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That’s what Michael Barone, co-author of “The Almanac of American Politics,” argued at an election forum this morning hosted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Voters no longer need to meet candidates at events or see them at rallies to feel as though they know them, he argues. “New media has in different ways displaced some of the old techniques of campaigning that have worked in the past,” he said. “Voters seem to be getting an in-depth look at the candidates through the Internet and cable TV. People can get a sense of them through YouTube clips.”

Herman Cain, beleaguered by charges of sexual harassment, was all over Washington last week -- an odd choice of venue, considering that the Iowa precinct caucuses are now just 58 days away and the New Hampshire primary 65. But as I learned when I sat next to Cain Friday morning during a long-scheduled taping of Richard Carlson's "Danger Zone" radio program, Cain seemed unfazed. In conversation before the taping he dismissed the controversy. "No documentation. No witnesses. And I didn't cancel a single event this week" -- although his wife Gloria, accompanying him for the first time, cancelled an interview...

On Oct. 22, 1844, thousand of Millerites, having sold all their possessions, climbed to the top of hills in Upstate New York to await the return of Jesus and the end of the world. They suffered "the great disappointment" when it didn't happen. In 1212, or so the legends go, thousands of Children's Crusaders set off from France and Germany expecting the sea to part so they could march peaceably and convert Muslims in the Holy Land. It didn't, and many were shipwrecked or sold into slavery. In 1898 the cavalrymen of the Madhi, ruler of Sudan for 13 years,...

Is Herman Cain a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination? It's a question no one in the pundit world was asking until the past week. Cain has never held public office. When he ran for the Senate in Georgia in 2004, he lost the primary by a 52 percent to 26 percent margin. He has zero experience in foreign or defense policy, where presidents have the most leeway to set policy. When questioned about the Middle East earlier this year, he clearly had no idea what the "right of return" is. His solid performance in the Fox News/Google debate...

But on one policy Truman went further than his top advisers or Dewey's. When the Soviets blocked land access to West Berlin in June 1948, Truman's advisers -- men of the caliber of George Marshall and Omar Bradley -- said that it was impossible to supply food and fuel to Berlin and we should just abandon it. At a crucial meeting in July 1948 Truman listened to this advice. After others finished talking, Truman said simply, "We're not leaving Berlin." Gen. Lucius Clay, our proconsul in Germany, set about organizing what became the Berlin airlift. Gen. William Tunner, who had...

Two years ago, in June 2009, the American economy emerged from recession, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. But as this week's Economist noted, with typical British understatement, "The recovery has been a disappointment." And maybe not a recovery for long. Robert Shiller, the economist who first identified the housing bubble, said last week that we may be headed for recession again. "Whether we call it a double dip or not," he told Reuters, "there is a risk." His Case/Shiller housing price index indicated that home prices in March slumped to levels not seen since March 2003, and...

Bottom line. This was a New Hampshire debate, but it has serious ramifications for Iowa as well. I have disparaged the idea that Romney is the frontrunner; I continue to think that given the polls no one is the frontrunner. But Romney behaved like a frontrunner tonight, one with confidence and sense of command and with the adroitness to step aside from two major issue challenges (Romneycare, his various views on abortion) he faces. Romney has wisely eschewed the Iowa caucuses this time, leaving as two major competitors there Pawlenty (from next door Minnesota and a genuine religious conservative) and...

Exit Newt Gingrich. Well, not quite yet, officially. On his Facebook page, Gingrich says he will endure "the rigors of campaigning for public office" and "will carry the message of American renewal to every part of this great land, whatever it takes." Without, however, the assistance of his 16 top campaign aides, some of whom had been with him for years, who resigned en masse last Thursday. They wanted him to spend more time on personal campaigning. He and his wife, Callista, figured they could do a lot of their campaigning and fundraising over the Internet. This is not the...

Exit Newt Gingrich. Well, not quite yet, officially: On his Facebook page, Gingrich says he will endure "the rigors of campaigning for public office" and "will carry the message of American renewal to every part of this great land, whatever it takes."

There's an awful lot that's stale in the debate on government energy policy. Some stale arguments are nevertheless valid: It's dangerous to depend heavily on Middle Eastern oil. Others have increasingly been seen as dubious: that global warming caused by human activity will result in catastrophe. There's stale talk about federal and state laws that promised great change but have produced very little. Electric cars, even with subsidies, are no larger a part of the auto fleet than they were 100 years ago.

Unexpectedly! As megablogger Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, has noted with amusement, the word "unexpectedly" or variants thereon keep cropping up in mainstream media stories about the economy. "New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly climbed," reported CNBC.com May 25.

The weakest part of our political system is the presidential nomination process. And it's not coincidental that it's the part of the federal system that finds least guidance in the Constitution. There is no provision in the Constitution that says that Iowa and New Hampshire vote first. The idea of giving any two states a preferred position in the process of choosing a president would surely have struck the Framers as unfair. But we are stuck with Iowa and New Hampshire voting first because no politician who contemplates ever running for president -- i.e., most politicians -- wants to arouse...

Obama's Antique Vision of Technological ProgressHis vision is of a dynamic economy. His result will be a static one. Barack Obama, like all American politicians, likes to portray himself as future-oriented and open to technological progress. Yet the vision he set out in his State of the Union address is oddly antique and disturbingly static. “This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,� he said. But Sputnik and America’s supposedly less advanced rocket programs of 1957 were government projects, at a time when government defense spending, like the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, drove technology. But today, as Obama noted...

On the day after Boxing Day, it's worth noting that Barack Obama is down but not out. You could tell as much from the contrast between his petulant post-election press conference and his peppy pre-Christmas press conference. In the former, he was crabby about accepting Republicans' demands that income tax rates on all taxpayers not be raised. In the latter, he was celebrating the lame-duck Congress's acceptance of his stands on the New START treaty, repeal of don't ask, don't tell, and even the previously reviled tax deal. Obama has obviously figured out that Americans prefer to see their president...

On the day after Boxing Day, it’s worth noting that Barack Obama is down but not out. You could tell as much from the contrast between his petulant post-election press conference and his peppy pre-Christmas press conference. In the former, he was crabby about accepting Republicans’ demands that income-tax rates on all taxpayers not be raised. In the latter, he was celebrating the lame-duck Congress’s acceptance of his stands on the New START treaty, repeal of don’t ask, don’t tell, and even the previously reviled tax deal. Obama has obviously figured out that Americans prefer to see their president describe...

It's hard to disagree. Robust economic growth solves a lot of fiscal and other problems. But Obama's fellow Democrats, to whom he explicitly directed these comments, can be forgiven for being puzzled. The whole thrust of his first two years -- the stimulus package, the health care legislation, the vast increases in government spending -- has been to put programs in place that have done little or nothing to stimulate economic growth. That's not accidental. The template for the Obama Democrats' policies, the New Deal of the 1930s, was not designed to stimulate economic growth, but to freeze in place...

This hour on the Michael Medved radio show, Michael Barone predicted that the Republicans will gain between 38 and 90 seats. (The midpoint is 64.)

After the 2008 elections, Democratic strategist James Carville predicted that Democrats would dominate US elections for 40 years; Republican strategist Karl Rove had predicted something similar for his party after George W Bush's narrower win in 2004. And Tony Blair's New Labour dominated British politics for nine or 10 years after its first landslide victory in 1997. But the Obama Democrats' dominance turned out to last not 40 years but 40 weeks – until Republicans overtook Democrats in the polls in August 2009. What gives? In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes famously said that practical men of business, who acknowledged...

Why have American voters gone so sour on Barack Obama's Democratic party? It's a question that must puzzle many in Britain who – Conservative as well as Labour and Lib Dem – welcomed Obama's election two years ago and saw him leading America and the world into broad, sunlit uplands. But now it appears that Obama's party is about to take what George W Bush called a "thumping" in the mid-term elections on November 2. It looks to be quite a fall. Obama won the popular vote in 2008 by a 53 to 46 per cent margin. That's not quite...

A bit of excitement today as Rush Limbaugh devoted much of his program today to my Wednesday column in the Washington Examiner, headlined “Tea party neophytes outshine the Dems’ old pros.” Rush (it seems natural to refer to him by first name) said many kind things about me, but also asked a few slightly barbed questions. “Why is Barone surprised that Tea Party professional outshine major party professionals?” “Why do those in the Beltway, writing articles and books and on TV, think their audience is? Why are they stuck that their audience understands their message?”

It's an ornate office in Indiana's beautifully maintained mid-19th-century Capitol, but the 49th governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, is not dressed to match the setting. He's just returned from spending the night in Princeton, Ind., staying at a constituent's house -- as he often does around the state -- and he's dressed in a work shirt and jeans. I've known Mitch Daniels since he was a staffer for Sen. Richard Lugar in the 1980s, and for years he struck me as one of the least likely candidates for public office. He's got strong, mostly conservative convictions; he doesn't suffer fools...

My subject today is the civil war raging in one of our great political parties, as highlighted in recent primary elections. No, I'm not talking about the split between the Tea Partiers and the Republican establishment (is there a Republican establishment anymore?). I'm talking about the split between two of the core groups of the Democratic Party, as witnessed in the Sept. 14 primaries in heavily Democratic New York (63 percent for Barack Obama in 2008), Maryland (62 percent Obama) and the District of Columbia (92 percent Obama).

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 sought to resolve,...

“Democrats choose Death Panels…” announces the Comedy Channel’s Jon Stewart with mock horror, “…for themselves!” It’s a very funny bit. The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty plays it straight as she reports: “Ultimately, some candidates, including incumbents, will have to be left for dead so that the parties can spend where it might still make a difference.” Then, there’s Michael Barone in the Washington Examiner. Mr. Barone has probably forgotten more about American politics than most political commentators will ever know. The editor for 40 years of the Almanac of American Politics knows political panic when he sees it. He nails...

When you spot the word “triage” in a political news story, you know someone is in trouble. Triage is the procedure by which medical personnel screening people injured in combat or disasters separate those who can be saved from those who can’t. The first group are given immediate surgery in hopes of recovery. The second are given painkillers to make the end bearable. So it was a startling to read last weekend in the New York Times that House Democratic leaders “are preparing a brutal triage of their own members in hopes of saving enough seats to keep a slim...

More good news for Republicans and bad news for Democrats keeps flooding in. Consider this morning’s polls reported in realclearpolitics.com. Mason-Dixon, polling for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, has Harry Reid up over Sherron Angle by only 45%-44%–a statistical tie. The mainstream meme has been that Angle is unelectable. This poll refutes that. She’s certainly not a sure winner, but she’s not a sure loser either. And Harry Reid, who has been on statewide ballots in Nevada going back to 1970, when he was elected lieutenant governor, is stuck under 50%. Next is Scott Rasmussen’s poll in the Florida governor race: Republican...

Like many Democrats over the past 40 years, Barack Obama has hoped that his association with unpopular liberal positions on cultural issues would be outweighed by pushing economic policies intended to benefit the ordinary person. In his campaign in 2008 and as president in 2009 and 2010, he has hoped that those he characterized to a rich San Francisco Bay area audience as bitterly clinging to guns and God would be won over by programs to stimulate the economy and provide guaranteed health insurance.At least so far, it hasn’t worked, as witnessed by recent statements by some of the Democrats’...

Republicans are starting to think about how to answer the Robert Redford question. You know the scene. In the 1972 movie "The Candidate," the Redford character, having won the election, turns to his political consultant and asks, "What do I do now?" Many Republicans fear they'll look as clueless as Redford. They entered this campaign cycle with little hope of winning congressional majorities. Now they have a good chance to do so in the House and an outside chance in the Senate. Some cynical Republicans say candidates should just harp on their opposition to the Obama Democrats' policies and figure...

The major political development of the last 17 months has been an inrush of hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans into political activity, an inrush symbolized by but not limited to the tea party movement. It is fascinating to me that the tea partiers have adopted the language and in some cases even the costumes of the Founders. While the Progressives’ descriptions of a “horse and buggy” Constitution and their sense that giant auto factories and steel mills were the harbinger of the future seem tinny and out of date, the language of the Founders continues to resonate...

Home-mortgage interest rates are the lowest in history, but house sales are plunging. Banks can make money easily because of the Federal Reserve’s low interest rates, but they’re not making many loans. Major corporations are sitting on something like $2 trillion in cash, but they’re not investing. Unemployment is running at 10 percent, rounded off, for the eleventh straight month, but few employers are hiring, and a million people have stopped looking for work in the last year. Small-business hiring is at a nine-month low, and retail sales are tailing off. Government policies designed to stimulate the economy seem to...

About 10,000 men and women have served in the United States Congress. Robert C. Byrd, who died Monday at age 92, served longer than all the rest - -more than 57 years, with six in the House and 51 in the Senate. In 1917, the year he was born, the United States had 103 million people and the nation had just entered World War I. The year he died, the United States had 310 million people, with military personnel in more than 100 countries around the world. Byrd's life and career tell us many things about our country -- some...

(AP) Democrats are reportedly planning to raise $125 million for a campaign to sell Obamacare to the voting public. Apparently the idea is that what 50-plus presidential speeches and statements and months of congressional debate could not do can be done by $125 million spent on everything from TV ads to community organizers.Maybe. But there seems to be a more fundamental problem here. The Obama Democrats didn't set out to produce an unpopular stimulus package, an unpopular health care bill and an unpopular cap-and-trade scheme.They thought these initiatives would be popular. In their view, history is a story of...

06/09/10 3:02 AM EDT A cluster of Bill Halter and Blanche Lincoln campaign signs are displayed at an intersection in Little Rock, Ark., (AP Photo/Danny Johnston) Eleven states voted yesterday in primaries and runoffs—the largest number of the year—and one way to look at the results is that no incumbent member of Congress lost his or her bid for reelection. So does this make 2010 less of an anti-incumbent (and anti-Democratic) year? Not really. I am put in mind of the story of the Teamsters Union business agent who was confined to the hospital. A bouquet was sent, with a...

Bob Bennett's defeat in last Saturday's Republican primary might be the beginning of a national trend. In the early 1990s, when incumbent members of Congress long thought to hold safe seats suddenly found themselves in political trouble over tax increases and the House bank, a Washington lobbyist friend lamented to me, "This is a tough year for the overdog." The same can be said, and perhaps with more emphasis, about election year 2010. Case in point: Bob Bennett of Utah. Mr. Bennett, who has served three terms in the Senate, was just denied a place on the primary ballot by...

LONDON -- British voters go to the polls today, and it appears likely that they will boot out the party in power for only the second time in 31 years. Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives ousted a Labor government in May 1979, and Tony Blair's "New Labor" party ousted the Conservatives in May 1997. Thatcher's party held on for 18 years and Blair's for 13 years in large part because the opposition indulged its extremes to the point of becoming unelectable. But long tenure tends to fray even the most successful party. Intra-party feuds become poisonous: The Conservatives quarreled over Thatcherism for...

Obama, Brown, and the ‘Third Way’The Left loses its way by abandoning the “third way.”  Left parties are in trouble in the Anglosphere. Here in America, Democrats are doing worse in the polls today than at any time in the last 50 years. In Britain, the Labour party is on the brink of finishing third, behind both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, in the election next Thursday. All of which raises the question: What happened to the “third way� center-left movement that once seemed to sweep all before it? Only a dozen years ago, in 1998, President Clinton enjoyed...

Thanks, I’ll Do It MyselfTea partiers fight Obama’s culture of dependence.  ‘Do you realize,� CNN’s Susan Roesgen asked a man at the April 15, 2009, tea party in Chicago, “that you’re eligible for a $400 credit?� When the man refused to put down his “drop socialism� sign, she went on: “Did you know that the state of Lincoln gets fifty billion out of the stimulus?� Roesgen is no longer with CNN, and CNN has only about half as many viewers as it did last year. But her questions are revealing. They help us understand that the issue on which our...

Last summer, I wrote a column framed as a letter to a young Obama voter. It concluded: "You want policies that will enable you to choose your future. Obama backs policies that would let centralized authorities choose much of your future for you. Is this the hope and change you want?" It seems that some young Obama voters have decided it isn't. The Pew Research Center's poll of the millennial generation, which voted 66 percent to 32 percent for Obama, found that they now identify with Democrats over Republicans by only 54 to 40 percent. Perhaps they are coming to...

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, after spending some time negotiating with committee Republicans Bob Corker and Richard Shelby, has decided to advance major financial regulation legislation without bipartisan support. Democratic spin doctors will try to portray the fight over this legislation as a battle between Republicans favoring lax regulation of Wall Street and Democrats favoring tough regulation. But is the Dodd bill really tough legislation, particularly in its treatment of the major financial entities? My American Enterprise Institute colleague Peter Wallison argues that it is not, because it gives Too Big To Fail status to the big entities—Citigroup and...

When Republican Senator Christopher Bond of Missouri announced that he would not run for reelection, his seat seemed ripe for a Democratic pickup. Barack Obama had just narrowly missed carrying Missouri by 3,903 votes, Democrat Jay Nixon had just been elected governor, Democrat Clair McCaskill had defeated incumbent Republican Senator Jim Talent in 2006 and Democrats had a ready-made candidate in Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, daughter of the late Governor Mel Carnahan and of former Senator Jean Carnahan, sister of 3rd district Congressman Russ Carnahan and granddaughter of longtime (1945-47, 1949-61) 8th district Congressman A. S. J. Carnahan (born...

Barack Obama's decision to postpone his trip to Indonesia and Australia — to a democracy with the world's largest Muslim population and to the only nation that has fought alongside us in all the wars of the last century — is of a piece with his foreign policy generally: attack America's friends and kowtow to our enemies. Examples run from Britain to Israel. Early in his administration, Obama returned a bust of Churchill that the British government had loaned the White House after 9/11. Then Obama gave Prime Minister Gordon Brown a set of DVDs that don't work on British...

Not many people noticed amid the Democrats' struggle to jam their health care bill through the House, but in recent weeks United States Treasury bonds have lost their status as the world's safest investment. The numbers are pretty clear. In February, Bloomberg News reports, Berkshire Hathaway sold two-year bonds with an interest rate lower than that on two-year Treasuries. A company run by a 79-year-old investor is a better credit risk, the markets are telling us, than the United States government. Buffett's firm isn't the only one. Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and Lowe's have been borrowing money at...

Did a search...did not see this one posted. Interesting and hopeful analysis from a guy who makes his living doing this kind of stuff.

The political commentariat doesn't know what to make of those thousands of Americans who've spontaneously thronged to tea parties and town-hall meetings to oppose the big-government programs of the Obama administration and Democratic Congress. Some on the left attack them as fascists or racists, though evidence of that is sorely lacking. David Brooks in The New York Times compared them to the New Left campus radicals of the '70s, which comes closer but doesn't quite ring true. I think the tea partiers bear an uncanny resemblance to the antiwar activists in the Vietnam War period. Like the tea partiers, the...

The political commentariat doesn't know what to make of those thousands of Americans who have spontaneously thronged to tea parties and town hall meetings to oppose the big government programs of the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders.Some on the Left attack them as fascists or racists, though evidence of that is sorely lacking. David Brooks in the New York Times compared them with the New Left campus radicals of the 1970s, which comes closer to reality but doesn't quite ring true.Some tea partiers, citing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, compare themselves with the patriots of 1776 and...

The Senate bill's abortion language is not the House Speaker's only problem. Are there enough votes in the House to pass the Senate's health-care bill? As of today, it's clear there aren't. House Democratic leaders have brushed aside White House calls to bring the bill forward by March 18, when President Barack Obama heads to Asia. Nevertheless, analysts close to the Democratic leadership tell me they're confident the leadership will find some way to squeeze out the 216 votes needed for a majority. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has indeed shown mastery at amassing majorities. But it's hard to see how she'll...

I find it interesting that veteran Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg agrees with my Wednesday Examiner column that if the November elections were held today, Republicans would win control of Congress. As I read Greenberg, he’s talking about the House and not necessarily the Senate, in which Republicans’ chances of winning a majority depend on winning just about all the conceivably close races. And he notes, as I do, that opinion could change between now and November. But Greenberg’s column is evidence that one of the Democrats’ best campaign consultants is reading the numbers much as I do. My sense is...

The political numbers tell a grim story. In five decades of closely following American politics, I have never seen the Democratic Party in worse shape. Democrats trail in polls in 11 of the 18 Democratic-held Senate seats up this fall and lead in polls in none of the 18 Republican-held seats. Republicans currently lead Democrats in most generic polls -- which party's candidate will you support for the House of Representatives? -- even though Democrats have almost always held the lead since Gallup began asking the question in 1950. Incumbents usually lead in individual House race polls. But polls have...

In his bestseller "Inside U.S.A.," the hugely readable journalist John Gunther described America as it was in the last year of World War II. He interviewed hundreds of politicians, businessmen and journalists, but only four men rated a separate chapter -- three politicians and Henry J. Kaiser, the California construction magnate who built dams and ships and manufactured concrete and steel and aluminum. Kaiser was, Gunther wrote, "tough, creative, packed with ideas and energy, above all a man who likes to make things." But he was also, he noted, a "link of enterprise by government, since government was on his...

Noemie Emery’s article, “Democrats inflicting themselves with wedge issues” and Michael Barone’s article, “With absolute power, Team Obama grows stupid” both attempt to diagnosis the problems ailing the Democrat agenda. Emery starts out by illustrating good and great politicians and then contrasts those politicians against the “I’m the Greatest” wannabe, president Barry Hussein Soetoro. And no the irony was not lost on me. Emery doesn’t consider president Soetoro either a good or a great politician. Barone begins by slamming the Soetoro Chicago inner circle. He notes that they were brilliant campaigners but have turned out to be mere amateurs at...