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Obama, Democrats Disrespect Mexico and Brazil--Where Are the Bush Critics?
Tweet Share on Facebook March 18, 2009 Comment (12)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
They will love us again, Obamaenthusiasts exulted, other countries will love us when we replace Bushchimphitler with a sophisticated, urbane leader who shows respect for other nations.
Well, how's that playing out? Not so well. Barack Obama, as it happens, has never visited Latin America. On the stump and otherwise he has paid little attention to it. So perhaps it's not surprising that in the last few days he has shown disrespect for the two leading nations of Latin America, Brazil and Mexico, two nations which between them have half the population of Latin America. Two nations which have intelligent, constructive presidents, the center-left Lula da Silva of Brazil and the center-right Felipe Calderon on Mexico.
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Republicans Get Good News in Polls as They Close the Ballot Gap on Democrats
Tweet Share on Facebook March 18, 2009 Comment (39)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Republicans have the lead in the generic ballot in the Rasmussen poll and are running even in that question in the latest NPR poll. The Republican lead in Rasmussen is 41-39 percent, with Democrats at the low end of the 39-50 percent range they've been over the past year and Republicans at the top end of their 34-41 percent range.
Is this just statistical noise? Quite possibly. But if I were chairman of the NRCC I would sure be looking at targeting a whole lot more races than I had imagined I would three months ago.
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Young Downscale Voters Didn't Show Up At Polls in 2008 Elections
Tweet Share on Facebook March 17, 2009 Comment (2)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
An update to my blog post yesterday on young voters: I've just checked out some Census numbers which I should have consulted before finishing that post. From the Census estimates of population by age in 2007, I find that of the 227,719,424 people 18 and over, 50,550,121 were 18 to 29. In other words, the under 30 population was 22 percent of the total adult population. So the young made up 22 percent of the potential electorate (or maybe one percent or two percent less, since they're probably less likely to be citizens and more likely to be imprisoned felons than their elders) but were only, according to the exit poll, 18 percent of the actual electorate. Which suggests very strongly that the young vote in 2008 was tilted heavily upscale, in terms of income and especially education, compared to the overall population. This reinforces my sense that the downscale young didn't show up and vote very much at all. So it remains, to me at least, a mystery how they would have voted if they did. I need to do more thinking and research on this.
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Ron Silver Was Articulate, Energetic and Made the Left to Right Political Journey
Tweet Share on Facebook March 16, 2009 Comment (11)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Ron Silver, actor and political activist, has died at 62. I admired him as an actor and as a political thinker. In my occasional conversations with him, he was knowledgeable, articulate, clear-sighted, energetic. Lots of energy: his speech to the 2004 Republican National Convention roused the crowd as few speeches by anyone but the nominees and (sometimes) the keynoter do. He had made after 9/11, as I had made more slowly some years earlier, the political journey from left to right, but he seemed entirely lacking in the hard edge of hate that so evident in some liberals and some conservatives. I sensed that he retained a certain sympathy for his younger, more liberal self and for the people whose politics he had shared but could no longer. And I felt instinctively that he understood things—understood politics and, more important, understood public policy and the importance of standing up for civilization against barbarism. Roger L. Simon has a beautiful remembrance of Ron and John Podhoretz has a fine appreciation.
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Downscale Voters Aren't Marrying, Forming Families—Republicans Should Go Upscale
Tweet Share on Facebook March 16, 2009 CommentBy Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
When I saw the headline "Bristol's myth" on David Frum's "New Majority" blog post, I braced myself for another of David's sneers at Sarah Palin. But he makes an important and broader point. And that is that unmarried motherhood is becoming quite common among young downscale whites, but remains very uncommon among young upscale whites. It's all very well and good, David argues, for Republicans to appeal to downscale middle-aged and elderly votes with conservative stands on cultural issues. But "family values," he says, are simply not going to be persuasive for young downscale voters who aren't marrying and forming traditional families. Here's his nut graf:
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The Left Pushes Secular Religions: Global Warming, Embryonic Stem Cell Research
Tweet Share on Facebook March 16, 2009 Comment (7)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
It seems to me that many on the cultural left are, while secular when it comes to conventional religion, very much believers in something that might be called secular religions—the religion of global warming, the religion of embryonic stem-cell research.
My Creators Syndicate column discusses the Obama budget and how it caters to the religion of global warming by imposing huge costs on what now is an ailing economy in order to fight disasters which we are told will strike us—we area told that there can be no argument—you must have faith!—40 or 50 years from now.
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How Detroit's Big Three Automakers Screwed Up
Tweet Share on Facebook March 13, 2009 Comment (7)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
This lecture by Joseph B. White, Detroit bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal from 1998 to 2007, is as good a short account of the Detroit automakers' woes as I have seen. Definitely worth reading. White is now a senior editor for the Journal in Washington. The Detroit bureau, by the way, once upon a time was one of the Journal's major incubators of talent. Norman Pearlstine and Seth Lipsky worked in the Detroit bureau on their way to the top echelons of journalism. I remember meeting Pearlstine in the early 1970s when I was a law clerk in Detroit (and writing the first edition of what became The Almanac of American Politics).
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Republicans Should Target Upscale Voters Unhappy With the Obama Economy
Tweet Share on Facebook March 12, 2009 Comment (6)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Very smart and subtle analysis of polling data by National Journal's Amy Walter about Barack Obama and his programs. Fascinating point: those who are watching his economic program most closely aren't very favorable. As Walter points out, those are upscale voters and tilt somewhat Republican. But as she also points out, Obama did very well with these groups in November 2008. This adds some heft to my recommendation that Republicans go upscale. That's where the votes are—or may be.
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Low Income Families Hurt By Ill-Conceived, Anti-China Consumer Safety Law
Tweet Share on Facebook March 12, 2009 Comment (3)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Blogger-lawyer-radio talk host Hugh Hewitt directs our attention in this column and in an earlier blog post to the unintended consequences of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008. It was passed in response to the presence of lead in toys manufactured in China—a genuine menace. But its broad terms, and the fact that it authorizes lawsuits by private lawyers, means that thrift shops are removing clothes from their shelves because they cannot rule out the infinitesimal possibility that the zippers contain lead. And it covers products intended for children up to age 12, even though 10-year-olds are not very likely to suck on their zippers. The result: low income families are going to have to pay more for their kids' clothes. And outfits like Goodwill and the Salvation Army are going to take a needless hit. Senator Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota's sole senator at the moment, played a major role in drafting the bill and now expresses puzzlement over its application. Maybe she and her colleagues should have thought more about this when they were getting positive news coverage for protecting innocent children.
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Men More Likely to Lose Their Jobs Than Women
Tweet Share on Facebook March 12, 2009 Comment (6)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
An old conservative joke: A headline in New York Times reads, "New York destroyed by nuclear bomb." Subhead: "Women, Minorities Hardest Hit." But in this recession men are more likely than women to become unemployed. Why? In past inventory-glut recessions we would have said because men are more likely to work in factories which are closed down. In this financial-solvency recession, one reason is that government and health care payrolls are the only ones increasing, and women are heavily represented in those fields. Pollster Scott Rasmussen sometimes shows the response to questions by private sector and public sector workers. I think it would be interesting to know how private sector men, public sector men, private sector women and public sector women respond.
Michael Barone
Michael Barone is a senior writer for U.S.News & World Report and principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics. He has written for many publications—including the Economist and the New York Times.
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