A quirky soul who once worked night rewrite at the Chicago Sun-Times could do this: Rattle off how every U.S. county ever voted in presidential elections while compulsively making penguin sounds.
Luckily, Michael Barone skips the animal noises.
Barone, 50, is political journalism’s Mr. Know-It-All, a reporter-historian whose air of authority reminds one how many reporters wing it, especially in a town where glibness can mask ignorance.
He, too, can spit out a district’s member of Congress and voting past. But he’ll also throw in demographic makeup, political and social history, geographical boundaries, notable institutions and, in case you plan to vacation there, nearest highways.
Mention, say, Chicago’s 5th District (Dan Rostenkowski’s old one), and you’ll hear Barone intone on how it goes down toward the 43rd Ward, “up to Irving Park, over to that Ukrainian area, probably includes that Polish hall on North Cicero, then heads west to Melrose Park.”
But he can do more than dispense political factoids as if they were bits of sports trivia-such as the only Democrat to have previously served in a Republican House of Representatives (Chicago’s Sidney Yates) or the state that has gone longest without a Democratic senator (Kansas, 65 years).
He can turn from micro- to macro-observer, tracking U.S., even worldwide, social and political trends through the century. These days, the big picture is conservative.
For 25 years, Barone has passed along his insights as principal author of The Almanac of American Politics, a constantly updated primer that sells 40,000 copies a year and has become
as standard a reference for reporters as a
dictionary.
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Its 1,550 pages and 250,000 words are nearly all written by Barone with research help from a small staff. It consumes “every waking moment,” other than those spent as a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report or raising a daughter as a single dad (his wife passed away).
The book is a bible in Congress. Barone’s essays on each member of Congress (when he’s really cranking he turns out 10,000 words a day) not only become the basis of introductions of politicians at gatherings, but are routinely cribbed by reporters doing congressional campaign stories.
Out of the blue, I mention Will County, Ill.
It nearly went for John Kennedy in 1960, he starts, then informing that it went with Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992. “The original nucleus of Will is Joliet, with the prison there, a little industrial city which has seen people moving to the burbs over time. You’ve got Homewood and Olympia Fields along the freeway. It’s where Downstate meets Chicagoland. Corn fields and suburban development.”
He then notes the retirement of Democratic Rep. George Sangmeister in 1994 and subsequent victory of Republican Jerry Weller:
“What’s really interesting is not just that the Dems didn’t put up much of a fight. That’s an ominous development for them nationally. It’s a district, like many others, that’s basically Republican and only voted Democrat because a particular candidate offered them something special.”
Barone grew up cushily in Detroit, the son of a general surgeon and a school teacher. As a teen, he committed to memory where every U.S. highway ended (“U.S. 24 ended at Telegraph Road and Square Lake Road in Pontiac, Mich.”).
He went on to Harvard, and Yale Law School, and was politically leftish during the Vietnam War years. After the invasion of Cambodia, he and Harvard chum Grant Ujifusa planned a guidebook on congressional voting patterns to help those lobbying against the war.
They quickly realized that “you couldn’t really market a book just to opponents of the Cambodia invasion.”
They pitched something more general to a small publisher and got a $10,000 advance. Because Ujifusa was in Boston and Barone was clerking for a judge in Detroit, Ujifusa trekked to a Harvard Square newspaper stand and mailed Barone all of that October’s copies of one newspaper from each state.
“I must have read the same Ann Landers column 25 times,” he says, recalling his immersion into the politics of the 50 states.
He combined obsession with election returns (“wonderful clues to what’s in people’s minds”) with driving around districts. By now, the increasingly conservative one-time pollster and Washington Post editorial writer has hit 432 of 435 districts, missing only Alaska, Wisconsin’s 8th (including Green Bay) and Missouri’s 7th (including Branson).
He concludes that the “cultural disorder of the late 1960s deprived the Democrats of their natural majority,” especially among the blue-collar class,” and, now, the old “politics of economic redistribution” has been blown out of the water by cultural issues, to which the GOP is linked.
“Wherever history is headed,” says Mr. Know-It-All, “it is no longer headed left.”
Fleeting fame
As Bob Packwood will learn, this town craves status. Lose your fancy title and you’re dog meat.
Witness the lonely figure of Robert McFarlane, the national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan, last Wednesday.
There he was in a federal appeals court, seeking to reverse a District Court dismissal of his libel suit against Esquire magazine. I was the one reporter at a hearing involving the man pardoned by President George Bush after pleading guilty to misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress about the Iran-contra scandal.
A 1991 Esquire article claimed he and others “committed an act of highest treason” by conspiring with Iran and Israel to delay release of the American hostages in Tehran and thus steal the 1980 election for Reagan. It claimed he’d been “recruited” by Israeli intelligence.
The arguments on both sides were brief and dry. McFarlane exited the court with his lawyer and, ever the wishful-thinking litigant, commended him for an argument that was “crisp . . . it tracked.”
A man who was once Big Heat then left the building, neither trailed nor noticed by a soul.
Cokie watch
Who better to moderate a panel on the 1996 presidential campaign at the TV and radio news directors convention Friday in New Orleans than that favorite of Celebrity Speechdom, ABC’s Cokie Roberts?
Double take
Check these snippets from two accounts of CIA involvement in the defection to Jordan of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Gen. Hussein Kamel Hassan:
“During a meeting with king Hussein he complained of having been politically sidelined by the rise of the president’s eldest son, Uday, in the Iraqi power structure.”- Aug. 31 edition of the Paris-based Intelligence Newsletter.
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“During a meeting with Jordan’s King Hussein, he complained of being pushed aside in the Iraqi power structure by Saddam Hussein’s son, Uday.”-Sept. 11 U.S. News & World Report.
“The Jordanian monarch immediately informed the U.S. Embassy about the state of mind of the man who was then number two in the Iraqi regime. The king was asked to sound Kamel out on whether he would cooperate with the Americans in return for a guarantee of his personal safety and help in winning power after toppling his father-in-law.”-Intelligence
Newsletter.
“The king quickly informed U.S. officials in Washington, who then asked him to sound out Hussein Kamel about cooperating with the United States in return for guarantees of safety and political support.”-U.S. News & World Report.
There’s more, but you get the point.