Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Mon, 22 Sep 2008 03:23:45 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Michael Barone :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Michael+Barone istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/voters-trust-mccain-on-economy/86308/ Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America, the 500-point plunge of the Dow, the government takeover of AIG — all these have got the presidential candidates talking about the economy. But both Senator Obama and Senator McCain have been vague about their solutions. And for good reason. Our economic problems are concentrated in the finance sector, and that's the part of the economy the average voter knows least about. Moreover, the political blame is widely... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/getting-inside-obamas-loop/85808/ Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Senator McCain was trained as a fighter pilot. In his selection of Governor Palin, and in his convention and campaigning since, he has shown that he learned an important lesson from his fighter pilot days: He has gotten inside Senator Obama's OODA loop. That term was the invention of a great fighter pilot and military strategist, John Boyd. It's an acronym for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. "The key to victory is operating at a faster tempo than the enemy," Boyd's biographer, Robert Coram... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/battle-of-the-party-themes/85333/ Mon, 8 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The national conventions are political shows staged to influence voters. Soon, we can measure the bounce that the two tickets have received from their gatherings. But the more important question is whether the conventions establish arguments that are sustainable — over the course of the campaign and, for the winning ticket, over four years of governance. Four years ago, John Kerry's convention produced a narrative that proved unsustainable. George W. Bush's convention produced one that was... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/obamas-dnc-storybook/84509/ Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Once upon a time, the two parties' national conventions chose presidential nominees. Now, they are television shows that try to establish a narrative — one that links the long-since-determined nominee's life story with the ongoing history of the nation, one that shows how this one man is perfectly positioned to lead America to a better future. The hope is that the nominee will get a bounce in the polls. And they usually do. Gallup poll data shows that nominees got a 5% or better bounce from 14... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/echoes-of-berlin-olympics/84050/ Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Last week, the two erstwhile communist superpowers were in the spotlight. Starting on August 8, China staged the Olympics — an event on the schedule for years. Also on August 8, Russia invaded the independent republic of Georgia — which apparently caught our government flatfooted. President Bush remained in Beijing watching the Olympians, while Prime Minister Putin, making no secret of who is in charge, went to the Russian borderland with Georgia to supervise. There are echoes of history in all... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/the-scotch-irish-and-other-election-factors/83612/ Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST To understand changes in the political map, we naturally tend to look for contemporary explanations. But American political alignments are not written on an empty slate. Beginnings matter, and the civic personalities of states tend to reflect the cultural folkways of their first settlers. So I was not startled when I compared state poll results in this election with the results of the 2004 election and found patterns that reflect the surges of historic internal migration. For this year's polls... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/the-limits-of-obama/83116/ Mon, 4 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Just when you think you've got the presidential race figured out, something comes along to upend your carefully wrought conclusions. Mainstream press provided lavish coverage of Senator Obama's trip abroad the week of July 21-25 and predicted he would get a bounce in the polls. Some of his supporters believe he has put the election away. Other observers employ the hackneyed and meaningless phrase, "It's his to lose." The poll numbers tell a different and more nuanced story. The two national... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/the-tipping-point/82715/ Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Sometimes public opinion doesn't flow smoothly; it shifts sharply when a tipping point is reached. Case in point: gas prices. $3 a gallon gas didn't change anybody's mind about energy issues. $4 a gallon gas did. Evidently, the experience of paying more than $50 for a tankful gets people thinking we should stop worrying so much about global warming and the environmental dangers of oil wells on the outer continental shelf and in Alaska. Drill now! Nuke the caribou! Our system of divided... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/mccain-take-cues-from-ford/82254/ Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Looking back over the last 40 years, the presidential campaign that most closely resembles this year's is the contest between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in 1976. The Republicans were the incumbent presidential party that year, as they are now, but the Democrats had a big advantage in party identification — on the order of 49% from 26% then, far more than today. The Republican president who had been elected and re-elected in the last two campaigns, Richard Nixon, had dismal favorability... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/obama-beyond-the-race-test/81299/ Mon, 7 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST "They're going to try to make you afraid of me," Barack Obama told the audience at a Jacksonville fundraiser last month. "He's young and inexperienced and he's got a funny name. And did I mention he's black?" Mr. Obama was doing here by inference what many of his supporters do more explicitly. Mr. Obama's candidacy, in their view, puts American voters to the test: Are they open-minded enough to vote for a black candidate? Or are they still so overcome by racial prejudice as to reject the first... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/why-veeps-now-matter/80919/ Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST "Not Exactly a Crime" is the title of a book on America's vice presidents published in 1972 — a year before Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign for actually committing a crime. The office of vice president has long been the butt of jokes — you know the punch lines — but as we await Senator Obama and Senator McCain's choices for vice president, we do so with the knowledge that vice presidents in the last five administrations have been important officers of government. (Yes, including... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/facts-are-changing/80470/ Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST As we enter the second half of the campaign year, facts are undermining the Democratic narrative that has dominated our politics since about the time Hurricane Katrina rolled into the Gulf coast — most importantly, the facts about Iraq. During the Democratic primary season, all the party's candidates veered hardly a jot or title from the narrative that helped the Democrats sweep the November 2006 elections. Iraq is spiraling into civil war, we invaded unwisely and have botched things ever... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/in-defense-of-lobbyists/80063/ Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Senator Obama has long said that his campaign will not accept contributions from lobbyists, and now that he is the presumptive nominee, the Democratic National Committee won't accept them, either. Senator McCain says that his campaign won't employ lobbyists, and volunteers are now queried about possible lobbying activity in the past. It's only a matter of time until someone calls for a law requiring every lobbyist to paint a big, red "L" on his forehead. Behind this stigmatization of lobbyists... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/this-years-battleground-states/79539/ Mon, 9 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Almost precisely at the midpoint between the Iowa caucuses on January 3 and the general election on November 4, the general election campaign is on. Neither party's nominee swept the primaries. John McCain's narrow popular vote margins in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, and most of the Super Tuesday states, combined with the Republicans' winner-take-all delegate allocation rules, effectively gave him the Republican nomination on February 6. Mike Huckabee made it official by withdrawing... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/the-economy-a-reality-check/78964/ Fri, 30 May 2008 00:00:00 EST 'It's the economy, stupid," James Carville famously said during the 1992 campaign, when a young Bill Clinton was running against the other President Bush. The same could be said during this presidential campaign. The headlines are full of economic bad news — mortgage foreclosures, the collapse of an investment bank, higher gas and food prices, and lower home prices. Voters routinely list the economy as their chief concern, and consumer confidence has sunk to low levels. Yet at the same time... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/distrusting-obama/78630/ Tue, 27 May 2008 00:00:00 EST As Barack Obama makes his slow but steady way toward the Democratic nomination, the assumption in the admiring precincts of the press corps is that voters have dismissed as irrelevant his longtime association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. But that may prove as mistaken as the assumption, back in 1988, that voters would not be impressed by Michael Dukakis's 11-year support of a law granting weekend furloughs to convicts sentenced to life without parole, an issue brought up in the primaries... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/four-ways-this-years-election-is-different/76635/ Mon, 19 May 2008 00:00:00 EST What makes this presidential election different from all other presidential elections? And different from what we expected when the year began? First, neither party's presumptive nominee was chosen by massive support from primary voters, as John Kerry was in 2004, George W. Bush in 2000 or Bill Clinton in 1992. That may not seem obvious in the case of John McCain, who effectively clinched the Republican nomination on Super Tuesday, February 5. But look at the numbers: In January, Mr. McCain won... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/sherwood-churchill-now-feith/76265/ Mon, 12 May 2008 00:00:00 EST In trying to understand news about the conflicts in Iraq, I work to keep in mind the difference between what we know now about decision making in World War II and what most Americans knew at the time. From the memoirs and documents published after the war, we've learned how leaders made critical judgments. But at the time, even well-informed journalists only could guess at what was going on behind the scenes. Today we're only beginning to learn about what went on behind the scenes in regard to... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/hillarys-tenuous-lead/75414/ Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST One thing many people haven't noticed about Hillary Clinton's 55% to 45% victory over Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary is that it put her ahead of Obama in the popular vote. Her 214,000-vote margin in the Keystone State means that she has won the votes, in primaries and caucuses, of 15,112,000 Americans, compared to 14,993,000 for Mr. Obama. If you add in the votes, as estimated by the folks at realclearpolitics.com, in the Iowa, Nevada, Washington, and Maine caucuses, where state... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/recession-we-never-knew-you/74613/ Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST "It's the economy, stupid." Those immortal words of the political philosopher James Carville in 1992 have been reverberating increasingly in the 2008 campaign. Polls show the economy as the top issue for voters, far ahead of Iraq. The general assumption is that this helps the Democrats, since the Republicans hold the White House and economic growth has stalled on their watch. But what do voters want done about the economy? And how amenable are they to the big-government programs Democrats are... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/missing-a-generation/73899/ Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Most people's views of the world are shaped by the times in which they came of age. That's why we speak of a baby boom generation or a Generation X. But some people miss out on the formative experiences of most of their peers. That's the case, I think, with the Republicans' certain nominee and the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. John McCain missed the 1960s. Barack Obama missed the 1980s. That's obvious in Senator McCain's case. He was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam between 1967... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/clintons-one-plausible-path/72628/ Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Barack Obama won 11 out of 11 primaries and caucuses between Super Tuesday and February 19. Hillary Clinton won three out of four contests on March 4. Suddenly, the look and feel of the Democratic presidential race is different. Yet the delegate count has changed hardly at all. Three victories in four states with 370 delegates netted Hillary Clinton only about a 20-delegate edge, leaving her still about 100 delegates behind. On the night that John McCain officially clinched the Republican... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/cindy-vs-michelle/71760/ Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST It's starting to feel like the general election. Rising to claim victory in the Wisconsin Republican primary before the networks could declare Barack Obama the winner on the Democratic side, John McCain started right in on his general election opponent. He promised to "make sure Americans are not deceived by an eloquent but empty call for change that promises no more than a holiday from history and a return to false promises and failed policies of a tired philosophy that trusts in government... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/hillary-confronts-a-rough-landing/70672/ Mon, 4 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Just shy of a month ago, after the first votes were cast in Iowa and New Hampshire, it seemed that the Republican Party faced a fluid and fractious nomination contest, while the Democrats faced a clear-cut choice between two not particularly adversarial candidates. What a difference a few weeks can make. Now it appears that John McCain is on an unobstructed flight path to the nomination, facing a few crosswinds but no serious navigation hazards, while the two leading Democrats, Barack Obama... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/back-at-the-carpenter-hotel/69873/ Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST My campaign and election memories go back to 1960, when I was one of the few who backed John Kennedy at an election night party that my parents were throwing. The early broadcasts had him winning big — they extrapolated that his gains in heavily Roman Catholic Connecticut would be matched across the mostly Protestant country — and I was too young to stay up for the dramatic conclusion. Two years later, as a freshman at Harvard, I went into Boston and saw a fresh-faced Edward Kennedy on the... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/five-elections-five-winners/69465/ Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Five elections. Five winners. Barack Obama (Iowa Democratic caucus), Mike Huckabee (Iowa Republican caucus), Mitt Romney (Wyoming Republican caucus, held January 5 when no one was watching), Hillary Clinton (New Hampshire Democratic primary) and John McCain (New Hampshire Republican primary). Still waiting for a win: Fred Thompson, on a bus tour in South Carolina; Rudy Giuliani, running around Florida; and John Edwards, hoping for a win in his native South Carolina, where he won in 2004, though... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/iowa-aftermath/69020/ Mon, 7 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST As this is written, the final numbers are not in, but the results of the Iowa precinct caucuses are clear. Two candidates that almost no one in the country had heard of four years ago — Democratic Senator Barack Obama and Republican Mike Huckabee — have emerged victorious. And by mighty impressive margins, particularly so if you factor in turnout. The Iowa Democratic Party estimated Democratic turnout at 220,000, nearly double the 124,000 recorded in 2004. The Republican turnout appears to have... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/looking-for-mr-right-in-2008/68472/ Fri, 21 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST On the issues, not very much separates the front-runners for the Democratic nomination. What's interesting is that all of them — Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards — are running well to the left of the only Democratic presidents in the last 40 years, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. The top Republican candidates, on the other hand, are all over the place on issues. Mike Huckabee, leading in every December Iowa poll and no. 1 nationally in the Rasmussen poll, denounces "the Bush... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/triumphs-for-democracy/67765/ Mon, 10 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST The world looks safer, friendlier, more hopeful than it did as we approached Christmastime last year. Then, we were on the defensive, perhaps on the verge of defeat, in Iraq. The Europeans' attempts to persuade Iran to renounce nuclear weapons seemed to have failed. Hugo Chavez was using his near-dictatorial powers and the oil wealth of Venezuela to secure the election of opponents of the American "empire" in Latin America. Today, things look different. And they suggest, to me at least, that... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/obedient-servants/66276/ Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST Education is not ordinarily thought to be in the purview of a Federal Reserve chairman. So it's striking when Alan Greenspan in his memoir, "The Age of Turbulence," raises the subject. "Our primary and secondary education system," he writes, "is deeply deficient in providing homegrown talent to operate our increasingly complex infrastructure." The result: "Too many of our students languish at too low a level of skill upon graduation, adding to the supply of lesser-skilled labor in the face of... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/watershed-moment/65864/ Mon, 5 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST October 2007 may turn out to be the month that immigration became a key issue in presidential politics. It hasn't been, at least in my lifetime. The Immigration Act of 1965, which turned out to open up America to mass immigration after four decades of restrictive laws, wasn't one of the Great Society issues Lyndon Johnson emphasized in 1964. The Immigration Act of 1986, which legalized millions of illegal immigrants but whose border and workplace provisions have never been effectively enforced... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/our-political-pudding/65406/ Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST "Pray take away this pudding," Winston Churchill commanded one night at dinner. "It has no theme." Our two political parties, facing the first election in 80 years in which neither the incumbent president nor the incumbent vice president is running, are similarly bereft of themes. Or, to put it more precisely, neither has a convincing narrative of where we are in history and where we should be headed next. Successful political parties usually have such narratives. Theodore Roosevelt's... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/were-way-past-2006/64963/ Mon, 22 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST Things are not working out as Democratic congressional leaders expected. For the first eight months of this year they struggled to find some way to shut down the American military effort in Iraq. They took it for granted that we were stuck in a quagmire in Iraq, with continuous high casualties and very little to show for them. They pressed hard to get the Republican votes they needed to block a filibuster in the Senate and were cheered when some Republicans, like John Warner, seemed to lean... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/crumbling-ivory-tower/64141/ Mon, 8 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST I am old enough to remember when America's colleges and universities seemed to be the most open-minded and intellectually rigorous institutions in our society. Today, something very much like the opposite is true: America's colleges and universities have become, and have been for some decades, the most closed-minded and intellectually dishonest institutions in our society. Colleges and universities today almost universally have speech codes, which prohibit speech deemed hurtful by others... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/last-picture-show-2007-10-01/63694/ Mon, 1 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST The United Auto Workers' strike against General Motors last week turned out to be brief. The company and union negotiators reached agreement not much more than 48 hours after union members started picketing. It barely made the front pages of most newspapers and seems to have made few ripples in the stock market. It didn't last long enough for any Democratic presidential candidate to walk the picket line. What a contrast with the last UAW national strike against GM. In September 1970, 400,000... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/narrative-of-success/63242/ Mon, 24 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST For most of the last year, the dominant narrative in most media, and for most voters, has been that we are getting nowhere in Iraq and that the Democrats, after their victory in last November's elections, are going to get out of Iraq. But events are not playing out that way. Last week, the Senate failed to pass an amendment that would have made it more difficult to rotate troops into Iraq — and passed, by a 72-to-25 margin, a resolution denouncing the MoveOn.org ad that attacked "General Betray... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/lawyering-the-war-to-death/62784/ Mon, 17 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST "Never in the history of the United States had lawyers had such extraordinary influence over war policy as they did after 9/11." Those are the words of Jack Goldsmith, the Harvard law professor who was one of those lawyers, as head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 and 2004. They appear in his book "The Terror Presidency," hailed as a criticism of the Bush administration's legal policies, which in part it is. Believing that some of his predecessor's opinions... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/de-funding-ahmadinejad/61315/ Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism. The mullah regime is providing weapons to kill our soldiers in Iraq. It is working furiously to develop nuclear weapons. We certainly do not want to go to war against Iran — though perhaps we could do a more aggressive job of keeping the mullahs' minions out of Iraq. But we have other weapons that are being deployed now — not by the military, the federal government, or officials in Washington, but by state government officials and legislatures in... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/driving-them-leftward/60393/ Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST One issue that's going to come up this fall that you haven't heard much about is trade. Or at least I hope it's going to come up. The Bush administration has submitted four free-trade agreements for approval by Congress — with Peru, Colombia, Panama, and South Korea. At the moment, their chances don't look very good. Democrats have taken to opposing FTAs almost unanimously. In July 2006, the House voted by only a 217-215 margin for the CAFTA, the FTA with four Central American countries, and... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/shifting-perceptions-of-the-war/59898/ Mon, 6 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST It's not often that an opinion article shakes up Washington and changes the way a major issue is viewed. But that happened last week, when the New York Times printed an opinion article by analysts of the Brookings Institution, Michael O'Hanlon and Ken Pollack, on the progress of the surge strategy in Iraq. Yes, progress. Messrs. O'Hanlon and Pollack supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 — Mr. Pollack even wrote a book urging the overthrow of Saddam Hussein — but they have sharply criticized... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/moving-past-the-funk/59436/ Mon, 30 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST Not all is gloom out there. That's the dominant message from the most recent Pew Global Attitudes Project's poll of 47 nations. Pew found that there is rising or constantly high contentment all over the globe with one's quality of life and family income. Satisfaction tends to be highest in America and Canada, but not far behind are Western Europe and Latin America. Even in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America, about one-third are highly satisfied with their quality of life and income. As the... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/leaving-boomers-behind/58939/ Mon, 23 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST For the past 15 years, our politics has been a civil war between two halves of the baby boom generation — generally taken to include those born between 1946 and 1964. We have had two presidents who were born in 1946 and graduated from high school in the class of 1964, which had the highest test scores in history. Both those presidents happened to have personal characteristics that people on the opposite sides of the culture war absolutely loathe. We first saw the acrimony of the boomer civil... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/when-fdr-prayed-over-the-air/58498/ Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST In front of the Franklin Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, N.Y., are two busts on pedestals, one of Winston Churchill and the other of Franklin Roosevelt. Carved into the marble beneath Roosevelt are these three words: The War President. We are not encouraged to think of Roosevelt these days as a "war president" — the moving FDR memorial in Washington makes little mention of his role as commander in chief of 12 million men, though it does quote his pre-war statement, "I hate war," the sincerity... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/veering-off-course/58066/ Mon, 9 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST President Bush's meeting last week with President Putin and his forthcoming meeting with the Chinese leader, Hu Jin Tao, are a reminder that Mr. Bush and his successors will continue to face the challenge of dealing with these two unfriendly and potentially dangerous powers. Much of the world has moved toward democracy and freedom, but China hasn't much and Russia seems headed in the opposite direction. Of the two, China is probably easier to deal with. It appears to have a collective... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/our-first-revolution/57786/ Tue, 3 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST The events that we celebrate this Fourth of July are familiar to most of us. In recent years, even as some universities decline to replace scholars of America's Founding, American readers have been snapping up — and reading — terrific books about the founding fathers. We want to know more about how our system of government was established and our liberties proclaimed. But the founding fathers did not write on a blank slate. When they began protesting the acts of George III and the British... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/immigration-bill-shocker/57704/ Mon, 2 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST The Senate's rejection of the immigration bill was a shocker. On Tuesday, 64 senators, four more than the required 60, voted for cloture, that is, to consider the bill and a couple of dozen amendments. On Thursday, only 46 senators, 14 fewer than required, voted for cloture and 53 voted against it, which was a vote to kill the bill. The bill's opponents had been assuming that if cloture had been voted, there would have been the 50 senators needed to approve the bill — only 50 because Senator... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/untangling-the-polls/57252/ Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST The Republican primary electorate is fluid. The Democratic primary electorate is viscous. That's my conclusion when I look back over the plentiful polls that have been tracking the two electorates' choices in this wide-open presidential race. The shape of the Republican race has plainly changed over the past six months. In the 15 December and January polls compiled by realclearpolitics.com, Rudy Giuliani averaged a narrow 30% to 24% lead over John McCain, with 7% for Mitt Romney. In the 28... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/get-us-past-iowa/56745/ Mon, 18 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, the leaders in Republican polls during most of the year, have announced they will not compete in the straw poll held in Iowa on August 15. Fred Thompson, who is polling well and expected to enter the race, may also opt out of this early test of strength. Florida has moved its primary to January 29, just one week after New Hampshire and shortly after the actual Iowa caucus, in defiance of Democratic Party rules. Florida Democrats risk being tossed out of the... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/red-nation-blue-nation/56269/ Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST Listening to the recent debates among the candidates, monitoring their Websites and reading the poll numbers, one gets the impression that the Republican and Democratic primary electorates are living in two different nations — or the same nation that faces two very different threats. The Republicans want to protect us against Islamist terrorists. The Democrats want to protect us against climate change. Each side believes the other's fears are largely imaginary. Rush Limbaugh regularly treats... MICHAEL BARONE http://www.nysun.com/opinion/steering-clear/54868/ Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 EST I confess that I haven't read the text of the compromise immigration bill agreed to by Sens. Edward Kennedy and Jon Kyl, and I request the right to, in congressional language, revise and extend my remarks. But at this writing, apparently nobody has read it — the final text is still not available. Many Americans have been complaining that the Iraqi parliament has been taking too long to come to agreement on sharing oil revenues and other big issues. But the same thing happens in the United...