America's Information Junkie

Michael Barone '66 says The Almanac of American Politics was born one night in 1963 at a reception for newly elected editors of The Harvard Crimson. Barone, the principal author of the Almanac, remembers meeting Grant Ujifusa '64 that evening and asking him about his home town.

"Worland, Wyoming," Ujifusa said.

"That's the western terminus of U.S. Route 16, isn't it?" Barone said.

"Yes," Ujifusa said, stunned by his new acquaintance's knowledge of that esoteric fact, "it is."

So when Ujifusa began to organize a directory of Congressmen and Senators to aid the protest against the American invasion of Cambodia in 1970, he asked Barone to help compile it. "He knew I liked facts and figures," Barone says.

That predilection for information-collection, combined with a $10,000 advance from a small Boston publisher, translated into the first Almanac in 1972. That first edition set a style that Barone and Ujifusa have followed and expanded in five subsequent Almanacs. The book contains a 1500-word profile of each member of Congress and his districts, lists of members' stands on several key issues, ratings by major political action groups and biographical data. Barone has written all of it (Ujifusa edits) since the first edition.

"I used to travel around a lot," Barone says. He has visited 403 of the 435 districts, doing most of the traveling in the early 70s in a much-loved 1970 Chevy. "I wanted to see how people live, what the Walthams of the world are like, what it was like to live there."

For seven years, Barone has been a vice president of Peter D. Hart Associates, a polling firm in Washington, so the statistical side of the Almanac fir right in with his vocation. But he adds, "Any number is an inadequate description of reality. Numbers are a science, reality is an art." Barone, the Chevy and a good road-map turned Ujifusa's notion into a reality.

Barone started his career as a self-described "Information junkie" during his childhood in the Detroit suburbs. Census figures, he says, were a favorite toy. From Cranbrook prep school, he went to Harvard, wrote occasionally for The Crimson's editorial board and graduated magna cum laude in 1966. He passed through Harvard Law School three years later and then spent two years clerking for a federal judge in Detroit. But the information bug never left him. And the idea of the Almanac proved irresistible. "It's the sort of thing I always wanted to read, so I wrote it."

The book still maintains a hint of the political leanings that inspired its creation. The tone falls somewhere between wry-liberal and responsible-moderate, amiably contemptuous of extremists of the Right or Left. Barone himself says he has turned more conservative since the days of the Vietnam protests, but he still proudly describes himself as a Democrat. His concern for the future of his party has led him to several of the recent soul-searching seminar Democrats have held since their 1980 debacle.

His intuition and polling experience tell him that the much-heralded national shift to the right may prove more ephemeral than Republican politicians hope. Democrats, Barone says, will be able to use the Social Security issue to particular advantage in the 1982 Congressional elections. "When people start thinking about getting old, it's a very emotional thing. You can't see the social security issue without seeing King Lear. The Democrats can capitalize on that."

But in the long term, Barone says, Democrats must reevaluate their priorities, "do an inventory on the country." One issue on which he thinks Democrats might re-think their position is affirmative action, which, Barone says, "often holds society up to a standard that a fair society couldn't meet." Strict quotas and busing imply that the percentages of minorities in every school or profession should be exactly the same as those in the general population. And that, Barone says, is an unrealistic demand because "people don't distribute themselves in a random fashion." Instead, Barone thinks less rigid programs--like open housing--would offer more benefits to both the majority and minorities. Saying that "most Americans are uncomfortable with the idea of excluding anyone because of race," Barone says a renewed push to end housing discrimination would both appeal to free market economists and address long-standing inequities.

Barone tends to frame political issues within the broader perspective he draws from his research in census and polling figures. But for all his "macro" ideas, he has not let the change in the quality of his daily, "micro" relations with America's Congressmen and Senators escape his notice. At first, says Barone, he was a little-known figure on Capitol Hill. But as his book--with its circulation of about 50,000--has begun to become quite well-known in Washington, especially amoung journalists, he finds "they all treat me very nicely." The politicians didn't need an almanac to teach them that lesson.