Michael-Barone is senior Political Analyst for the Washington Examiner.
A resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, he is also a
Fox News Channel contributor and co-author of The Almanac of
American Politics. His column is published Wednesdays and Sundays.
Reading"Masters and Commanders," Andrew Roberts' magnificent account of British and American leaders in World War II, I was struck by how many of them, working prodigious hours and under great strain, were struck down by heart attacks while in their 60s. This doesn't happen anymore, I thought, with the blood pressure and cholesterol medicines many of us routinely take.
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"The single most important jobs program we can put in place is a growing economy." So said Barack Obama at his surly press conference last week defending the tax deal he made with Republicans.
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Is there any chance we can come to grips with our short-term and long-term fiscal problems -- the huge current federal budget deficit and the huge looming increases in entitlement spending? Maybe so. Or at least the chances seem a little better after the release of two sets of proposals in the weeks after the election.
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When welfare state advocates have argued that Sweden and other Scandinavian countries have shown that welfare state policies can work and are consistent with high levels of economic production and growth, I have long had one reply: Those policies would work here too if America had 310 million Swedes.
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In my Wednesday Washington Examiner column, which had to be filed before the full returns were available, I tried to set the Republicans’ historic gains in the House of Representatives in historic perspective, keeping in mind that the exit polls suggested that Republicans would not get the full advantage of the tsunami of public opinion in their favor in Senate races.
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. . . . can groove on these results from Brazil’s election, showing the percentages and numbers of votes for presidential candidates Dilma Rousseff and Jose Serra. You can check out every municipality in every state. The state that appears first is Sao Paulo, which has more people than California.
See if you can find the city of Sao Paulo, in which 6.4 million votes were cast.
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From Washington State comes news from Secretary of State Sam Reed that mock elections involving some 15,400 school pupils resulted in a 53%-47% victory for Republican challenger Dino Rossi over incumbent Democratic Senator Patty Murray. This makes a certain amount of sense: conservative adults are more likely and liberal adults are less likely to be parents, and parents have a significant effect on their children’s political preferences.
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According to Folha de São Paulo, Dilma Rousseff has been elected president of Brazil by a 56%-44% margin over José Serra, former Governor of the state of São Paulo. Dilma (Brazilians seem to refer to her always by her first name) was chief of staff to outgoing President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, whose job approval ratings have been sky high, and he campaigned with her frequently after the first round of voting October 3, in which Dilma led Serra 47%-33%.
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Editor’s note: Examiner senior political analyst Michael Barone wrote the following op-ed for the UK readers of the Telegraph
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That’s one thought that’s probably going through the head of Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Chris Van Hollen as he receives the latest polling numbers from districts Democrats thought would never be competitive. Examples:
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By now you have heard the astonishing and dismaying news that NPR has fired Juan Williams for making the following comment on the O’Reilly program on Fox News Channel.
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One of the constant refrains of the so-called mainstream media is that tea party candidates are blithering incompetents and weird wackos. They may do well this year, the refrain goes, but when voters come to their senses the Republican party will pay a big price for embracing them.
This meme is part of a pattern. As longtime Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, now writing for The Daily Beast, puts it, "News organizations were late to the tea party phenomenon and are still grappling to explain it."
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Charles Lane of the Washington Post’s editorial page staff has an interesting blogpost on the perilous alliance of the public employee unions and the Democratic party. “A party that depends on the public employees to get elected,” he writes, “will have trouble reaching out to the wider electorate—i.e., the people who pay the taxes that support public employees’ salaries and pensions.” He says this could be a particular problem for California’s Jerry Brown, New York’s Andrew Cuomo and Mar
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Seven months ago Speaker Nancy Pelosi spent a busy week rounding up votes to pass the Senate version of the Democrats' health care legislation.
It wasn't easy. She had to get Democrats who had voted no in November to switch to yes in March. And she had to get Democrats who had refused to vote for the bill in November without an anti-abortion amendment to vote for a bill in March that lacked that language.
She took the unusual step of scheduling the roll call for Saturday -- so members wouldn't go back to their districts and be besieged by Obamacare opponents.
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I think this ad, from Colorado Republican Senate candidate Ken Buck and spotted by National Review’s Jim Geraghty, sums up one reason for the energy and enthusiasm of the tea party and other aroused opponents of the Obama Democrats this year. “They heard us, and yet they ignored us,” Buck says. The American people, speaking through polls and through the voters of (yes) Massachusetts, said, Don’t pass that health care bill. The Obama Democrats passed it anyway.
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