Barone’s Quest

Which snaps him to the battle in the 1930s between Franklin Roosevelt and Republican “press lords” like William Randolph Hearst and Col. Robert McCormick.

Which snaps him to Richard Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, simultaneously targeting Democrat George McGovern and the national media in the 1972 campaign.

Which snaps him back to Palin and how she’s been able to rally the Republican base by lambasting the press and the political establishment.

Snap. Snap. Snap. That’s how it goes with Barone, a man who is always working on a political jigsaw puzzle — in his columns and blogs for U.S. News & World Report, in his commentary for Fox News, and in The Almanac of American Politics, the bible of the trade that he updates every other year.

His mind is teaming with little pieces of electoral knowledge. Whether he’s talking or writing or waiting for a plate of steamed dumplings at his neighborhood Chinese restaurant, he is always working to put all the pieces in their proper place.

“It’s interesting – in the era of mass media, the electorate has generally gone the opposite direction of the press,” Barone says, considering the latest collection of pieces he’s put together. “McCormick certainly bears that out. He tried to use the [Chicago] Tribune to skewer Roosevelt and Roosevelt turned it right back on him.”

Barone quickly sorts through a few more mental puzzle pieces to see if he’s building a real image.

The growth and evolution of radio. Snap. The changes in media ownership. Snap. The Jacksonians’ use of new printing technology in 1828 to overwhelm previously dominant local newspapers. Snap. The Internet. Snap.

“I think there’s something to that,” he says. “I ought to put that on the blog.”

Barone then briefly regards the image he has put together in his mind, admires it for a moment, mentally shifts to different pieces of the puzzle, and digs into a few of the dumplings.

Michale Barone is always on the verge of a fresh thought, an insight and, every once in while, an epiphany.

Which is why Barone, 64, who is the embodiment of the word pundit – erudite, educated, with a bit of a patrician air – is also the most prolific blogger at U.S. News.

“We started Michael blogging based on a series of hallway conversations where he would end up coming into my office and chewing over politics,” said Brian Kelly, the magazine’s editor. “That’s what a blog is, is great hallway chatter. And when you work with someone like Michael and at a place like U.S. News, you have great hallway chatter.”

In an era when every 26-year-old with a nice smile who ever worked on a congressional race is thrust before television cameras and asked to opine on the attitudes of the American electorate, Barone stands with a a few elite political observers who regularly say something worth hearing.

A young liberal who grew into a middle-aged conservative, Barone’s election analyses draw notice in all political quarters.

“His ideological viewpoint may have changed but his insights into voting patterns and demographics would make it into the pantheon of any group of political minds,” said Peter Hart, the dean of Democratic pollsters, who was also Barone’s first boss in Washington.

Hart met Barone at a dinner with their wives in 1973. Barone had come to town with a resume that included a Harvard diploma, a Yale law degree, a clerkship for a federal judge, and the publication of the first edition of The Almanac of American Politics.

Hart left the dinner vowing to his wife to hire Barone, who knew nothing about polling and whose political activity had been limited to some dabbling.

Barone had used his fascination with American people and places to help fellow Harvard Crimson staffer Grant Ujifusa put together the first Almanac, which Ujifusa intended as a guide to help knock off hawkish members of Congress after the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in 1970 . The book was far from the authoritative field guide to American politics that it would one day become.

Hart offered Barone the chance to work on a poll as a tryout, and he gave the young lawyer an hour-long briefing on how to put together a polling script.

“He came back to me with a manuscript and I said ‘This is the most brilliant briefing I have ever done,’” Hart said, laughing. “Michael instinctively knew how to ask the questions and how to get at what really drive people.”

Barone worked at Hart’s firm for seven years, and his fascination with the currents of American demography became his life’s work.

“The thing that Michael has is the rare ability to go 3,000 or 30,000 feet up and look and understand the real patterns,” Hart said. “He then has the ability to go down on the ground and see how those trends are playing out.”

While he was working for Hart, Barone kept expanding and refining the Almanac. He was also continuing his travels across the country to see and learn how his Americans think about politics.

Barone visited the 435th of 435 congressional districts (Alaska, at large) in 1998. Tell Barone where you’re from and he’ll know the county, the population, and the voting trends in recent elections.

“Michael collects places like people collect baseball cards,” Kelly said. “He was there and he knows why things are happening. He’s seen the place where the housing project got torn down behind the strip mall and saw the high-end condos going in. He doesn’t just know that voting trends have changed, he knows why.”

As Barone’s knowledge grew, so did the size of the puzzles he wanted to work on. One campaign or one poll wouldn’t provide a big enough field of view for the work he wanted to do.

From Hart’s shop, Barone headed to the Washington Post’s editorial page and continued to churn out the Almanac with a changing cast of co-authors. He made his first forays into televised punditry and began writing topical books on electoral trends. His own political views were also continuing to move rightward.

When he moved to U.S. News in 1989, Barone found his professional home. It has been a collegial atmosphere for him where the best minds could rise to the top.

Gloria Borger has been the left-of-center counterweight to Barone’s right-of-center opinion work at the magazine. She’s a CNN contributor. He’s on FOX News. She decries Republican attacks. He laments liberal media bias. It works perfectly.

“While he definitely has a point of view, he listens to other viewpoints respectfully,” Borger said. “And he’s such a historian that its a delight just to listen to his broad takes on current political thought and trends. We may disagree, but the discussion is always so much fun.”

Borger is not alone. The fact that Barone’s opinions are rooted in scholarship and real reporting makes political journalists of all stripes pay attention. On Election Day, reporters in newsrooms across America will un-mute FOX when Barone starts telling Brit Hume what he sees in the early returns from Cuyahoga County, Ohio.

“I also admire the craftsmanship of his columns, and take his forecasts as seriously as anyone’s — liberal or conservative,” New York Times political writer John Harwood said. “What I don’t understand, and find distracting in his work, is what seems to me his preoccupation with perceived media bias in presenting his analysis. It’s not that I dismiss media bias as a fantasy, but I think it is overrated and repetitive focus on it is tiresome.”

But to Barone, perceived bias, whether it’s from the Times today or the press lords of the 1930s, is just another piece in a puzzle that he’s assembling in hopes of reaching a lofty goal — the fullest picture of America yet.