One day back in May 1970, two students met in Harvard Yard. Look, Mike, Grant Ujifusa said to Michael Barone, all these people are protesting the invasion of Cambodia. If they’re to have any real effect on policy, they’ll need a guide to the politicians who make policy. We should do an almanac. Mr. Ujifusa, who went on to work at some of our better book publishers and is now a Reader’s Digest senior editor, mentioned his new idea to Mr. Barone, whose future would include stops at the Washington Post and U.S. News & World Report, because when they first met and Mr. Ujifusa mentioned he was from Worland, Wyoming, Mr. Barone, who hails from Michigan, said, “Oh yes, that’s at the western terminus of U.S. 16, isn’t it?”
Indeed, Mr. Barone, who wrote just about every word in the 1,500-page 1992 edition of the biennial Almanac of American Politics, has always been “a detail guy.” He had come across Worland while poring over the atlas in the family encyclopedia. Mr. Barone recently described to me the moment when—at age eight—he first discovered the pleasure of demographics: “I studied the results of the 1950 Census, and found it fascinating to look at the changes in population from city to city—who’d gained, who’d lost.” That fascination, unabated, has now taken him into 425 of the United States’ 435 congressional districts. The Almanac, now in its 11th edition, is the manifestation of a lifelong obsession that has made Mr. Barone a walking, talking gazetteer. As his introductory essay in the new volume shows, he’s a first-rate political thinker as well.
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