Washington Examiner columnist and nationally recognized political sage Michael Barone was feted Wednesday for his contributions to public discourse.
Barone joined former Federal Election Commission member Bradley Smith, Wall Street Journal Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot and Hoover Institution fellow John Taylor in winning a Bradley Prize, given for “outstanding intellectual achievement.” Barone, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and co-author of “The Almanac of American Politics,” became The Examiner‘s senior political analyst in April 2009.
The Bradley winners were celebrated at the Kennedy Center Wednesday night. In his acceptance speech, Barone said he found his avocation early, when his parents bought him the World Book Encyclopedia. “When my mother would send me out in the back yard to play, I would sneak back down the side door in to the basement where we kept the encyclopedia and make tables showing the populations of major cities in 1940 and 1950,” he said. “For reasons that I have always found unaccountable, none of the other kids were interested in census figures.”
Summing up his career, Barone said: “Professionally, I have moved from law to political consulting to journalism, each one of which tends to pay less than the one before; the only next step is academia.” “But as I look back,” he said, “it seems to me that I have spent my career trying to understand and describe as best I can this wonderful country, the United States of America.”
The prize is given by the Bradley Foundation, named for Milwaukee brother-businessmen. It is “committed to preserving and defending the tradition of free representative government and private enterprise that has enabled the American nation and, in a larger sense, the entire Western world to flourish intellectually and economically.”
“All this is second nature to Michael,” Examiner Editor Stephen G. Smith said at the time the award was announced, “because he loves this country and what it stands for.”
Four awards are given out every year. Each carries a $250,000 cash prize. Past winners include Washington Post columnists Charles Krauthammer and George Will, activist Ward Connerly, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, scholar Victor Davis Hanson and Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol.
