Obama Needs to Brush up on Middle East History By Michael Barone
For a man of his impressive educational credentials, Barack Obama has sometimes shown a surprising ignorance of history.
Commentary by Michael Barone
Most Recent Releases
June 8, 2009
June 5, 2009
Advancing Civil Rights By Overturning Old Laws By Michael Barone
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.
June 1, 2009
GOP Should Run Against the Power of the Center By Michael Barone
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.
May 29, 2009
Will Sotomayor's Style Blunt Her Liberal Views? By Michael Barone
Barack Obama has named his nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. What's the likely fallout, politically and judicially?
May 27, 2009
No Time for Tea-and-Crumpet Interrogations By Michael Barone
When former Vice President Dan Quayle scheduled a big speech, President Bill Clinton didn't hop in and schedule one for the hour before.
May 21, 2009
Why the U.S. Should Listen to India's Voters By Michael Barone
Last November, 131 million Americans voted, and the whole world took notice. Over the last month, about 700 million Indians voted, and most Americans, like most of the world, didn't much notice.
May 18, 2009
Obama Changes Course on Antiterrorism By Michael Barone
Step by step, Barack Obama has been reversing himself on antiterrorist policy. Last month, he announced he would not appeal a federal court decision ordering the government to release photographs of terrorist interrogations. This was in line with his decision to release on April 16 four memoranda prepared by the Bush administration Justice Department on that subject.
May 14, 2009
Obama Offers Security at the Expense of Liberty By Michael Barone
Republicans and conservatives are trying to grapple with the Obama administration's $3,600,000,000,000 federal budget -- let's include the zeroes rather than use the trivializing abbreviation $3.6 trillion -- and the larger-than-previously-projected $1,841,000,000,000 budget deficit.
May 11, 2009
On Guns and Climate, the Elites Are Out of Touch By Michael Barone
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.
May 7, 2009
White House Puts UAW Ahead of Property Rights By Michael Barone
Last Friday, the day after Chrysler filed for bankruptcy, I drove past the company's headquarters on I-75 in Auburn Hills, Mich. As I glanced at the pentagram logo, I felt myself tearing up a little bit. Anyone who grew up in the Detroit area, as I did, can't help but be sad to see a once great company fail.
May 4, 2009
Beware of Mandatory Arbitration in Card Check By Michael Barone
In his statement explaining his decision to switch from the Republican to the Democratic Party, Sen. Arlen Specter assured his listeners that "my position on Employees Free Choice (card check) will not change."
April 30, 2009
Specter's Party Switch Is All About Winning By Michael Barone
Only his most sycophantic admirers might compare Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter with Winston Churchill, but the two do have something in common. Both had long and turbulent political careers, and both switched parties twice.
April 25, 2009
The Left's Angry Mob Recalls Madame Defarge By Michael Barone
It's tough trying to please people who crave vengeance almost as much as Madame Defarge, the unsparing French revolutionary in Dickens' "Tale of Two Cities."
April 23, 2009
Obama Lets Congress -- and Lobbyists -- Do the Work By Michael Barone
The balance between the executive and legislative branches in writing laws has changed over the centuries. In the 19th century, Sen. Stephen Douglas wrote the Kansas-Nebraska Act, with President Franklin Pierce just an interested bystander.
April 21, 2009
Back to the Future: Obama's Foreign Policy By Michael Barone
As Barack Obama finishes up his second major foreign tour, a pattern in his approach to foreign policy seems to be emerging.
April 16, 2009
On Climate and Health, Beware of Easy Formulas By Michael Barone
Beware of geeks bearing formulas. That's the lesson most of us have learned from the financial crisis. The "quants" who devised the risk models that induced so many financial institutions to buy mortgage-backed securities thought they had reduced risk down to zero.
April 11, 2009
Unions Can't Move the World By Michael Barone
If you have a long enough lever, you can move the world. That's an old saying attributed to Archimedes. But what Archimedes didn't add is that a long enough lever may splinter in your hands if the material is not strong enough. You may end up not moving the world where you wanted it to go and finding yourself in a position you didn't want to be in.
April 4, 2009
Obama Abroad: In Some Ways, Much Like Bush By Michael Barone
Barack Obama's foreign policy is beginning to take shape. Semantically, it's a sharp repudiation of the policies of the George W. Bush administration. In reality, it's something like a continuation of Bush policies. Or, if you want to distinguish between the allegedly confrontation-minded policies of Bush's first term and the more accommodationist policies of his second term -- a distinction that I think is exaggerated but has something to it -- then it's something like the second Bush term. With, of course, some differences.
March 28, 2009
Not Yet Ready for a Welfare State By Michael Barone
Roadblocks. That's what Barack Obama has been encountering on the audacious path toward a European-style welfare state he has set out in his budget and other proposals.
March 21, 2009
Card Check: Good for Unions, Bad for America By Michael Barone
The Obama administration's budget is full of proposals that threaten to weaken our staggering economy.
