Author: Michael Barone

Will Hillary Clinton be elected America’s next president? The polls suggest she will. Recent polls compiled by Real Clear Politics show her winning 67 percent of the vote in Democratic primaries, with no other candidate above 11 percent. General election polling shows Clinton with an average lead over various possible Republican nominees of 51 to […]

America used to be a land with great upward social mobility, but isn’t anymore. America never was a land with great upward social mobility. Which do you believe? Keep in mind that your answer will have significant implications for public policy. Most politicians, of both right and left, favor the first statement. Conservatives say big […]

It is reminiscent of the quandary faced by Gen. Maurice Gamelin on the evening of May 15, 1940. Suddenly he realized that German panzer troops had broken through the supposedly impassable Ardennes. French troops to the north were cut off and rendered useless, troops to the south were falling back in disarray on all sides […]

Last month, Barack Obama traveled to snowy St. Paul, Minn., the same place where in the sunnier days of June 2008 he predicted that his clinching of the Democratic presidential nomination would be remembered as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and the earth began to heal.” This time in […]

Solipsism. It’s a fancy word that means that the self is the only existing reality and that the external world, including other people, are representations of one’s own self and can have no independent existence. A person who follows this philosophy may believe that others see the world as he does and will behave as […]

February marked the fifth anniversary of the reemergence of the label “Tea Party” in American politics. It was in February 2009 that Rick Santelli delivered his famous rant on CNBC, and a few days later, a group calling itself the Tea Party Patriots was organized. Today the conventional wisdom is that the Tea Party movement […]

What motivates people to demonstrate in central squares, day after day and week after week, against repressive regimes at the risk of life and limb? It’s a question raised most recently by events in Ukraine and Venezuela. The leaders and backers of the Yanukovych regime in Ukraine and the Maduro regime in Venezuela have had […]

Former House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously said that all politics is local. And it mostly was, in his time: He was first elected to the Massachusetts legislature’s lower house in 1936 and became its speaker in 1949, and was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1952 and became its speaker in 1977. […]

It is 611 miles from the United Auto Workers headquarters in Detroit to Volkswagen’s assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tenn. It’s a long day’s drive, about 10 hours almost entirely on Interstate 75, but it turned out to be too far for the UAW. Or so one must judge from the results of the unionization election […]

The roots of American liberalism are not compassion, but snobbery. That’s the thesis of Fred Siegel’s revealing new book, “The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class.” The standard account from liberal historians over the years, and more recently in bestsellers by Glenn Beck, is a linear story: Government expansion starts […]

Is Barack Obama trying to shift alliances in the Middle East away from traditional allies and toward Iran? Robert Kaplan, author and geopolitical analyst for the Stratford consulting firm, thinks so. In a realclearworld.com article, Kaplan argues that the Obama administration sees the recently elected Iranian President Hassan Rouhani “as a potential Deng Xiaoping, someone […]

America succeeds because Americans fail and forgive. That’s the intriguing message — or part of it — of Megan McArdle’s new book “The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success.” McArdle, a Bloomberg blogger and columnist, stands out among economic writers, and not just because she’s the only woman among […]

Henry Waxman and George Miller are retiring from the House and not running for re-election after 40 years as congressmen from southern and northern California. Also retiring and not running for re-election is Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa. Sen. Max Baucus of Montana will resign if, as expected, he is confirmed as ambassador to China. […]

Not as bad as expected. That’s my verdict on President Obama’s fifth State of the Union address. With his approval running well under 50 percent, Obama was not quite so confrontational as he has been in the past. He conceded that in the last four years, wages “have barely budged,” that inequality “has deepened” and […]

Just about everyone agrees that 2013 was not a good year for President Obama. His job approval plummeted as the Obamacare rollout cratered. His oft-promised pivot to Asia was as much of a dud as his oft-promised pivot to the economy. But it must also be said that the Republican politicians who have been touted […]

It is 41 years since the Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade decision, effectively legalizing abortion everywhere in the United States. Ever since, it has been a source of controversy — and confusion. Some of that confusion is owed to the fact that the opinion was written by Justice Harry Blackmun, the only […]

What do young Americans want? Something different from what they’ve been getting from the president they voted for by such large margins. Evidence comes in from various polls. Voters under 30, the millennial generation, produced numbers for Barack Obama 13 percentage points above the national average in 2008 and 9 points above in 2012. But […]

The Census Bureau’s holiday treat is its release of annual state population estimates, to be digested slowly in the new year. The headline from this year’s release is that population growth from July 2012 to July 2013 was 0.72 percent, lower than in the two preceding years and the lowest since the Great Depression 1930s. […]

Like just about everybody else in Washington and many across the country, I’ve been reading the excerpts from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ book “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of War.” It presents a significantly more negative picture of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton than Gates’ statements in office led anyone to expect. And it […]

As Barack Obama scrambles to eviscerate key sections of his own signature health care law, he and other Democrats are trying to shift voters’ focus to another issue — income inequality. Unfortunately, the solutions they advocate are pitifully inadequate or painfully perverse. Start with the minimum wage, which some Democrats see as an election-winning wedge […]

It is widely accepted that Hispanics will become a larger share of the American electorate in the years to come. This is a matter of simple arithmetic. Less than one-tenth of adults counted in the 2010 Census classified themselves as “Hispanic” (a term invented by the Census Bureau for the 1970 count). But one-quarter of […]

In 1793, the envoy Lord Macartney appeared before the Qianlong emperor in Beijing and asked for British trading rights in China. “Our ways have no resemblance to yours, and even were your envoy competent to acquire some rudiments of them, he could not transport them to your barbarous land,” the long-reigning (1736-96) emperor replied in […]

Most Americans have an image of Mexico as a nation convulsed by violent drug wars and sending hundreds of thousands of desperate immigrants across our southern border. That image is out-of-date. The drug war has largely quieted down and scarcely affects most of the country while, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, net migration from […]

Christmastime is an occasion for families to come together. But the family is not what it used to be, as my former American Enterprise Institute colleague Nick Schulz argues in his short AEI book “Home Economics: The Consequences of Changing Family Structure.” It’s a subject that many people are uncomfortable with. “Everyone either is or […]

Sometimes it seems like things are upside down. Barack Obama and his Obamacare administrators are continually making laws, through blogpost (suspending the employer mandate) and bulletin (suspending the individual mandate). This, even though the Framers of the Constitution said that it was Congress that would make the laws; the president is just supposed to faithfully […]

As the fifth year of the Obama presidency draws to a close, it may be time to examine the unspoken but powerful assumption behind the policies of the president and his party. That is the assumption that in times of economic distress Americans would be, more than usual, supportive of or amenable to Big Government […]

Democratic National Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz says that Obamacare will be a vote-winner for Democrats in 2014. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says the same thing. Perhaps they really believe that. But the numbers in polls conducted since Oct. 17, when the end of the government shutdown put the spotlight on the rollout of Obamacare, […]

Watching the twists and turns of American foreign policy while reading Christopher Clark’s “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914” is an unnerving experience. Clark’s history, unlike many on the outbreak of World War I, starts not with the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, but a dozen […]

In 1970 the eccentric but insightful economist Albert Hirschman published a book called “Exit, Voice and Loyalty.” It explored how people respond when a private firm’s or a government agency’s performance is deteriorating. Some people choose to leave, buying another product or service or leaving the government’s jurisdiction. Others use voice, complaining about defects or […]

Not many foreign policy experts would argue with the proposition that the country with which the United States has the most problematic relationship is Pakistan. Most Americans, when they have thought about it, have taken a similar view since Osama bin Laden was killed in a raid by Navy SEAL Team Six in May 2011. […]