The good news for Senator William Roth (R-Del.) is that his place in history is secure: There’s a big entry on him in the most thumbed-through reference book in Washington. The bad news is that it begins as follows: ” With his trademark toupee,he does not cut a social figure nor is he dazzlingly articulate.”
This tidbit helps to explain why the Almanac of American Politics — an encyclopedia with an attitude — is so beloved in Washington. Michael Barone and Grant Ujifusa have been putting out their half-million-word Almanac every two years since 1972. The two met as left liberal Harvard undergraduates working on the student newspaper, the Crimson, in the mid- 1960s. It was Ujifusa who hit upon the idea of an almanac in 1969 — he saw it as a way to focus the outrage of their fellow Vietnam war protesters on the unfeeling Congress — and who found the original publisher, Gambit. But by Ujifusa’s own account, Barone now does virtually all of the writing.
It’s no longer left-leaning — in fact, it has taken on much of the conservative coloring of the electorate it covers. But ideology is not the important thing about the Almanac. A bold love for politics is. Like James Bryce’s gargantuan 1888 classic The American Commonwealth — which one opens looking for dry detail on caucuses and parliamentary protocol and closes having read sentiments like “the European reader [will be] surprised when he learns that most of the corrupt leaders in Philadelphia are not Irishmen” — the Almanac is a long march through America’s political culture.
Where Lord Bryce focused oninstitutions, Barone focuses on personalities — thousand-word essays followed by voting records, biographical information, and financial reports, and including photos, maps, and other paraphernalia. He covers every elected national political offcial, from President Clinton to Eni E H. Faleomavaega (delegate of American Samoa, where, Barone notes, the 1988 Democratic presidential primary drew 36 voters).
Much of the information in the Almanac is surely available elsewhere: that Howell Heftin is the nephew of the pre-New Deal segregationist senator ” Cotton Tom” Hellin; that Nancy Kassebaum is the daughter of presidential candidate Alf Landon; that Nancy Pelosi’s father was mayor of Baltimore
In an age in which people count such things, it’s not a secret that Anna Eshoo is the only member of Congress of Assyrian descent, or that John Conyers has the worst attendance record (71 percent in 1993) of any House member not under indictment.
But Barone is interested in politics as a repository for all of the human passions, not just power — and his Almanac is full of vital (or idly fascinating) information that is not only unavailable anywhere else, but so trivial you can’t quite believe he dug it up in the first place.
Barone cares deeply that Gary Auerbach, the Democrat who got thrashed by Jim Kolbe in the Arizona 5th last year, used to be Morris Udall’s chiropractor. And that second-term Rep. Blanche Lambert Lincoln of the Arkansas 1st, once the receptionist for her predecessor Bill Alexander, also worked for Billy Broadhurst, who was Gary Hart and Donna Rice’s host on the Monkey Business cruise that ended Hart’s political career. And that Alabama Rep. Sonny Callahan lives on a houseboat. And that Hermosa Beach city councilman Robert “Burgie” Benz hosts a “beer drinking and vomiting fest” every July 4. And that Vic Fazio was first elected in 1978 when it was revealed that incumbent Robert Leggett had two wives. And that the Mexican who murdered Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio is a registered Democrat in Long Beach.
Like any genuinely serious discussion of the intersection of politics and human nature, the Almanac is a repository of mishaps, insults, and gaffes. Bill Baker of the California 10th is still vocally anti-abortion,but he’s probably not proud to be reminded that he once introduced a group of high- school award winners as “17 abortion survivors.”
Idaho Sen. Larry Craig’s inadvertently memorable quip that “the only endangered species in New York is probably a free white human being” is recorded for posterity, as is Michigan Republican State Chairman Susy Heintz’s description of David Bonior: a “whiny, wacky, wimpy, wasteful, worn- out, washed-up, windbag wimp.”
The national legislature is revealed in all its Brobdignagian, bizarre splendor. Jay Dickey of the Arkansas 4th sponsored a bill to restore-flogging. His 1992 opponent, Arkansas secretary of state Bill McCuen, accused Dickey — against abortion in all cases, including rape and incest — of being “pro- incest.” California state senator Phil Wyman, the only Republican legislator west of the Mississippi River to be defeated in November 1994, once authored ” a bill to ban the allegedly satanic practice of recording certain words into songs backwards.”
Barone writes as a historian — in fact, as one of the very few Americans to make the Paul Johnson crossover from journalist to Gibbon-in-training. His 1990 Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan (which Ujifusa edited at the Free Press) was a remarkably ambitious effort at popular history, and the Almanac itself is a work of history in perpetual progress. Barone accompanies each version with a long historical essay, and in this edition he looks back at the elections of 1994: “A clearer repudiation of the party in power,” he writes, “cannot be imagined.”
The evidence: Of the governors’ races in the eight biggest states, the Democrats won just Florida, where the only age group Lawton Chiles took was the over-65s. There are now only two educational groups that support the Democrats: highschool dropouts and those with graduate degrees. All of the metropolitan areas in the Great Lakes Basin, the union stronghold that stretches from Buffalo to Detroit, now vote Republican.
Barone views the old Democratic order as an elite being swept away, much as the New England Federalists were in the first half of the 19th century, to be replaced with . . . what? Barone envisions a democracy of small associations, of the type that prevailed when Tocqueville visited the country in the aftermath of the Federalist collapse.
But this Tocquevilleanism, this belief that Americans continue to make policy through small groups, has always been a preoccupation of Barone’s and an animating idea of his Almanacs even before the electorate rallied to it last November.
Is it warranted? In an otherwise glowing essay on Our Country, the historian Fred Siegel took Barone to task for overestimating the individualism and independence of the contemporary American citizen. It’s a criticism with some merit, and it goes to the heart of the book’s animating conceit — that the different congressional districts carry a lot of historical baggage that shapes whom they elect and how they act, election year after election year. Barone is right to note that the “Hispanic” 2nd district of Arizona is not historically Hispanic. It is important that self- rule for the District of Columbia is not a new failure: When radical Republicans gave D.C. autonomy during Reconstruction, “Boss” Shepherd drove the city into bankruptcy.
But do history and local character matter anymore, or have they been obliterated for the time being by the half-century of politics Barone has chronicled? Barone’s own account of the nationalization of local politics under Democratic rule — redistricting in particular — is shocking. Bush White House liaison Doug Wead, interested in running for Congress, had to move four times between 1990 and 1992 to stay in the Arizona 6th. Ron Dellum’s tenure in the House was saved by redistricting in 1992, when suburbs over the ridge from Oakland were removed from his body politic.
There are classic gerrymanders famous from the Wall Street Journal editorial page: Florida’s centipede-shaped 3rd and 17th districts; Louisiana’s mark-of-Zorro 4th; and the saxophone-shaped Massachusetts 4th, which elects Barney Frank.
Then there are the preposterous vote counts that come out of our new ” rotten boroughs.” In the New York 15th, also known as Harlem, which has 580, 354 residents, only 2,812 cast votes against Charles Rangel; in the slightly larger 16th (Bronx), only 2,257 voted against JosSerrano.
Not surprisingly, the denizens of these rotten boroughs all over the country — particularly occupants of “black seats” — have voting records that are not only similar but even identical, by Barone’s tally. Nor are Republicans showing a great deal of geographical or cultural distinctiveness. Why is youngblood Steve Buyer of the Indiana 5th legislativelyindistinguishable from old war-horse Pat Roberts of the Kansas lst? One hundred forty-eight of 230 Republicans had perfect voting records on the Contract with America. Is it reasonable to see in this conformity a return to the politics of small groups?
The worry that arises naturally from the Almanac is that the new right will become Tocquevillean in exactly the same way that the old left is multi- cultural: able to tell the difference between pad thai and bami goreng without knowing the capital of Thailand. In the same way, Americans may wind up uttering paeans to small government while holding on to big government for dear life.
Arizona, whose citizenry loves to badmouth federal handouts, is profoundly dependent on federal highway and water money. Alaska, with the largest body of libertarian voters in the country, has “never had a self-sustaining private sector economy.”
Idaho, the current mecca of antigovernment protesters, has an economy that relies on one single water-greedy crop — potatoes — and needs massive federal infusions to keep the spuds growing. These sobering examples lead one to think that Barone’s faith in the desire of his countrymen to live the Tocquevillean life may be unduly optimistic.
Still, one must admit that his vision inspires hope, which is not the sort of feeling generally inspired by a reference book. Barone views politics as a “noble calling” (the phrase is the late E Clifton White’s), if not always a neat or moral one.
His Almanac is as big and baggy and various as the good, the bad, and the ugly who make up the political class in all eras — a book about politics whose only fault is that it is more interesting than politics itself.
By Christopher Caldwell
