Michael Barone
The Archive
Here's why Biden is making big mistakes on crime, welfare and immigration
How to explain President Biden's ideological transformation over the years? Perhaps it's the same as the explanation of why the chameleon's complexion changes when he moves from desert to forest:...
Team Biden knows its open-borders plan is unpopular — so why do it?
"BIDEN," say the young demonstrators' T-shirts, imitating his campaign logo, "PLEASE LET US IN!" What a waste of T-shirt money: For President Biden seems determined to let in as many...
Liberals are pushing us fast back to the bad, old days
When public policies have produced disastrous results, and when alternative policies have resulted in immediate, seemingly miraculous improvement, why would anyone want to go back to the earlier policies? The...
GOP will do fine — with or without Donald Trump
When you've been consuming and producing political commentary for many years, you get used to certain recurring themes. One is the imminent disappearance or relegation to permanent minority status of...
Biden's 'racial justice' agenda: Judge everyone by the color of their skin
On Tuesday, six days into Joe Biden’s administration, it became clear why Susan Rice, hitherto a foreign-policy specialist, was named director of the Domestic Policy Council. Rice — unconfirmable for...
The left now just wants to silence conservatives — all of them
It wasn't just Donald Trump's detractors who felt a sudden sense of relief when they heard that Twitter was blocking his feed after the storming of the Capitol and the...
These Trump policies reduced economic inequality — will Biden dare to keep them?
The policies of defeated one-term presidents aren’t as easily reversed as their victorious successors sometimes suppose. Even when, as now, the winning party has majorities in both houses of Congress....
How the cultural elite came to rule the Democratic Party
Eighty-five percent of counties with a Whole Foods store voted for Joe Biden. That factoid, relayed by The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, tells you something important about the election...
Democrats are now reaping the whirlwind of their 2016 election 'Resistance'
"My sense is that if Trump wins, Hillary supporters will be sad,” left-wing writer Sally Kohn tweeted the day of the 2016 election. “If Hillary wins, Trump supporters will be...
No, GOP's gerrymandering edge is not a threat to democracy
One of the many big surprises in this month's surprising election was the Democrats' failure to overturn Republican majorities in state legislatures. Various Democratic committees budgeted $88 million to flip...
What the pollsters got so wrong with 2020 election
I find it remarkable that polling has been as accurate as it has been — but it got worse this week. The RealClearPolitics average of recent polls showed Joe Biden...
Sometimes it looks like neither Biden nor Trump is trying to win
Are both presidential candidates trying to lose? Or at least pursuing campaign strategies that put them at grave risk of defeat? In nearly four years, Donald Trump has made little...
COVID-19 lockdowns seriously deepen the economic divide
Vaclav Smil, 76, native of communist Czechoslovakia and former University of Manitoba professor for four decades, has written 39 books on energy, technology and demography. “Nobody,” says Bill Gates, who...
Democrats latest awful idea: adding new states to lock in Senate control forever
What happens if, as seems much more likely now than it did a year or six months ago, Democrats overturn the Republican majority in the Senate? No clear answer yet,...
Joe Biden and Donald Trump are both aiming only at a narrow win
The presidential campaign is at knife’s edge. Both parties assume patterns of support will closely resemble those in 2016. And both are making surprisingly little effort, considering how close that...
It's now looking like the lockdowns may have been a huge mistake
Were lockdowns a mistake? To that nagging question, the answer increasingly seems to be yes. Certainly, they were a novelty. As novelist Lionel Shriver writes, “We’ve never before responded to...
Face the facts on when America's divisions got so deep
Give Politico’s chief Washington correspondent, Ryan Lizza, some credit. After Michelle Obama’s speech capping the first night of the Democrats’ virtual convention, he tweeted: “Story of an era in two...
Joe Biden's perilous veep-pick balancing act
If the presidential-nominating process is the weakest part of our political system, the vice-presidential selection process comes solidly in second place. Some might even argue it’s a contender for the...
'Peaceful protests' prompt new lows in media misconduct
'Protesters in California,” tweeted ABC News about an incident in Oakland, “set fire to a courthouse, damaged a police station and assaulted officers after a peaceful demonstration intensified.” If you’d...
COVID-19 may have killed the conventions, but they had a lot of co-morbidities
If things had proceeded according to schedule, we’d be checking the polls this week to see if Joe Biden had gotten a bounce from his acceptance speech in Milwaukee. That’s...