough to join in voluntary groups. Tocqueville might have a different impression should […]

America’s two major political parties are inevitably coalitions, forced by the winner-take-all Electoral College and the need of candidates in single-member congressional districts to amass 50 percent of the vote, or nearly that, to win election. In a nation of America’s cultural variety, that means holding together groups that have different priorities and conflicting positions […]

“This is my last election,” President Obama said in words caught on an open mic. “After my election, I have more flexibility.” He was speaking in Seoul, South Korea, in March 2012, almost exactly two years ago, to Dmitry Medvedev, then in his last year as Vladimir Putin’s stand-in president of Russia. The subject was […]