Michael Barone

With absolute power, Team Obama grows stupid

How could such smart people do so many stupid things? That question, or variations on it, is being asked in Washington and around the country about the Obama administration. The same people who directed the campaign that defeated Hillary Clinton and routed John McCain, a campaign that raised far more money and attracted far more volunteers than any before it, have within a year come up with a legislative program that is crashing in ruins and that, to judge from recent polls, has left the Democratic party weaker than I have seen it in almost 50 years of closely following politics. The 2008 campaign was an impressive achievement. So, in a negative way, is the 2009 legislative program that...

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The Murtha district

Congressman John Murtha has died at age 77. He first came to Congress after winning a special election in 1974, to fill the seat vacated by the death of his predecessor, Republican John Saylor. This was one of five Democratic victories in 1974 special House elections in the first half of 1974 which demonstrated the political toxicity of the Watergate scandal. The other Democratic victors were Richard VanderVeen in Michigan 5, Gerald Ford’s old district, two weeks later in February, Thomas Luken in Ohio 1 in March, Bob Traxler in Michigan 8 in April, and John Burton in California 6 in June. Presumably there will be a special election in Pennsylvania 12 to replace Murtha on...

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Some deep thinking on health care

One of my favorite pundits is Walter Russell Mead, and I say this even though I often find myself disagreeing with him. Disagreeing, and thinking hard about whether I was really right after all. He’s got a great blogpost up at The American Interest about health care, which I think hits the target square in the middle on the main problem with the Democrats’ health care bills: "The current bill is a classic example of steady state, blue social model thinking: it is more interested in keeping the status quo going by pumping more money into it than it is in the basic restructuring needed to build a system that will work in the future." He follows up with his vision of health...

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A Conservative debate on spending

The opinion columns in the Sunday Telegraph give a glimpse of a debate British Conservatives are having now that they seem on the verge of winning a general election that must be held by June and that Republicans may have some time later: how to cut back government spending that has generated budget deficits exceeding 10% of gross domestic product. Conservative party leader David Cameron this month sent signals that a Conservative government might not cut spending back sharply, and has evoked different reactions from two veteran columnists. Matthew D’Ancona, who has an insider’s knowledge of the goings on in parliamentary politics, is not so alarmed by what he calls...

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Public-sector unions bleed taxpayers

Growing up in Michigan in the heyday of the United Auto Workers, I long assumed that labor unions were part of the natural order of things. That's no longer clear. Last month the Labor Department reported that private-sector unions lost 834,000 members last year and now represent only 7.2 percent of private-sector employees. That's down from the all-time peak of 36 percent in 1953 and '54. But union membership is still growing in the public sector. Last year 37.4 percent of public-sector employees were union members. That percentage was down near zero in the 1950s. For the first time in history, a majority of union members are government employees. In my view, the outlook for both...

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Are all climate scientists dishonest?

In my Wednesday Examiner column, written and published before the snowstorm which is currently blanketing metro Washington, I looked at the astonishing dishonesty of climate scientists. My American Enterprise Institute colleague Kenneth Green takes a somewhat critical view of my column, and makes some very interesting points. I think our differences are more in tone than in substance; I am willing to admit that there are some honest climate scientists, just as there are some honest trial lawyers and used car salesmen, and that honest people in all three professions serve useful functions in our society. We do need honest climate science and we need to be prepared to take actions...

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The race for Obama's Senate seat looks like a Massachusetts-type perfect storm

Since my earlier blogpost on the results of the February 2 Illinois primary, I’ve had the chance to crunch some more numbers, with help from the websites of the election boards of Chicago, suburban Cook County and the other 101 counties of Illinois. Here are the results in tabular form, with the number of votes cast for senator in the Republican and Democratic primaries. I’ve listed separately the results in Chicago, suburban Cook County, the Collar Counties and Downstate. The Collar Counties are DuPage, Kane (including the city of Aurora), Kendall, Lake and Will; returns from McHenry were unavailable and are therefore included in the Downstate total. Returns include 99% of...

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Democrats exiting the sinking ship?--Part 19: Minnesota

Republican Eric Paulsen beat the odds in 2008, winning 48%-41% in the suburban Minneapolis 3rd congressional district while Barack Obama was carrying it 52%-46%. Once upon a time the 3rd was Minnesota’s most Republican district, but since the late 1990s it has been trending Democratic, thanks to the liberal cultural attitudes of its upscale affluent voters. Looking ahead from the 2008 election, it looked like a tempting target for Democrats, even though 2008 nominee Ashwin Media fell short. But now comes the news that state Senator Terri Bonoff, who narrowly lost to Media at the DFL nominating convention, won’t run this year. She said she was “interested in the...

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Illinois primary voting numbers look good for Republicans

Illinois held the nation’s first non-special primary election this year, and almost all the results are in. The big story for national politics is the race for Barack Obama’s old Senate seat, now held by the inimitable Roland Burris. And the news is very good for Republicans. North Shore suburban Congressman Mark Kirk won the Republican primary with 57% of the vote to 19% for conservative Patrick Hughes, while the Democratic race was much closer. State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, long well ahead in the polls, won 39% to 34% for former Chicago Inspector General David Hoffman. Giannoulias has been running mostly ahead of or even with Kirk in public polls, but there’s...

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How climate-change fanatics corrupted science

Quick, name the most distrusted occupations. Trial lawyers? Pretty scuzzy, as witness the disgraced John Edwards, kept from the vice presidency in 2004 by the electoral votes of Ohio. Used car dealers? Always near the bottom of the list, as witness the universal understanding of the word "clunker." But over the last three months a new profession has moved smartly up the list and threatens to overtake all. Climate scientist. First came the Climategate e-mails made public in November that showed how top-level climate scientists distorted research, plotted to destroy data and conspired to prevent publication of dissenting views. The British government concluded last week that the...

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Joel Kotkin's America in 2050

Joel Kotkin has long been one of my favorite demographic analysts, with an uncanny ability to spot trends in columns of statistics and a keen eye for the revealing details of everyday life. His latest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, and he’ll be discussing it at an afternoon panel next Friday at American Enterprise Institute (you can to attend register here). Commenting will be an all-star panel: my AEI colleague Nick Eberstadt, Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress and Bill Frey of the Brookings Institution. I’ll be moderating. Kotkin looks ahead past our current economic troubles and underlines the strengths America has as it heads into the...

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Is high-speed rail the answer?

I confess to a fascination with proposals to build high-speed rail lines—and to intense skepticism that such lines can provide economically useful transportation in most parts of America. Sharing my skepticism is urbanologist Wendell Cox, writing in the Wall Street Journal. Cox argues that only two high-speed rail lines in the world—the Tokyo-Osaka Bullet Train and the Paris-Lyon TGV—have proved profitable. And he takes particular aim at the high-speed rail project which Barack Obama ballyhooed, and provided $2.6 billion in financing for, on the day after his State of the Union Speech. That line would run from somewhere in the Tampa Bay area to somewhere in metropolitan...

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An upset in Barack Obama's home congressional district?

Republican blogger Patrick Ruffini, who was one of the first, on December 30, to call for Republicans to seriously contest the Massachusetts Senate seat in the January 19 special election, is now calling for Republicans to back Charles Djou in the special election in Hawaii’s 1st congressional district. The seat is vacant because incumbent Democrat Neil Abercrombie resigned to run for governor (reasonably: it’s hard to campaign intensively when you’re 5,000 miles away in Washington). As Ruffini points out, under Hawaii law this is an all-party contest in which the leading candidate is elected, and there are at least two Democrats with serious backing running, with the...

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Getting Iran right

It has long seemed to me, and to the much better informed Michael Ledeen, that the chances of regime change in Iran are far greater than the chances that the current mullah regime would agree to abandon its nuclear program. But the Bush administration did not do much to encourage regime change, and the Obama administration has bet heavily on the prospects of negotiation and has at times treated regime charge as affirmatively undesirable. Their policy has had a year in which to work—and obviously hasn’t. But don’t take my word for it. The editorialists at the Washington Post now recognize that regime change is more likely than a deal. Key paragraph: “The problem...

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Maybe carbon dioxide is not the only factor affecting weather and climate

That’s the thought I had as I read this Wall Street Journal news story headlined, “Slowdown in Warming Linked to Water Vapor.” The lead sentence reads, “Climatologists have puzzled over why global average temperatures have stayed roughly flat in the past decade, despite a long-term warming trend.” The first thought that occurred to me was: Well, maybe it wasn’t an eternal long-term warming trend. We know from history that weather sometimes gets colder and sometimes gets warmer; we have good reason to believe (although Michael Mann’s discredited hockey-stick graph tried to deny this) that temperatures were higher in western Europe and other places...

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Obama impresses 'educated class' but not terrorists

Just whom are we trying to impress? That's a question that occurred to me when, on his second full day in the presidency, Barack Obama announced we would close the Guantanamo detainee facility within one year. It's a question that has kept occurring to me over the last year and nine days, even though Obama and his administration have proven unable to keep that promise. Whom are we trying to impress by ruling out enhanced interrogation techniques on unlawful combatants, techniques that produced valuable intelligence that saved American lives? Whom are we trying to impress by limiting questioning to the Army Field Manual? That's a good guide for handling prisoners of war and other...

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Anthrax attacks still unexplained

This week in the Wall Street Journal, Edward Jay Epstein explains why the September 2001 anthrax attacks have still not been explained, despite the most extensive investigation in the FBI’s history. He demonstrates why the FBI’s pinning of the crime on a chemical weapons scientist who committed suicide is utterly unconvincing. I blogged on this on New Year’s Day, citing an earlier version of Epstein’s article that appeared on his website. It seemed to me in September 2001 and it seems to me today, eight years and four months later, that there is a high likelihood that a state actor was behind the anthrax attacks. A reasonable retort: why then was there no...

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Generic ballot polls suggest possible epic party disaster for Dems

The Real Clear Politics average on the generic ballot now shows Republicans ahead 46%-42%. This is historically unprecedented. Except for a single CNN/USA Today poll conducted right after the Republican National Convention, September 5-7, 2008, which seems to have been an outlier, Republicans didn’t take the lead on the generic ballot—which party’s candidate will you vote for in House races—until March 9-15, 2009, in Rasmussen polling (which samples likely voters and whose results have therefore leaned more Republican than those of other pollsters since Barack Obama’s inauguration). Republicans since took a lead in the NPR poll (July 22-26), Gallup...

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Inside Obama's State of the Union speech

I know I’m weighing in late—in the old days of journalism this would have been early!—but I want to make a few points about Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech which I haven’t seen elsewhere. Bows to labor unions. In saluting the resilience of the American people, Obama specifically mentioned people “building cars and teaching kids”—both heavily unionized occupations. And his administration has been pouring money into them, through the General Motors and Chrysler bailouts and through the one-third of the 2009 stimulus package that went to state and local governments. Obama not only pays off his political debts, he gives his paymasters...

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Robocalls called the Massachusetts special election

Pollster Scott Rasmussen issues a spirited defense of robocall polling, in response to an attack by ABC pollster Gary Langer on Public Policy Polling, a North Carolina-based Democratic firm which, like Rasmussesn and SurveyUSA, uses robocalling. Langer was responding specifically to a PPP poll which showed that more Americans trusted Fox News than ABC, CBS or NBC News. Rasmussen convincingly defends robocalling and makes a further important point. “Rasmussen Reports is a new media outlet, digital from birth, and we informed our audience that this was a race worth watching two weeks before the stunning upset victory by Republican Scott Brown in an historically very...

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Can Democrats line up enough votes to confirm Bernanke?

President Barack Obama announced last August he would nominate Ben Bernanke to serve another term as Federal Reserve Chairman. In the last week, since Republican Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate election, senators of both parties have loudly announced they would oppose his nomination. Stock markets took a dive at the end of last week largely because (or so stock market observers told us -- plausibly, I think) of doubts that Bernanke would be confirmed. His term as chairman ends January 31, and the prospect of the Fed having no confirmed chairman certainly could be unsettling to players in the financial markets. This is one of those issues (like the votes on TARP...

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Democrats fall as fast as Nixon Republicans in 1974

Republican Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts' special Senate election was for Democratic leaders a moment that can be described in two words, of which I will only print the first here, which is "oh." Left-wing bloggers, liberal columnists and the stray Nobel Prize winner-turned polemicist are all urging Democrats in Congress to pass, somehow, some way, a health care bill, and many of them are calling for a second and even larger stimulus bill. But Democrats in Congress are replying, as politicians are wont to do when challenged by party wingers, that their name is on the ballot. New York Times editorialists can opine that the Massachusetts result had nothing to do with opposition...

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Sen. Bayh in danger; a look at the numbers

Pollster Scott Rasmussen has taken the first poll on the 2010 Senate race in Indiana—a race that until the last couple of weeks no one thought would be seriously contested. Rasmussen shows Democratic incumbent Evan Bayh trailing Republican Congressman Mike Pence 47%-44% and leading former Congressman John Hostettler 44%-41% and state Senator Martin Stutzman 45%-33%. These are astounding numbers. A general rule in polling is that what an incumbent gets in a poll he gets in a general election. Everyone knows him; those not voting for him now are not likely to vote for him later. This is particularly the case with Evan Bayh, who was elected secretary of state of Indiana in...

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Democrats exiting the sinking ship? Part 18: Arkansas

After saying repeatedly that he would not retire, Arkansas 1st district Democratic Congressman Marion Berry announced he would not run for reelection. This makes him the second Democratic House member from Arkansas to announce he would retire; 2nd district incumbent Vic Snyder had already done so. Both Snyder and Berry were first elected to the House in 1996, to succeed retiring Democrats—Ray Thornton in the Little Rock-based 2nd district, Blanche Lambert Lincoln in the east Arkansas 1st district. Lincoln was in the process of giving birth to twins; she was elected U.S. senator in 1998 and reelected in 2004. For Arkansas Democrats, 1996 was an excellent year to run for an...

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Voters spurn the 'boob bait' of the educated class

When the New York Times columnist David Brooks first sat down with Barack Obama, they talked a lot about Burke. That's Edmund Burke, the 18th century conservative British politician and philosopher. Not Jimmy Burke, the 20th century Massachusetts pol, who said that all you had to know to serve in Congress was "Social Security and shoes." The cold hard numbers in the Massachusetts special Senate election this week tell you something important about the appeal of Barack Obama and his policies on his 365th day in office. Democrat Martha Coakley did fine among the voters that would be impressed by your knowledge of Edmund Burke. But she got a thumbs down and Republican Scott Brown got a...

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Silver: Dems likely to lose seven Senate seats, gain none

Nate Silver has unveiled his algorithms for rating the chances of each party in this year’s Senate races. This replaces his seat-of-the-pants ratings which seemed to me to be unduly optimistic for his side (the Democrats). Silver’s numbers attempt to show the percentage likelihood of each party winning the seat, taking into account poll results, candidates’ ratings and the likelihood of candidates to win their parties’ nominations. Silver’s bottom line is the same as that of Larry Sabato: at the moment, Democrats are likely to lose seven seats and pick up none. That would reduce the Democrats’ majority in the Senate to 52-48. But one should...

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Failure of ad campaigns for health reform shows Supreme Court ruling not as bad as Dems fear

In the past year, we have seen Obama allies—or the potential adversaries he co-opted—advertise heavily in favor of the Democrats’ health care legislation. The idea was to avoid the ads that supposedly defeated the Clinton health care plans, but the money advantage didn’t seem to make much difference. Barrages of negative ads run in behalf of Corzine in New Jersey, Creigh Deeds in Virginia and Martha Coakley in Massachusetts did not prevent Republicans from winning in each of those Obama ’08...

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If Republicans run as strongly as Brown, only 103 House Dems are safe.

Republican Scott Brown won 52%-47% in Massachusetts, which voted 62%-36% for Barack Obama in 2008. How did he do in each of Massachusetts’s 10 congressional districts, all of which are represented by Democrats who have been reelected without much opposition this decade? Blogger Fred Bauer has attempted to calculate the results, omitting results in cities or towns which are split between congressional districts. Bauer shows Coakley winning 80%-20% in Michael Capuano’s 8th district (which voted 84% for Obama), 54%-46% in Ed Markey’s 7th district (65% Obama) and 51%-49% in John Olver’s western Mass 1st district (64% Obama). He shows Coakley narrowly...

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Democrats exiting the sinking ship? Part XVII

It’s unusual for a poll to show an incumbent House member trailing a challenger. So it’s interesting that a SurveyUSA poll conducted for FireDogLake shows Democratic incumbent Baron Hill of the 9th district of Indiana trailing Republican challenger Mike Sodrel 49%-41%. It should be noted that Sodrel is almost surely better known than most challengers; this is the fifth time he has run against Hill, and he won the 2004 race 49.5%-49.0%. Hill won 51%-46% in 2002, 50%-45% in 2006 and 58%-38% in 2008. The SurveyUSA poll shows Sodrel up 9% from where he ran 14 months ago and Hill running an amazing 17% behind where he ran in 2008. Will Hill run again? He (and Sodrel) have both...

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Democrats' Senate majority could be scaled far back

Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia is saying that if the Senate elections were somehow held today, rather than next November, Democrats would lose another seven seats and would be reduced to a 52-48 majority. One of those 52, of course, would be Independent Democrat Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Sabato is no partisan shill; he was quick to note how Republican fortunes were falling in the 2006 and 2008 cycles. He sees the Democrats losing the following seats if the elect ion were held today: Arkansas (Blanche Lincoln), Colorado (appointee Michael Bennet), Delaware (appointee Ted Kaufman, who is not running), Illinois (appointee Roland Burris, who is not running), Nevada (Harry...

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