Free Republic

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...