|
 ichael
Barone is co-author of The
Almanac of American Politics 2002, which debuts this summer,
and author of The
New Americans. He is also a senior writer at U.S. News
& World Report and a regular panelist on The McLaughlin
Group.
Kathryn
Jean Lopez:
You've been co-author of The Almanac of American Politics
since 1971. How did you wind up with such a cool job, writing the
"bible of American politics"?
Michael
Barone:
My longtime co-author, Grant Ujifusa, came up with the idea that
became The Almanac of American Politics. His original idea
was to write a guide to students lobbying against the Cambodia invasion
in May 1970. Soon it became apparent to us that such a book could
be useful to anyone who wanted to affect or understand American
politics. Grant succeeded in interesting a small Boston publisher,
Gambit, Inc., and the book appeared in November 1971. He approached
me to be a co-author because he remembered that when we met, at
Harvard, I had asked where he was from and he said, "Worland,
Wyoming." "That's the western terminus of U.S. 16,"
I said, as it then was. This astonished him because no one at Harvard
had heard of Worland and many at Harvard had not heard of Wyoming.
"Someone who knew that is the person who should write this
book," he later told me.
Lopez:
What goes into the making of the Almanac from your perspective?
About how much time does it take you?
Barone:
Since the 1984 edition, the Almanac has been published by
National Journal. National Journal's Eleanor Evans supervises a
staff of researchers, editors, and fact-checkers who work on the
Almanac, and for the 2002 edition, National Journal's Richard
Cohen has become a co-author. National Journal provides me with
a research packet — increasingly thick because of information available
through the Internet — on every state and congressional district
and their elected representatives, and I write either the first
or second draft of each section of the book. Naturally I retain
some of the text of the previous Almanac, but I do try to revise
it extensively, so that the final product reflects what I would
have written if I was writing the whole thing for the first time.
Lopez:
You've been to every congressional district in the U.S. How often
do you have to revisit them; how much do the state profiles change
from Almanac to Almanac?
Barone:
In 1972 it occurred to me that, although I was writing about every
state and congressional district, I had only been in about 30 states
and less than half the 435 congressional districts. Ever since I
have kept track of every state and congressional district I have
visited, and on occasion have taken detours and bypasses to net
another district. I reached my 50th state and 435th congressional
district on Friday, February 13, 1998, when I landed at Anchorage
Airport in Alaska. I don't have any systematic plan to revisit districts,
although I do make some efforts in that direction: In 1999 I visited
Nebraska and Montana, states where I had not been for many years.
I am watching congressional redistricting closely, to see if districters
create a new district or districts I haven't been to; you may be
sure I will be traveling to such districts soon.
Lopez:
Was this year much more of a challenge that usual, given the post-election
period in Florida and then the Jeffords defection?
Barone:
The Jeffords defection required some changes, but in writing the
2002 Almanac I tried not to emphasize chairmanships and ranking
minority member status in the Senate, but to emphasize instead legislation
each senator had worked on, since I obviously knew that there was
the possibility of a change in party control — and there could be
a change of party control again, after we go to press.
Lopez:
Is there anything in the new edition that surprised you to learn
while working on it? Any odd facts you are particularly proud of?
Barone:
My favorite so far is that one out of every 12 children in Nebraska
is Hispanic. This reflects the influx of Hispanics to work in meatpacking
factories and other jobs in the Great Plains states. Nebraska had
been exporting people for 80 years, from 1910 to 1990; in the 1990s,
it started importing them. I certainly didn't expect this ten years
ago.
Lopez:
In what ways will the "New Americans" you write about
in your other new book shape the midterm and 2004 elections?
Barone:
One change in American life that I didn't anticipate 30 years ago
— and just about no one else did, either — was the large-scale Hispanic
and Asian immigration that started up in the late 1960s and has
accelerated ever since. I think you can see from previous Almanacs
— this might be a project for a grad student somewhere — that I
have been fairly alert to the emergence of large immigrant populations
in states and districts, and to the potential political effects
of those movements. I got the idea for The New Americans
from working simultaneously on articles about Hispanics in America
for Reader's Digest and on the political history of Italian-Americans
for the National Italian American Foundation. It struck me at some
point that there was a great resemblance between Italian immigrants
and Latino immigrants: As I was watching and listening to Latinos
on Pacific Boulevard in Huntington Park, Calif., I was seeing a
community that was very much like the Italian community my grandfather
grew up in in Lackawanna, N.Y. As I began reflecting more on the
subject, the resemblance between Jewish and Asian immigrants became
clear pretty quickly. It took more time for me to see the resemblance
between the Irish Catholic immigrants who left Protestant-ruled
Ireland starting in the 1840s and the black internal immigrants
who left that other country, the rural segregated South, starting
in the 1940s. I wrote up the idea as a 900-word article for U.S.
News & World Report, then as a 9,000-word Bradley Lecture
at the American Enterprise Institute, and finally as the 90,000-word
The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again, published
by Regnery in May 2001.
|
