BARONE: Presidential focus slips

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BARONE: Crushing those animal spirits

Monday, March 9, 2009

”Animal spirits,” said John Maynard Keynes, are the essential spring of capitalism. We depend on the animal spirits of investors, high earners and entrepreneurs for a growing economy.

BARONE: Turning a blind eye to human rights

Monday, March 2, 2009

On the last day of her trip to East Asia, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke briefly of the place of human rights in American policy toward China. "Our pressing on those issues" - issues she didn't identify any more fully - "can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis."

BARONE: Count on the Constitution

Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2009

All of America was watching Barack Obama on Jan. 20 as he promised to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." But few thought that, within a month, controversy would arise over the Constitution's census clause.

BARONE: Real lesson of the great depression

Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2009

"Not since the Great Depression." "Not since the 1930s." You hear those phrases a lot these days, and with some reason. Now that Congress has passed the Democratic stimulus package, it may be worthwhile to look back at Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and consider how well it worked as policy - and politically.

BARONE: Cool on a very bad day

Monday, Feb. 9, 2009

Tuesday, Feb. 3, was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day for Barack Obama.

BARONE: Presidential patterns

Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2009

Last Tuesday, for the 22nd time in 220 years, Americans saw the peaceful post-election transfer of power from one political party to another. In our great outdoor national ceremony, scheduled for some reason on a day that is as likely as any other to be the coldest of the year, Barack Obama took the oath as our 44th president and spoke to the nation for 19 minutes in a speech that was far more somber than the mood of the crowd of 2 million on the Mall.

BARONE: A migrational change?

Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2009

Evidence keeps accumulating that the tide of immigration is ebbing. Tough enforcement laws passed by states like Arizona and Oklahoma and localities like Prince William County, Va., have reportedly spurred Latino immigrants to move elsewhere. Tougher enforcement of federal immigration laws may be having the same effect.

BARONE: Can Senate bar appointee?

Monday, Jan. 5, 2009

Under the 1969 Supreme Court case of Powell v. McCormack, the Senate has no right at all to do that.

BARONE: Keeping his distance?

Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2008

Barack Obama and his family are vacationing in his native Hawaii, far from the wintry snows of Chicago - and far from almost every other American politician. There's a metaphor here for how I think he will conduct himself as president - He will try to keep his distance from other politicians, including his fellow Democrats. I see Mr. Obama trying to remain aloof from his party, much as Dwight Eisenhower did five decades ago. Like Eisenhower, I think he has drawn the conclusion that his party needs him more than he needs his party.