American Pastoral
An interview with Michael Barone.

By Kathryn Jean Lopez, NR associate editor
June 14, 2001 11:45 a.m.

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.