Joe Biden Is No Jimmy Carter By Michael Barone
"The worst president since Jimmy Carter."
Commentary by Michael Barone
Most Recent Releases
September 3, 2021
August 27, 2021
A Tale of Two Airlifts: A Commentary by Michael Barone
"This is now on track," said White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Tuesday, "to be the largest airlift in U.S. history." On the process of bringing American citizens, Afghan partners and allies out, she continued, "I would not say that is anything but a success."
August 20, 2021
Fiddling While Kabul Falls: A Commentary by Michael Barone
Historians aren't actually sure that Nero caused or neglected a fire that consumed much of ancient Rome. Historians, however much they'd like to, won't be able to deny that President Joe Biden bears full responsibility for America's humiliating retreat from Afghanistan, and our neglect of the tens of thousands who aided us and now face torture and death from the Taliban.
August 13, 2021
California Liberals Flunking First Test of Government by Michael Barone
Will Gov. Gavin Newsom be the second Democratic California governor to be recalled and removed from office in this (or the last) century? Polls suggest that's one possible result of next month's recall election.
August 6, 2021
The Manhattan Project's 'Martians' Didn't Look Like America by Michael Barone
The Manhattan Project didn't look like America. Undertaken today, it would be criticized for failing to meet diversity and inclusion guidelines.
Today's human resources department professionals would be triggered if they looked at the list of physicists hired to produce what President Franklin Roosevelt was told could be a uranium-based bomb "with a destructiveness vastly greater than anything now known." They would be astounded that the president, in his haste to develop such a weapon, as he put it, "before Hitler got it," authorized the hiring of scientists without any attempt to match the diversity of the American population.
July 30, 2021
Do We Have to Watch Their Wretched Movie All Over Again? By Michael Barone
Why do I feel that I have seen this movie before?
July 23, 2021
Speech Suppression is Habit-Forming by Michael Barone
Speech suppression is a habit that the Biden administration and its liberal supporters can't seem to break. Many staffers may have picked up the habit in their student years: Colleges and universities have been routinely censoring "politically incorrect" speech for the last 30 years. As Thomas Sowell noted, "There are no institutions in America where free speech is more severely restricted than in our politically correct colleges and universities, dominated by liberals."
July 16, 2021
Joe Biden's Big Lie by Michael Barone
Did you know that Black people are not going to be allowed to vote in America anymore? At least in states controlled by Republicans. Sounds a bit unlikely, but that's a conclusion you might have come to if you took seriously what President Joe Biden said in Philadelphia Tuesday.
July 9, 2021
Both Parties Fail to Respond to Signals in the Political Marketplace by Michael Barone
I like to apply free market analysis to American politics. Within established laws, politicians compete for votes and are rewarded for maximizing voters' preferences. As in economics, there are sometimes market failures, but mostly the system seems to be self-regulating.
July 2, 2021
New York Mayoral Primary Shows Split Between Democratic Constituencies by Michael Barone
New York City's notoriously incompetent election officials have not finished tabulating the votes in the June 22 Democratic primary, with its novel ranked choice voting system. But the first choices of voters -- minus some 124,000 absentees -- nevertheless reveal some important things about the differences between different segments of the Democratic coalition in America's largest city.
June 25, 2021
Charles Murray's Two Uncomfortable Truths and His Not Bad Advice by Michael Barone
Give Charles Murray, longtime scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, credit for courage. Again and again, despite outrageously unfair attacks, he has returned to the public arena and persisted in telling unwelcome truths. In his meticulous prose, with charts and tables so elegant as to betray an aesthetic bent, he makes his points with precision and clarity.
June 18, 2021
This Juneteenth, Remember Americans Who Put Slavery on the Path to Extinction By Michael Barone
This week, the Senate unanimously passed a bill declaring Juneteenth a national holiday, commemorating June 19, 1865, when a Union general informed the last enslaved people in Texas that, thanks to the 13th Amendment, they were free. This was the denouement of a long process, begun more than four score years before and cruelly delayed for many decades.
June 14, 2021
Adolescents Need Constraints, Not Indulgence by Michael Barone
Letting adolescents have their way." That's one way to describe two public policies, advocated vociferously by woke liberals, opposed surely by most. One primarily affects young men, the other primarily young women.
June 4, 2021
Facebook's Speech Suppression Argues for Repeal of Section 230 and a Facebook Stock Price of Zero by Michael Barone
"A lot of people have egg on their face" for dismissing the COVID-19 lab leak theory, tweeted ABC News ' Jonathan Karl this week. "Some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them."
May 21, 2021
Reform Prosecutors May Hang on, but National Democrats May Not by Michael Barone
This week's Democratic primary election for Philadelphia district attorney could presage outcomes in the 2022 and 2024 elections, but not in the way the winner would like.
May 14, 2021
British Labour's Problems Could Hurt Democrats, Too by Michael Barone
Five years ago next month, British voters, in the largest turnout ever, voted to leave the European Union by a 52% to 48% margin. It was an unexpected result, and a harbinger of Donald Trump's even more unexpected election as president five months later.
May 7, 2021
Some Rotten Underpinnings of Biden's Positive Rating By Michael Barone
On the surface, Joe Biden seems to be doing pretty well. But underneath, there are signs of problems, areas where partisan overstretch threatens the underpinnings of what some are hailing as the new order of things.
April 30, 2021
The 2020 Census: Small Republican Gains in a Nation Hunkered Down by Michael Barone
The COVID-delayed results of the 2020 census are finally in, with totals for the 50 states and the District of Columbia at nearly one-third of a billion -- 331,449,281 -- and with surprises having to do with the short run and what French historians call the "longue duree."
April 23, 2021
The Ebbing of 'the Misperception That Bigotry Is Everywhere' by Michael Barone
How will future historians explain this? From 2001 to 2014, majorities of Americans, including supermajorities of blacks and non-Hispanic whites, told Gallup pollsters that "race relations" were either very or somewhat good.
April 16, 2021
Workers Don't Share Democrats' Nostalgia for Unions By Michael Barone
It wasn't even close. The final count was 1,798 against and 738 for, 71% to 29%.
