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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 sustainable until Katrina and the 2005-06 meltdown in Iraq -- yet that may be redeemed in history by the success of the surge and...

Never before, at least in my memory, has a vice presidential nominee so wowed a convention, and never before has a vice presidential nominee been so pivotal to a presidential candidate's campaign. John McCain made a high stakes bet and has collected big time. Since Palin's selection was announced Aug. 29 in Dayton, mainstream media has been trying to discredit Palin--even setting a betting line on when she would be dropped from the ticket. Those bets now seem to be worth less than shares of Bear Stearns. --- The American Margaret Thatcher? Too soon to say. But consider this: Lady...

As Roosevelt was approaching the podium, out of view of the spectators, he reached out to shake hands with the elderly poet Edwin Markham and fell. Helpless to rise on his own, Roosevelt was furious; his speech text flew out of his hands. But aides quickly helped him rise and, on the arm of his son James Roosevelt, made his way to the podium and began speaking to the 100,000 in the stadium and a nationwide radio audience. But the pages of his speech text were out of order. Quickly, without a hint of irritation or hesitation, he reshuffled them...

Sarah Palin's speech to the Republican National Convention last night was a home run. A star was born. While the Obama campaign has attempted to disparage it by saying that it was written by a former George W. Bush speechwriter, Matthew Scully—and thus link it to the McCain=Bush meme that was one of the chief ideas thrust forward in their convention in Denver last week—it cannot be dismissed as such. Scully reportedly had written a generic draft that could have been used by whichever vice presidential candidate McCain had chosen. But once Palin was the choice, she and Scully reportedly...

Democrats charge that Republicans make illegitimate attacks on their candidates, attacks that imply that they are far out of the American mainstream. The two examples they cite are the “Willie Horton” ads against Michael Dukakis in 1988 and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads against John Kerry in 2004. But both attacks were well within the bounds of fair political comment. Dukakis supported for 11 years a policy of granting weekend furloughs for prisoners sentenced to life without parole. Willie Horton, one of those furloughed, fled and committed another violent crime. There’s a reasonable argument for granting weekend furloughs...

August 30, 2008, 9:00 a.m. Outrageous VulnerabilitiesObama may not Weather this storm. By Michael Barone As this is written, with a deadline looming, I have not heard Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at Invesco Field and have not learned who is John McCain’s choice for vice president. You know more about these things than I do. So I will write about something I may know more about, and which has been the subject of some concern at the Democratic National Convention: the Democrats’ charge that Republicans make illegitimate attacks on their candidates, attacks that imply that they are far out...

In my U.S. News column this week, I make a brief reference to the unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist bomber William Ayers and his connections to Barack Obama. They were closer than Obama implied when George Stephanopoulos asked him about Ayers in the April 16 debate—the last debate Obama allowed during the primary season. To get an idea of how close they were, check out Tom Maguire's Just One Minute blog and Steve Diamond's Global Labor and Politics. The Obama-Ayers relationship is also mentioned in David Freddoso's The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's...

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 percent or better bounce from 14 of the 16 national conventions between 1976 and 2004. And that's even...

Some bad news today for the Obama campaign. Realclearpolitics.com yesterday had John McCain ahead of Barack Obama by 274 to 264 electoral votes, counting leaners. RCP has Obama carrying just two Bush '04 states, Iowa and New Mexico, with 12 electoral votes. McCain's lead in two other Bush '04 states, Virginia and Colorado, with 20 electoral votes is microscopic, but then so is Obama's lead in New Hampshire, with four electoral votes. And when RCP takes tossup states, with 132 electoral votes, out of the totals, Obama is ahead 228 to 178. Still... Then today two national polls showed McCain...

Last week, the two erstwhile communist superpowers were in the spotlight. Starting on Aug. 8, China staged the Olympics -- an event on the schedule for years. Also on Aug. 8, Russia invaded the independent republic of Georgia -- which apparently caught our government flatfooted. George W. Bush remained in Beijing watching the Olympians, while Vladimir 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 this. Echoes that remind us in one way or the other of Berlin. China's Olympic extravaganza -- and its...

The two erstwhile communist superpowers were in the spotlight last week. Starting on Aug. 8, China staged the Olympics — an event on the schedule for years. Also on Aug. 8, Russia invaded the independent republic of Georgia — which apparently caught our government flatfooted. George W. Bush remained in Beijing watching the Olympians, while Vladimir 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 this. Echoes that remind us in one way or the other of Berlin. China's Olympic extravaganza — and its...

For the last several weeks, the focus of political debate has been on the energy issue. As I've written, $4-a-gallon gasoline has changed public opinion, which now favors oil drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have been struggling, successfully so far, to prevent votes on such drilling, but that's unpopular with the public. House Republicans this past week have been taking to the House floor—which is open to the public during business hours during the congressional recess—and demanding a vote on drilling now. I think it's...

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, I used the results from FiveThirtyEight.com, which discounts results based on its estimates of pollsters' accuracy and the recentness of...

August 02, 2008, 0:00 a.m. Was Obama’s Bounce a Bubble?Polls continue to show an unstable presidential campaign. By Michael Barone Just when you think you’ve got the presidential race figured out, something comes along to upend your carefully wrought conclusions. Mainstream media provided lavish coverage of Barack 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...

Just when you think you've got the presidential race figured out, something comes along to upend your carefully wrought conclusions. Mainstream media provided lavish coverage of Barack 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 tracking polls showed Obama getting a bounce while he was in Europe, especially after his speech before 200,000 or...

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 government and litigation-friendly regulation makes it hard for our society to do things and easy for adroit...

...The Ford ad team told them more — how he had grown up in Middle America, played football for the University of Michigan (the name of the team was omitted in ads aired in Ohio) and served in the military in World War II. There's an assumption this year that voters know John McCain pretty well. But my sense is that there is still a lot of filling in the blanks that the McCain campaign can do. Second, they filled in the blanks on Jimmy Carter. Most voters wanted to support a Democrat, and one who had smoothed over the...

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 percent to 26 percent 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 ratings, far lower than George W. Bush's. His name could scarcely be mentioned at the Republican...

Sixty years ago this month, the top story in campaign year 1948 was not the big poll lead of Republican nominee Thomas Dewey or the plight of President Harry Truman. It was the Berlin airlift. On June 23, the Soviets cut off land access to West Berlin. Gen. Lucius Clay, the military governor in Germany, called for sending convoys up the autobahns, but Allied troops were vastly outnumbered by the Red Army, and everyone feared they would overrun Western Europe unless the United States retaliated with the atomic bomb. Air Force generals said that there was no way planes could...

Sixty years ago this month, the top story in campaign year 1948 was not the big poll lead of Republican nominee Thomas Dewey or the plight of President Harry Truman. It was the Berlin airlift. Air Force generals said that there was no way planes could ferry the 8 million pounds of food and coal Berlin would need every day. Secretary of State George Marshall and Joint Chiefs Chairman Omar Bradley, two of America's most respected generals, felt Berlin was indefensible and we should withdraw. One man disagreed. President Harry Truman, in one crucial meeting after another, said, "We're not...

"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?" Obama was doing here by inference what many of his supporters do more explicitly. 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 black candidate with a serious chance to win? There are obviously problems with this....

"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 Barack Obama's and John 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 Dan Quayle -- see Bob Woodward and David Broder's book). How the...

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 since, no good outcome is possible, and it is time to get out of there as fast as we can......

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 tittle 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 since, no good outcome is possible, and it is time to get out of there as fast as we can....

He has a high job rating in what was the most fiercely contested state in 2004, a state whose 20 electoral votes would have made John Kerry president if he had gotten 119,000 votes. But Strickland has taken himself out of the running. "If drafted, I will not run; if nominated, I will not accept; and, if elected, I will not serve." Some find that astonishing. A look at Strickland's curriculum vitae tells why he bowed out. He served as an associate minister in a Methodist church a year or so in the late 1960s. He worked two years as...

Almost precisely at the midpoint between the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3 and the general election on Nov. 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 Feb. 6. Mike Huckabee made it official by withdrawing after the March 4 Texas and Ohio primaries. Barack Obama's big delegate margins in caucus states, combined with Democrats' proportionate representation rules, gave him what proved...

Was Hillary Clinton trying to muscle her way into the vice presidential nomination? That was the widely held assumption when she made her nonconcession speech on the night of the South Dakota and Montana primaries. Last month, longtime Democratic consultant Bob Beckel argued that Clinton could force her way onto the ticket by holding her own delegates and appealing to superdelegates who had endorsed Obama (or endorsed neither candidate) and who owed the Clintons. It seemed unrealistic to me, but it was a tantalizing suggestion, and Clinton's statement earlier that day on a conference call that she would consider accepting...

Hillary Clinton's 249,000-popular-vote plurality in Kentucky, offset only partially by Barack Obama's 108,000-vote plurality in Oregon, gives her a popular-vote lead in two of realclearpolitics.com's six metrics, i.e., counting Florida and Michigan, and including those two states and the imputed popular-vote margin in the Iowa, Nevada, Washington, and Maine caucuses. And it puts her within reach, depending on the result in unpredictable Puerto Rico, of a popular-vote lead in two more metrics—the two that don't include Michigan, where Obama removed himself from the ballot and Clinton didn't. All of which seems to me to make a solid case that...

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 Rev. 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 by Al Gore but largely ignored in press coverage at the time. Evidence for this comes in the exit...

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, Feb. 5. But look at the numbers: In January, McCain won New Hampshire 37 percent to 32 percent, South Carolina 33 to 30 percent and Florida 36 to 31 percent....

Barack Obama's campaign hopes it will. They're putting out the word that they hope to announce on the night of May 20, after the results come in from the Kentucky and Oregon primaries, that their candidate has the 2,025 votes needed for the Democratic nomination. That would mean that the nomination would be settled before the May 31 rules committee meeting on the status of the disqualified Michigan and Florida delegations; this would deprive Clinton of a grievance but would not deprive Obama of the nomination. The June 1 primary in Puerto Rico, in which it seems possible Clinton could...

May 10, 2008, 8:30 a.m. Warring HistoryRethinking the Iraq critics. By Michael Barone 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...

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 Iraq. One important new source is the recently published "War and Decision"...

Is the bottom falling out for Barack Obama? It’s too early to say that, but there are some disturbing signs. On the positive side, superdelegates still are breaking his way. Rep. Baron Hill, whose southern Indiana district almost certainly will vote for Hillary Clinton, came out for Obama. So did fellow Hoosier Joe Andrew, who previously endorsed Clinton and who was named Democratic national chairman by Bill Clinton in the 1990s. (James Carville may have another name for him.) Obama is still well ahead among delegates chosen in primaries and caucuses, and he is not very far behind in superdelegates,...

Will Barack Obama's longtime connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright continue to hurt him? Evidence that it will comes from pollster Scott Rasmussen, who finds that only 30 percent of likely voters say Obama denounced Wright because he was outraged, while 58 percent believe he denounced him for political convenience. Only 33 percent believe Obama was surprised by Wright's statements at the National Press Club, while 52 percent say he was not surprised. Some 26 percent say it's very likely that Obama "shares some of Pastor Wright's controversial views about the United States" and 56 percent say it's somewhat likely...

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 with 14,993,000 for 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 Democratic parties did not count the number of caucus attenders, Clinton still has a lead of 12,000 votes. Moreover,...

One thing many people haven't noticed about Hillary Clinton's 55 percent to 45 percent 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 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 Democratic parties did not count the number of caucus-attenders, Clinton still has a lead of 12,000 votes....

April 19, 2008, 7:00 a.m. MSM’s Ayers BreakthroughRules are changing for Obama. By Michael Barone Barack Obama seemed puzzled. Angrily puzzled. The apostle of hope seemed flummoxed by the audacity of the question. At the April 16 Philadelphia debate, George Stephanopoulos, longtime aide to Democratic politicians, was asking about his longtime association with Weather Underground bomber William Ayers. The Weather Underground attacked the Pentagon, the Capitol and other public buildings; Ayers was quoted in the New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001, as saying, “I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough.� It was at Ayers’s...

My, oh my, but weren’t those fellows from ABC News rude to Barack Obama at this week’s presidential debate. Nothing but petty, process-oriented questions, asked in a prosecutorial tone, about the Democratic front-runner’s personal associations and his electability. Where was the substance? Where was the balance? Where indeed. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her aides have been complaining for months about imbalance in news coverage. For the most part, the reaction to her from the political-media commentariat has been: Stop whining. That’s still a good response now that it is Obama partisans — some of whom are showing up in distressingly...

Barack Obama seemed puzzled. Angrily puzzled. The apostle of hope seemed flummoxed by the audacity of the question. At the April 16 Philadelphia debate, George Stephanopoulos, longtime aide to Democratic politicians, was asking about his longtime association with Weather Underground bomber William Ayers. The Weather Underground attacked the Pentagon, the Capitol and other public buildings; Ayers was quoted in The New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001, as saying, “I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough.” It was at Ayers’ house that Obama’s state Senate candidacy was launched in 1995; Obama continued to serve on a...

The Democratic Tribes at War Clinton's a fighter — and Jacksonians vote for fighters. By Michael Barone Exit polls have shown that the contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has produced deep divisions among Democratic constituencies. It looks something like tribal warfare. Whites have voted, if you average the results from the states, 53 percent to 39 percent for Clinton; blacks, 80 percent to 17 percent for Obama; Latinos, 58 percent to 39 percent for Clinton; Asians, in California (the one primary state where they’re numerous enough to gauge), 71 percent to 25 percent for Clinton. The differences in...

Exit polls have shown that the contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has produced deep divisions among Democratic constituencies. It looks something like tribal warfare. Whites have voted, if you average the results from the states, 53 percent to 39 percent for Clinton; blacks, 80 percent to 17 percent for Obama; Latinos, 58 percent to 39 percent for Clinton; Asians, in California (the one primary state where they're numerous enough to gauge), 71 percent to 25 percent for Clinton. Continues...================================================================= Al Gore should drop out of the race According to one poll, 22 percent of Democrat voters want Hillary...

And it's part of a larger point. Much of our politics over the past two decades has seemed to be a cultural civil war between the two halves of the baby boom generation, between the cultural liberalism of Bill Clinton and the cultural conservatism of George W. Bush. To most voters, McCain seems to stand above or at least aside from that culture war. His age and generational identity may turn out to be a political asset. Obama, born at the tail end of the baby boom generation in 1961, didn't miss the '80s in the same sense that McCain...

The Clinton campaign has taken to boasting that its candidate has won states with more electoral votes than has Barack Obama. True. By my count, Clinton has won 14 states with 219 electoral votes (16 states with 263 electoral votes if you include Florida and Michigan) while Obama has won 27 states (I'm counting the District of Columbia as a state, but not the territories) with 202 electoral votes. Eight states with 73 electoral votes have still to vote. In percentage terms, Clinton has won states with 41 percent of the electoral votes (49 percent if you include Florida and...

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 McCain's case. He was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam between 1967 and 1973 -- the years of the march on the Pentagon, urban riots,...

It's a generational thing. That was the theme of Barack Obama's speech last Tuesday, in which he both failed to renounce and at the same time separated himself from the man he has described as his spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Obama said that Wright's bellowing, "God damn America," was just a response to the evil treatment of America's blacks all those years ago by an old man (66) who does not realize, as Obama does and as the success of Obama's candidacy shows, that America is not static but has been perfecting itself. Obama's even tone and his...

Has the Rev. Jeremiah Wright been trying to sabotage Barack Obama's presidential candidacy? I'm inclined to think so. That's not original thinking on my part: Steve Sailer advanced the idea in a posting way back on January 15 (definitely read the whole thing). Sailer notes that Wright's foundation gave its award to Louis Farrakhan in November 2007, long after Obama began his presidential campaign. Unless Wright is a complete idiot (which he obviously isn't), he had to realize that Farrakhan was political poison. It's not like he couldn't have thought of other people to honor. Sailer's concluding paragraph: I bet...

Barack Obama won 11 out of 11 primaries and caucuses from Super Tuesday to Feb. 19. Hillary Clinton won three out of four contests on March 4. Suddenly, the look and feel of the Democratic presidential race were different. Yet the delegate count has changed hardly at all. Three victories in four states with 370 delegates netted Clinton only about a 20-delegate edge, leaving her still about 100 delegates behind. On the night that John McCain officially clinched the Republican nomination, the course of the Democratic race seemed less clear and more fraught with peril than ever. Hillary Clinton appeared...

It's time to throw out that old map with the red states and blue states. The map that implies that all but a handful of states will definitely vote Republican or Democratic and that the real contest will be decided in Florida or Ohio or whatever. For a time, the map served its purpose. Only three states changed parties between the 2000 and the 2004 presidential elections, and the average change in percentage margin in those states was only 1.5 percent. But such hugely static political patterns are the exception rather than the rule in our history. The last two...

February 23, 2008, 0:00 a.m. Pride Goeth Before a FallMichelle Obama's comments may prove significant. By Michael Barone 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...