Free Republic

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...