Free Republic

As the final votes were being counted, it was possible to draw some lessons from Republican Bob McDonnell's victory in Virginia and the close, three-way governor's race in New Jersey, never mind that White House press secretary Robert Gibbs has taken to saying that the elections don't mean much. The odd-year elections -- held in the first year of a presidency -- have been meaningful over the last two decades. In 1993, New Jersey voters rejected tax-raising Democratic Gov. James Florio, despite the best efforts of Bill Clinton's consultant James Carville -- a harbinger of the losses congressional Democrats suffered...

If you were watching television on Tuesday night as the election returns came in showing Republicans capturing the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, you probably missed seeing the biggest losers of the evening. You may have caught the concession speech of Creigh Deeds, who ran 12% behind Barack Obama's winning percentage of the vote in Virginia, and that of Jon Corzine who, after spending over $100 million of his own money on three campaigns, ran 13% behind Obama's winning percentage in New Jersey and got evicted from Drumthwacket, the governor's mansion in Princeton. But you missed seeing the guy...

My Wednesday Examiner column, written as the 2009 election returns were coming in, stands up pretty well. But let me add some observations written as the course of the elections became clearer. First, in the governor elections in Virginia and New Jersey, the Democratic candidate ran far behind Barack Obama’s percentages in 2008 and the Republican candidates ran ahead of George W. Bush’s percentages in 2004. The numbers are pretty daunting. In Virginia Creigh Deeds won 41% of the votes, way behind Barack Obama’s 53% in 2008. And in New Jersey Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine won 45% of the votes,...

The GOP victories reveal fissures in the coalition that elected Barack Obama. If you were watching television on Tuesday night as the election returns came in showing Republicans capturing the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, you probably missed seeing the biggest losers of the evening. You may have caught the concession speech of Creigh Deeds, who ran 12% behind Barack Obama's winning percentage of the vote in Virginia, and that of Jon Corzine who, after spending over $100 million of his own money on three... --snip-- Instead, support evaporated as Democrats from places as dissimilar as Arkansas and California...

Unsurprisingly, Michael Barone has an interesting and incisive roundup of numbers from last night that go deeper than the top-line results. Some nuggets: * Bergen County, New Jersey, a 56%-42% Corzine constituency in 2005, came within a point or two of voting for Christie. * Westchester County, New York, voted 58%-42% for a Republican county executive after voting almost exactly the opposite way, in a race involving the same two candidates, four years before. * The Virginia Board of Elections has results by CD showing that three Dems who captured seats in 2008 by very narrow margins (the 2nd, 5th,...

Where have all those Obamenthusiasts who were so visible in 2008 been hiding this year? In this New Republic article Lydia DePillis seems to think that the problem is that Organizing For America has been run as a top-down organization, rather than as a bottom-up movement, giving the folks out there no sense of ownership. She asks, “Can a grassroots organization run in the top-down style of a political machine really accomplish much—let alone change the terms of debate on any given issue?” I think there’s something more going on here. Many Obamenthusiasts were thrilled by the idea of putting...

Michael Barone finds it odd that Barack Obama can go to Oslo and Copenhagen for mainly personal reasons, but somehow can’t find the time to travel to Berlin to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall — the climax of the Cold War and the West’s triumph. Given the key role played by the US in the collapse of Soviet Communism, people have good cause to wonder why the leader of the free world can find time to pick up an award for himself and pitch his hometown to the International Olympic Committee, but not to...

"His father was a great friend of my father." The reference to William Ayers' father was how Mayor Richard M. Daley began his defense of Barack Obama for his association with the unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist. Daley's father, of course, was Richard M. Daley, mayor of Chicago from 1955 until his death in 1976. Ayers' father was head of Commonwealth Edison, the Chicago-based utility, from 1964 to 1980. You bet they were great friends. That's governance, Chicago style. The head of government is friends with the heads of every big business, lobby and union, and together they make decisions on...

Is Virginia denying military voters the chance to vote in its state election this November? That’s what I gather from this post from the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder and this post from Republican blogger Soren Dayton. There’s some shabby history here. In 1944 Republicans and Southern Democrats in Congress ganged up to make it difficult for military personnel—about 12 million men at the time—to vote; Republicans believed that most G.I.s would vote for Franklin Roosevelt, and Southern Democrats feared that black G.I.s would vote and get into the habit of voting. In 2000 some Democrats in Florida tried to prevent military...

As Sen. Max Baucus tries to squeeze a health care bill out of the Senate Finance Committee, and as Sens. Barbara Boxer and John Kerry race to meet their latest deadline to introduce a bill to reduce carbon dioxide, some Democrats wonder whether their congressional leaders and the president who has deferred to them have sought only limited changes rather than more fundamental reform on both health insurance and carbon emissions.

There’s starting to be some speculation that Republicans might recapture a majority in the House in 2010. That would require them to gain 40 seats—the exact number they needed to gain in 1994, the last time they recaptured a majority from the Democrats. Interestingly, I don’t recall anyone predicting the Republicans would win a majority, much less gain the 52 seats they actually did that year, until July 1994, when I wrote an article in U.S. News & World Report suggesting there was a serious possibility they would do so.

Strangers to dissent, liberals try to stifle it By: Michael Barone Senior Political AnalystSeptember 20, 2009 It is an interesting phenomenon that the response of the left half of our political spectrum to criticism and argument is often to try to shut it down. Thus President Obama in his Sept. 9 speech to a joint session of Congress told us to stop "bickering," as if principled objections to major changes in public policy were just childish obstinacy, and chastised his critics for telling "lies," employing "scare tactics" and playing "games." Unlike his predecessor, he sought to use the prestige of...

The dwindling number of readers of The New York Times were treated Wednesday to a column by Thomas Friedman extolling China's "one-party autocracy," which, he told us, "is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people." China's leaders, he reported, are "boosting gasoline prices" and "overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power." All, of course, in the cause of reducing carbon emissions, which so many luminaries assure us are bound to produce global warming and environmental catastrophe.

In my previous blogposts on the Washington Post news pages’ campaign to “Macaca” Virginia Republican governor nominee Bob McDonnell by running story after story on McDonnell’s 1989 Regent University thesis—Republican Governors Association operative Nick Ayers has noted 34 such pieces, including articles, blogposts, cartoons, editorials and on-line chats—I have purposely refrained from citing opinion articles, since after all opinion writers can legitimately try to influence readers and readers are on notice that this is so. But I’ll make an exception here for Metro columnist Robert McCartney’s Sunday analysis in which he argues, persuasively, that the McDonnell thesis isn’t likely to...

Before leaving for his vacation on Martha's Vineyard, Barack Obama said the next big item on his legislative agenda -- well, after health care, cap and trade, and maybe labor's bill to effectively abolish secret ballots in union elections -- was immigration reform. What he has in mind, apparently, is something like the comprehensive immigration bills that foundered in the House in 2006 and in the Senate in 2007. These featured guest-worker and enforcement provisions, as well as a path to legalization.

Edward Kennedy was buried Saturday, the last son of Joseph and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, the longest-serving member of the only royal political family our democratic republic has ever produced. Those who remember the 1960s understand viscerally, even if they do not share themselves, the almost mystical devotion the Kennedys inspired. Those who do not find it harder to understand, and those who come after us may find it utterly mystifying. But it was real. Other political families -- the Adamses, the Harrisons, the Tafts -- produced multiple generations of national politicians but generated nothing like mass enthusiasm. The sons of...

The president has been playing the “Look, Ma—no hands!” game for the better part of a week, denying responsibility for the decision to name a special prosecutor to go after CIA operatives interrogating terrorists overseas. Democrats are ignoring the whole thing, now dimly aware that this is not the sort of thing the public likes. Conservatives are furious and taking the president to task for his refusal to take responsibility for the decision—or fire Attorney General Eric Holder if this isn’t what the president wanted. Michael Barone, recalling that Harry Truman sacked an attorney general, writes: Obama administration spokesmen are...

As it becomes clear that a large percentage of Americans are rebelling against the prospect of a larger, more intrusive government, including many who Democratic politicians assume would see themselves as beneficiaries of government spending and activity, debate among supporters of the Democratic agenda has focused on tactics.Should the Democrats have depicted their health care program as providing security rather than cutting costs? Should Barack Obama insist that the "government option" is essential, or should he let that provision drop by the wayside? Was it a mistake to whip the cap-and-trade bill through the House in June rather than focus...

'I AM a pessimist by nature, which is why I have spent my life as a journalist in stead of trying to be a leader, which requires optimism." So wrote Robert Novak, who died Tuesday, in his 2007 autobiography, "The Prince of Darkness." He surely anticipated the problems now facing President Obama and Democratic congressional leaders, optimists all. Not that Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are the only optimists who have been flummoxed by the obviously spontaneous outpouring of opposition to Democratic health care bills. Among those optimists are almost all of the Washington press corps and a large...

Colorado, where the Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountains, has some claim to be on the leading edge of American politics. It produced anti-war, pro-environment Democrats like Sen. Gary Hart in the 1970s, Reaganite Republicans like Sen. Bill Armstrong even before Ronald Reagan won in 1980, Clintonesque Democrats like Gov. Roy Romer in the 1980s and National Review's favorite Republican governor, Bill Owens, in the 1990s. In this decade, a group of liberal multimillionaires -- Tim Gill, Rutt Bridges, Jared Polis and Pat Stryker -- developed "the Colorado model," not only funding candidates, but setting up think tanks, advocacy groups...

  Once, when asked his philosophy, Franklin Roosevelt answered simply, "I am a Christian and a Democrat."   As always with Roosevelt, there was more to it than that. He was not just a Christian, but a Protestant, an Episcopalian, a descendant of Huguenot and Yankee New Englanders on his mother's side. And he was not just a Democrat, but a New York Democrat, whose leaders and most faithful voters were overwhelmingly Catholic, especially Irish Catholic. There was a tension, always, between this Protestant patrician and his Catholic party, a tension that this congenial country squire and shrewd politician...

Dear Young Obama Voter, Congratulations. You have truly changed America. Those of you under 30 voted 66 percent to 32 percent for Barack Obama, an unprecedented margin. Your elders 30 and over voted for him, too, but only by a 50 percent to 49 percent margin. You converted a 2000-like margin to a solid majority and added significant numbers to the Democratic majorities in Congress. You voted, as your candidate and our president said, for Hope and Change. But I ask you to consider whether the policies that the president has proposed and in some cases pushed through really amount...

THERE are more conserva tives than Republicans and more Democrats than lib erals. That's one of the asymmetries between the parties that helps to explain the particular political spot we're in. The numbers are fairly clear. In the 2008 exit poll, 34 percent of voters described themselves as conservatives and 32 percent as Republicans; 39 percent described themselves as Democrats, only 22 percent as liberals. The result is that the two parties have offsetting political advantages. Democrats tend to win on party identification. Republicans tend to win on ideology. Democrats don't have to appeal to as many independents as Republicans...

One video is worth a thousand words (or, as in this column, about 730). The video in question, put together by a group called Verum Serum, shows public statements by three advocates of single-payer (government monopoly) health insurance explaining that a health care bill with a "government option" would move America toward a single-payer government health care system. You may not have heard of the first two, Rep. Jan Schakowsky and professor Jacob Hacker. But you have heard of the third, President Barack Obama. Schakowsky is a left-wing Democrat from the north side of Chicago and adjacent suburbs and, as...

One video is worth a thousand words (or, as in this column, about 730). The video in question, put together by a group called Verum Serum, shows public statements by three advocates of single-payer (government monopoly) health insurance explaining that a health care bill with a “government option” would move America toward a single-payer government health care system. You may not have heard of the first two, Rep. Jan Schakowsky and professor Jacob Hacker. But you have heard of the third, President Barack Obama.

Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Creigh Deeds is going to use the abortion issue against his Republican opponent Bob McDonnell. I think this is a desperation tactic. It contradicts Deeds’s statement in a debate two weeks ago that he would not emphasize social issues, but that’s almost beside the point. The main thing is that 2009 is a year of economic distress, and voters’ minds are mostly on economic issues. McDonnell has been campaigning on jobs and economic growth, and in the process has emphasized his opposition to national Democrats’ position on the unions’ card check bill and the various Democratic...

We Americans tend to take the great strengths of our country for granted. In the hubbub of political debate, we concentrate on things that are allegedly wrong with America and lose sight of our great achievements. We make up only 4 percent of the world's population. Yet we lead the world in many ways, and the rest of the world -- or that part of it not in the thrall of evil regimes -- depends on us for many of the things necessary to the good life. Cases in point: Most people in the rest of the world are free...

Moreover—and this is a point I haven’t seen others make—when Gates was shouting in the hearing of passerbys that Crowley was a racist, Crowley must have regarded this as a threat to his entire career. Allegations of racism could result in losing his job, being publicly disgraced, being unable to get another good job—the end of everything he’d worked for all his adult life.

Aura dazzles, but argument gets things done. Consider the debate on the Democrats' health care bill and the increasingly negative response to Barack Obama's performance. Democrats have the numbers to pass a health care bill -- 256 votes in the House, 38 more than the 218 majority; 60 votes in the Senate, enough to defeat a filibuster. But they haven't come up with the arguments, at least yet, to put those numbers on the board. It's something not many predicted that bright January inauguration morning. We knew that day that Obama was good at aura, at generating enthusiasm for the...

Aura dazzles, but argument gets things done. Consider the debate on the Democrats' health care bill and the increasingly negative response to Barack Obama's performance. Democrats have the numbers to pass a health care bill -- 256 votes in the House, 38 more than the 218 majority; 60 votes in the Senate, enough to defeat a filibuster. But they haven't come up with the arguments, at least yet, to put those numbers on the board. It's something not many predicted that bright January inauguration morning. We knew that day that Obama was good at aura, at generating enthusiasm for the...

"With polls showing a drop in Barack Obama's job rating and sinking support for the Democrats' health care plans, there is evidence of collateral damage where you might not expect to find it: in the standing of Democratic governors. Pennsylvania's Ed Rendell suddenly is getting negative job ratings " "Ohio's Ted Strickland, who has spent most of his first term working amicably with Republican legislators, scores less than 50 percent in the latest Quinnipiac poll and has only tenuous leads over two Republicans, John Kasich and Mike DeWine, who may run against him next year." "In the two gubernatorial races...

WITH polls showing a drop in President Obama's job rating and sinking support for the Democrats' health-care plans, there is evidence of collateral damage where you might not expect to find it: in the standing of Democratic governors. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell suddenly is getting negative job ratings in both the Quinnipiac University and the Franklin & Marshall College polls -- his lowest marks in seven years. Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, who has spent most of his first term working amicably with Republican legislators, scores less than 50 percent in the latest Quinnipiac poll and has only tenuous leads over...

With polls showing a drop in Barack Obama's job rating and sinking support for the Democrats' health care plans, there is evidence of collateral damage where you might not expect to find it, in the standing of Democratic governors. Pennsylvania's Ed Rendell is suddenly getting negative job ratings in both the Quinnipiac and the Franklin and Marshall polls -- his lowest marks in seven years as governor. Ohio's Ted Strickland, who has spent most of his first term working amicably with Republican legislators, scores under 50 percent in the latest Quinnipiac poll and has only tenuous leads over two Republicans,...

THURSDAY is the day things tend to come to a boil on Capitol Hill. Members of Congress have been in town for three or four days; they're planning their exits on Friday to meet other commitments; they've had a chance to talk and meet with one another and sample the moods of their colleagues. This month, Thursdays have been very bad days for the Obama administration's attempt to pass health-care bills concocted by House and Senate committee chairmen. On the first Thursday after Congress got back in session, July 9, 40 members of the Democratic Blue Dogs caucus sent House...

Once upon a time, British and American politics seemed to operate in tandem. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan came to office, both supposedly little experienced and out of the mainstream, at about the same time. Tony Blair shaped his New Labor politics with the New Democrat approach of Bill Clinton very much in mind. But today, British and American politics are moving in very different directions. One reason is that changes of government, from one party to another, have become very infrequent in Britain. The only one the last 30 years, since Thatcher's victory in 1979, was Blair's in 1997....

Disarray. That's one word to describe the status of the Obama administration's legislative program as Congress heads into its final four weeks of work before the August recess. A watered-down cap-and-trade bill passed the House narrowly last month, but Sen. Barbara Boxer has decided not to bring up her version in the upper chamber until September. Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, who promised a health-care bill last month, still isn't delivering, and neither is the Health Committee's Christopher Dodd. They're both trying to nibble down cost estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, which has put the price tag at a...

THE Supreme Court's deci sion in Ricci v. DeStefano, the case of the New Haven firefighters, was a ringing endorsement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964's ban on racial discrimination and a repudiation of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's decision in the Second Circuit US Court of Appeals. While five justices flatly rejected Sotomayor's ruling, even the four dissenters wouldn't have let stand her ruling allowing the results of a promotion exam to be set aside because no black firefighter had a top score. Ricci is also something else: a riveting lesson in political sociology, thanks to the concurring...

The Supreme Court's decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, the case of the New Haven firefighters, was a ringing endorsement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964's ban on racial discrimination and a repudiation of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's decision in the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. While five justices flatly rejected Sotomayor's ruling, even the four dissenters wouldn't have let stand her ruling allowing the results of a promotion exam to be set aside because no black firefighter had a top score. Ricci is also something else: a riveting lesson in political sociology, thanks to the concurring opinion...

The conventional wisdom, as recorded in the New York Times, is that the Republican party is in terrible trouble because of the confessions in the past two weeks of adultery by two possible presidential candidates, Nevada Senator John Ensign and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. I think this is overwrought, for reasons set forth in my Washington Examiner blog post. The Democratic party is surviving the confessions of adultery by 2004 vice presidential nominee John Edwards and former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, and the Republican party will survive the confessions of Ensign, who never seemed likely to be a...

Bankruptcy experts Mark Roe and David Skeel, law professors at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, have written a paper assessing the Chrysler bankruptcy—very negatively. It hasn’t been published yet, but it’s available here to Social Science Research Network subscribers; I’m working off an emailed copy. [snip] Roe and Skeel note that the bankruptcy judge didn’t use—or even mention—the ordinary requirements of creditor priority in § 1129 of the bankruptcy code. “The requirement in § 1129 (a)(8) tghat each class of creditors consent or receive full payment wasn’t used. A market test wasn’t used. There was no judicial valuation of...

The House Democratic leadership succeeded in passing the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill by a 219-212 margin. In all, 44 Democrats voted against the bill, and 8 Republicans voted for it. It’s always interesting to examine the roll call on a close vote on an important issue—when members are voting for keeps and when some significant number of members cross party lines. And House roll call votes provide useful clues in gauging the legislation’s possible fate in the Senate. This bill was passed by the votes of one-third of the nation—the Northeast (New England, NY, NJ, DE, MD) and the...

There is a tendency for newly installed presidents, like adolescents suddenly liberated from adult supervision, to do the exact opposite of what their predecessors did. Presidents of both parties indulge in this behavior, though Democrats who campaign as candidates of hope and change are more likely to do so. Some of this is a legitimate response to the political process: Voters tend to elect presidents who seem to possess qualities and views they thought lacking in their predecessors. But some of it, and especially in the case of Barack Obama, seems to come from an adolescent-like confidence that everything done...

The adolescent angst of Barack Obama By: Michael Barone Senior Political Analyst 06/23/09 7:22 PM EDT There is a tendency for newly installed presidents, like adolescents suddenly liberated from adult supervision, to do the exact opposite of what their predecessors did. Presidents of both parties indulge in this behavior, though Democrats who campaign as candidates of hope and change are more likely to do so. Some of this is a legitimate response to the political process: Voters tend to elect presidents who seem to possess qualities and views they thought lacking in their predecessors. But some of it, and especially...

Obama's chickens are coming home to roost! Dodge Facts, Skip Details, Govern Chicago-Style By Michael Barone Real Clear Politics June 22, 2009 We pundits like to analyze our presidents and so, as Barack Obama deals with difficult problems ranging from health care legislation to upheaval in Iran, let me offer my Three Rules of Obama. First, Obama likes to execute long-range strategies but suffers from cognitive dissonance when new facts render them inappropriate. His 2008 campaign was a largely flawless execution of a smart strategy, but he was flummoxed momentarily when the Russians invaded Georgia and when John McCain picked...

[A]s Barack Obama deals with difficult problems ranging from health care legislation to upheaval in Iran, let me offer my Three Rules of Obama. First, Obama likes to execute long-range strategies but suffers from cognitive dissonance when new facts render them inappropriate. His 2008 campaign was a largely flawless execution of a smart strategy, but he was flummoxed momentarily when the Russians invaded Georgia and when John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. On domestic policy, he has been executing his long-range strategy of vastly expanding government, but may be encountering problems as voters show unease at huge...

MANY psephologists -- derived from the word for pebbles, which the an cient Greeks used as ballots -- study who wins and loses elections. Lately, I've been looking more closely at turnout. For, though most psephologists haven't stopped to notice it lately, we live in a decade of vastly increased voter turnout. Turnout in our presidential elections has risen from 105 million in 2000 to 122 million in 2004 and 131 million in 2008 -- an increase of 25 percent when population went up only 8 percent. Turnout in off-year elections has increased, too. The total vote for House elections...

Michael Barone reviews the latest polling on Barack Obama and his policies, and comes to the consensus opinion that the honeymoon has ended. Despite his high personal ratings after five months on the job, Obama has increasing resistance to the policies he’s championed. Overall, Obama’s biggest problem is that people don’t trust government — and he may not be helping matters. Barone points to the following indicators, among others:

Two cases likely to be decided this month by the Supreme Court — one of them an appeal in a Connecticut case decided by a panel including Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor — could result in significant changes in our civil rights laws.

Move to the center. That's the advice Republicans are getting from quarters friendly and otherwise. It seems to make a certain amount of sense. If opinion is arrayed along a single-dimension, left-to-right spectrum and clustered in the middle in a bell-curve pattern, then a party on the right needs only to move a few steps toward the center or just beyond to convert itself from minority to majority status. But the world is a lot more complicated than that. Opinion is not arrayed on a single dimension, but flies all over the place in two or three or even four...

What's the likely fallout — politically and judicially — of President Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals? Politically, Obama gets a plus for naming the first Hispanic justice (unless one counts Benjamin Cardozo, nominated in 1932, a descendant of Portuguese Jews). Sotomayor has an appealing biography: She grew up the daughter of Puerto Rican parents in the Bronx, had a fine academic record at Princeton and Yale Law School, served in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan and practiced commercial law. Republicans delayed her confirmation for the appeals court in...