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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 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...

[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 years ago, political scientists came up with a theory that elites lead public opinion. And on some issues, they clearly do. But on some issues, they don't. Two examples of the latter phenomenon are conspicuous at a time when Barack Obama enjoys the approval of more than 60 percent of Americans and Democrats have won thumping majorities in two elections in a row. One is global warming. The other is gun control. On both issues, the elites of academe, the media and big business have been solidly on one side for years. But on both, the American public has...

Many years ago, political scientists came up with a theory that elites lead public opinion. And on some issues, they clearly do. But on some issues, they don't. Two examples of the latter phenomenon are conspicuous at a time when Barack Obama enjoys the approval of more than 60 percent of Americans and Democrats have won thumping majorities in two elections in a row. One is global warming. The other is gun control. On both issues, the elites of academe, the media and big business have been solidly on one side for years. But on both, the American public has...

Michael Barone, one of the country’s leading commentators on politics and government, is joining The Washington Examiner as senior political analyst, it was announced Monday. Barone, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and for 18 years a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report, will write a twice-weekly column for the Examiner’s new Politics page and blog regularly for washingtonexaminer.com. Barone is widely known as the principal co-author of The Almanac American Politics, founded in 1971 and published by National Journal every two years. “Michael knows more about politics than anyone in journalism, as his peers will...

"Not since the Great Depression." "Not since the 1930s." You hear those phrases a lot these days, and with some reason. As Congress prepares to pass the Democratic stimulus package, it may be worthwhile to look back at Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and consider how well it worked as policy -- and politically. There's a fairly broad consensus on policy that some of Roosevelt's actions made a positive difference but that they didn't get us out of the Depression. Amity Shlaes in her path-breaking "The Forgotten Man" makes a strong case that some of Roosevelt's moves blocked recovery, and even...

November 22, 2008, 0:00 a.m. The Limits of Success -- and FailurePresidencies do not turn out as presidents or their constituents expect. By Michael Barone We Americans are blessed with a history that teaches that things work out right. Our first president set the precedent of relinquishing power he could have had for life and returning to his farm. Two of our greatest presidents were struck down, Abraham Lincoln by an assassin and Franklin Roosevelt by grave illness, at a moment of transcendent victory. Such a history of exceptional leaders is a blessing but also a weakness when things...

Can we trust the polls this year? That's a question many people have been asking as we approach the end of this long, long presidential campaign. As a recovering pollster and continuing poll consumer, my answer is yes -- with qualifications. Martin KozlowskiTo start with, political polling is inherently imperfect. Academic pollsters say that to get a really random sample, you should go back to a designated respondent in a specific household time and again until you get a response. But political pollsters who must report results overnight have to take the respondents they can reach. So they weight the...

The radical socialists have stolen our retirement money, they have stolen the values of our homes, they have ruined and closed our banks and stolen the value of our vote, and, now, the polls say, they will apply the final coupe de grace with an Obama victory in November. First they infiltrated our schools and colleges and our media; then the liberal Democrats passed laws that extorted and forced banks into giving home mortgages to persons who had no chance of repaying these loans – to people with little or no income – in the guise of “fairness”. It’s not...

Note to Paulson: The Key to Passing the $700 Billion Bailout Is Insurance September 26, 2008 09:58 AM ET | Michael Barone | Permanent Link Contrary to widespread expectations in Washington and on Wall Street, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's financial bailout/rescue package was not agreed to at the White House meeting that started at 4 p.m. Thursday. The meeting included the congressional and committee leaders of both parties and the administration's top financial officials, plus two presidents—George W. Bush and either Barack Obama or John McCain. What's the problem? An agreement modifying the Paulson plan in significant ways seems to...

September 20, 2008, 0:00 a.m. The Old Economic Rule Doesn’t WorkFinancial distress doesn't push voters to Democrats. By Michael Barone The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America, the 500-point plunge of the Dow, the government takeover of AIG — all these have got the presidential candidates talking about the economy. But both Barack Obama and John McCain have been vague about their solutions. And for good reason. Our economic problems are concentrated in the finance sector, and that’s the part of the economy the average voter knows least about. Moreover, the political...

John McCain was trained as a fighter pilot. In his selection of Sarah Palin, and in his convention and campaigning since, he has shown that he learned an important lesson from his fighter pilot days: He has gotten inside Barack Obama's OODA loop. That term was the invention of the great fighter pilot and military strategist John Boyd. It's an acronym for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. "The key to victory is operating at a faster tempo than the enemy," Boyd's biographer Robert Coram writes. "The key thing to understand about Boyd's version is not the mechanical cycle itself, but rather...

August 30, 2008, 9:00 a.m. Outrageous VulnerabilitiesObama may not Weather this storm. By Michael Barone As this is written, with a deadline looming, I have not heard Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at Invesco Field and have not learned who is John McCain’s choice for vice president. You know more about these things than I do. So I will write about something I may know more about, and which has been the subject of some concern at the Democratic National Convention: the Democrats’ charge that Republicans make illegitimate attacks on their candidates, attacks that imply that they are far out...

August 09, 2008, 0:00 a.m. It’s Not RationalThe ghosts of political leanings. By Michael Barone To understand changes in the political map, we naturally tend to look for contemporary explanations. But American political alignments are not written on an empty slate. Beginnings matter, and the civic personalities of states tend to reflect the cultural folkways of their first settlers. So I was not startled when I compared state poll results in this election with the results of the 2004 election and found patterns that reflect the surges of historic internal migration. For this year’s polls, I used the results...

August 02, 2008, 0:00 a.m. Was Obama’s Bounce a Bubble?Polls continue to show an unstable presidential campaign. By Michael Barone Just when you think you’ve got the presidential race figured out, something comes along to upend your carefully wrought conclusions. Mainstream media provided lavish coverage of Barack Obama’s trip abroad the week of July 21–25 and predicted he would get a bounce in the polls. Some of his supporters believe he has put the election away. Other observers employ the hackneyed and meaningless phrase, “It’s his to lose.� The poll numbers tell a different and more nuanced story. The...

June 07, 2008, 0:00 a.m. Clearing the FieldThe general election begins. By Michael Barone Almost precisely at the midpoint between the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3 and the general election on Nov. 4, the general-election campaign is on. Neither party’s nominee swept the primaries. John McCain’s narrow popular-vote margins in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, and most of the Super Tuesday states, combined with the Republicans’ winner-take-all delegate allocation rules, effectively gave him the Republican nomination on Feb. 6. Mike Huckabee made it official by withdrawing after the March 4 Texas and Ohio primaries. Barack Obama’s big delegate margins...

There are lessons to be learned from the dazzling success of the surge strategy in Iraq. Lesson one is that just about no mission is impossible for the United States military. A year ago it was widely thought, not just by the new Democratic leaders in Congress but also in many parts of the Pentagon, that containing the violence in Iraq was impossible. Now we have seen it done. We have seen this before in American history. George Washington's forces seemed on the brink of defeat many times in the agonizing years before Yorktown. Abraham Lincoln's generals seemed so unsuccessful...

There are lessons to be learned from the dazzling success of the surge strategy in Iraq. Lesson one is that just about no mission is impossible for the United States military. A year ago it was widely thought, not just by the new Democratic leaders in Congress but also in many parts of the Pentagon, that containing the violence in Iraq was impossible. Now we have seen it done. We have seen this before in American history. George Washington's forces seemed on the brink of defeat many times in the agonizing years before Yorktown. Abraham Lincoln's generals seemed so unsuccessful...

On the issues, not very much separates the front-runners for the Democratic nomination. What's interesting is that all of them—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards—are running well to the left of the only Democratic presidents in the last 40 years, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. The top Republican candidates, on the other hand, are all over the place on issues. Mike Huckabee, leading in every December Iowa poll and No. 1 nationally in the Rasmussen poll, denounces "the Bush administration's arrogant bunker mentality" in the current Foreign Affairs and says that after Iran was included in the axis of...

Here are the election returns for Tuesday’s special election in the Fifth District of Massachusetts. Democrat Niki Tsongas beat Republican Jim Ogonowski 51 to 45 percent in a district in which John Kerry beat George W. Bush 57 to 41 percent. This probably counts as the “near upset” I suggested as a possibility in my U.S. News column for the week.

This week the American public will surely be focused on Iraq, as Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker present their reports to Congress. Petraeus and Crocker undoubtedly will speak of the striking military success of the surge strategy, while Democrats will try to focus on the failure of Iraqi politicians to reach agreement on major issues. But Iraq is not the only challenge America will face in the coming years. Islamist terrorists will continue to try to attack the U.S. and undermine, if not destroy, our free society. Americans, for all the media's concentration on Iraq, seem aware of...

This week, the American public will surely be focused on Iraq, as Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker present their reports to Congress. Petraeus and Crocker will undoubtedly speak of the striking military success of the surge strategy, while Democrats will try to focus on the failure of Iraqi politicians to reach agreement on major issues. But Iraq is not the only challenge America will face in the coming years. Islamist terrorists will continue to try to attack the United States and undermine if not destroy our free society. And Americans, for all the media's concentration on Iraq, seem...

The resignation of Karl Rove ends the tenure of a man who has occupied a unique place in American history. No other presidential appointee has ever had such a strong influence on politics and policy, and none is likely to do so again anytime soon. Only Robert Kennedy exerted similar influence, and he had little to do with electoral politics during his brother's presidency. Rove brought to his work a wide and deep knowledge of U.S. history, political statistics, demography and public policy. He worked hard and, for most of three years, under an unjustified threat of indictment. He does...

We seem to be entering a new period in American politics. We have come through a period of trench warfare, in which two armies of approximately equal size faced each other across the battlefield and tried to rally their sides to achieve the incremental gains that would make the difference between victory or defeat. There were few defections from either army in this culture war, and almost no one crossing the lines. Like the trench warfare of World War I, our politics in this period, which stretched from 1995 to 2005, was a conflict of many bitter battles and no...

Listening to the recent debates among the candidates, monitoring their Websites and reading the poll numbers, one gets the impression that the Republican and Democratic primary electorates are living in two different nations -- or the same nation that faces two very different threats. The Republicans want to protect us against Islamist terrorists. The Democrats want to protect us against climate change.

I confess that I haven't read the text of the compromise immigration bill agreed to by Sens. Edward Kennedy and Jon Kyl, and I request the right to, in congressional language, revise and extend my remarks. But at this writing, apparently nobody has read it -- the final text is still not available. Many Americans have been complaining that the Iraqi parliament has been taking too long to come to agreement on sharing oil revenues and other big issues. But the same thing happens in the United States Congress. Members mull important issues and seem to do nothing for long...

U.S. News and World Report's Michael Barone on the realignment of America. HH: Joined now by U.S. News and World Report’s Michael Barone. Michael, always a pleasure to have you here. MB: Always a pleasure to be with you, Hugh. HH: Your piece on Opinion Journal today, the Realignment of America, instantly shot around America as political junkees began to read it. And demographics are destiny, and I guess what you’re writing here is that the interior boom towns like Las Vegas and Phoenix and Charlotte and Orlando and Tampa and Jacksonville, is that where the action is, Michael Barone?...

“We believe these three individuals are innocent.” The words, soberly spoken by North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, bring to an end the unjust prosecution of the three former Duke lacrosse players. “We have no credible evidence that an attack occurred.” The motives of the “overreaching” prosecutor, as Cooper called him, are obvious: Prosecuting three white men on charges brought by a black accuser helped him win black votes he needed in an election. The motives of those who rushed to believe the charges—and continued to believe them 366 days after DNA testing implicated none of the players—are something else....

Live thread to FReep about the Special

I first started my weblog three years ago after a Thanksgiving dinner at which I was astonished to hear some of the falsehoods about our country’s history my grandchildren had been taught and were repeating at the dinner table. Of course, as a college professor, I was well aware of the “hate America” crowd that infected the liberal arts faculty of the college where I taught, but I had no idea how deeply this poison had sunk its tentacles into the public school curriculum and its teachers. We are not going to defeat the Islamic fascists who would destroy us...

"They always blame America first." That was Jeane Kirkpatrick, describing the "San Francisco Democrats" in 1984. But it could be said about a lot of Americans, especially highly educated Americans, today. In their assessment of what is going on in the world, they seem to start off with a default assumption that we are in the wrong. The "we" can take different forms: the United States government, the vast mass of middle-class Americans, white people, affluent people, churchgoing people or the advanced English-speaking countries. Such people are seen as privileged and selfish, greedy and bigoted, rash and violent. If something...

February 26, 2007, 0:00 a.m. Where’s the Beef.com?A presidential cybertour. By Michael Barone Presidential candidates have the opportunity to set the national agenda by bringing forward new proposals and innovative policies. Some do this: Bill Clinton in 1992, George W. Bush in 2000. Others don’t. Like most or all of the 2008 candidates. Click through their websites, and what you find is pretty thin gruel. Especially so from the two leading in the polls. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s homepage links to her recent Senate speech on Iran, but not her 2002 speech backing the Iraq war resolution. She calls for...

What's with the polls? In 2004, the electorate that went to the polls or voted absentee was, according to the adjusted NEP exit poll, 37 percent Democratic and 37 percent Republican. In party identification, it was the most Republican electorate since George Gallup conducted his first random sample poll in October 1935. But most recent national polls show Democrats with an advantage in party identification in the vicinity of 5 percent to 12 percent. Party identification usually changes slowly. Historically, voters have switched from candidates of one party to candidates of the other more readily than they have changed their...

In the midst of the campaign month of October came the news last week that the population of the United States has passed the 300 million mark. There's a sharp contrast between the negativity of the political climate and the robustness of our demographic increase -- we were at 200 million in 1967, less than four decades ago. Then, as now, Americans were in a negative mood, but had much more to be depressed about. We were then mired in a war that produced more than 20 times the number of American deaths as the conflict in Iraq has so...

What would a Democratic victory -- likely now but not certain in the House races, possible if all the close ones go their way in the Senate races -- mean? Would it mean that we are heading into a political realignment, to a time when Republican positions can no longer rally a majority?Not really, I think. Right now, it doesn't look like Democrats will end up with the kind of popular vote percentage in House elections won by their party in 1974 (up from 46 percent to 58 percent in two years) or Republicans in 1994 (up from 46 percent...

The Disappearing 'Us' By Michael Barone One of the salutary results of the Clinton administration, I thought, was that it got liberals and Democrats in the habit of using the first person plural. U.S. military forces in Bosnia, Kosovo and elsewhere were "our troops." NATO and Japan and Australia and all the rest were "our allies." The second person plural used to come naturally to all Americans. G.I.s in World War II were "our boys" (the second word now politically incorrect and also inaccurate), whether you were a Republican or a Democrat, from the North or the South, black or...

He who frames the issues tends to determine the outcome of the election. That's an old rule of political consultants, the first and most important rule, really. It's a rule that George W. Bush's chief political strategist Karl Rove knows well. And it's a rule that he and Bush -- and events -- have put into operation over the last few weeks. For months, the central issue of the off-year election has been, Hasn't Bush kept us too long in Iraq? Now, the issue seems to have become, Who can keep us safe against the Islamofascist terrorists who want to...

There seems to have been a change in the political winds. They've been blowing pretty strongly against George W. Bush and the Republicans this spring and early this summer. Now, their velocity looks to be tapering off or perhaps shifting direction. When asked what would affect the future, the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan famously said: "Events, dear boy. Events." The event this month that I think has done most to shape opinion was the arrest in London on Aug. 9 of 23 Muslims suspected of plotting to blow up American airliners over the Atlantic. The arrests were a reminder...

In our war against Islamo-fascist terrorism, we face enemies both overt and covert. The overt enemies are, of course, the terrorists themselves. Their motives are clear: They hate our society because of its freedoms and liberties, and want to make us all submit to their totalitarian form of Islam. They are busy trying to wreak harm on us in any way they can. Against them we can fight back, as we did when British authorities arrested the men and women who were plotting to blow up a dozen airliners over the Atlantic. Our covert enemies are harder to identify, for...

Why do they hate us? No, I'm not talking about Islamofascist terrorists. We know why they hate us: because we have freedom of speech and freedom of religion, because we refuse to treat women as second-class citizens, because we do not kill homosexuals, because we are a free society. No, the "they" I'm referring to are the editors of The New York Times. And do they hate us? Well, that may be stretching it. But at the least they have gotten into the habit of acting in reckless disregard of our safety. Last December, the Times ran a story revealing...

Left-wing nostalgia dies hard, but can it survive the events of this week? It has been a tough 10 days for those who see current events through the prisms of Vietnam and Watergate...[snip] Historians may regard it as a curious thing that the left and the press have been so determined to fit current events into templates based on events that occurred 30 to 40 years ago...[snip] Journalists in the 1940s, '50s and early '60s tended to believe they had a duty to buttress Americans' faith in their leaders and their government. Journalists since Vietnam and Watergate have tended to...

Two weeks ago, I pointed out that we live in something close to the best of times, with record worldwide economic growth and at a low point in armed conflict in the world. Yet Americans are in a sour mood, a mood that may be explained by the lack of a sense of history. The military struggle in Iraq (nearly 2,500 military deaths) is spoken of in as dire terms as Vietnam (58,219), Korea (54,246) or World War II (405,399). We bemoan the cruel injustice of $3 a gallon for gas in a country where three-quarters of people classified as...

Things are better than you think. Yes, I know, most Americans are... convinced that the struggle in Iraq is an endless cycle of bloodshed, certain that our economy is in dismal shape.... That's what polls tell us. But if we look at some other numbers, we'll find that we are living not in the worst of times but in something much closer to the best. [snip] First, economic growth. In 2005, as in 2004, the world economy grew by about 5 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund, and the IMF projects similar growth for several years to come.... [snip]...

Will Democrats win control of the House in November? It's a question lots of people have been asking in Washington and around the country these days. It seems possible, certainly. Democrats only have to make a net gain of 15 seats to win a majority. But it's also true that, with the single and large exception of 1994, neither party has made a net gain of more than 10 House seats over the last 20 years.I think there are two plausible hypotheses about how House elections work. If Hypothesis One applies, Democrats have a good chance at gaining a majority....

"This much is certain: The welfare state as we know it cannot survive." So Charles Murray writes in The Wall Street Journal in an article on his new book, "In Our Hands.""No serious student of entitlements thinks that we can let federal spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid rise from its current 9 percent of gross domestic product to the 28 percent of GDP that it will consume in 2050 if past growth rates continue."You can quibble about the numbers, but the overall trend is clear: We're on a collision course. On the one hand, we have a private-sector...

This week, the Senate is expected to take up immigration, almost 20 years after passage of the last major immigration bill. Immigration is in some ways an American success story -- half of all immigrants in the world head to the United States -- but also a story of failure -- we have an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants within our borders. The House in December passed a border security bill. The Senate Judiciary Committee spent three weeks hashing over border security and illegal immigrant and guest workers' provisions.Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist nudged it toward decision by announcing that...

Twelve years ago, I was the first in the national press to write that the Republicans had a serious chance to win a majority of seats in the House. That article appeared in the issue of U.S. News that hit the newsstands on July 11, 1994, less than four months before the election.That's how late it was in the cycle before anyone except Newt Gingrich and his acolytes took seriously the possibility that the Republicans would win control for the first time in 40 years.In this cycle, many reporters have been contemplating the possibility that Democrats will take the House...

Twelve years ago, I was the first in the national press to write that the Republicans had a serious chance to win a majority of seats in the House. That article appeared in the issue of U.S. News that hit the newsstands on July 11, 1994, less than four months before the election.

Plunging poll numbers for President Bush, lobbying scandals, the furor over the U.S. ports deal and even Dick Cheney’s hunting accident could all hurt Republicans in the 2006 elections. But the GOP has one thing in its favor, according to political pundit Michael Barone: The sorry state of the Democrats. "The standing of the Republican Party is not in great shape,” the Fox News Channel contributor told an audience in Charlotte, N.C. "Perhaps the only thing going for it is [that] the standing of the Democratic Party is not in great shape either.” Republicans have tended to win a slightly...