A Fix for Political Junkies

...The district and member analyses contain both hard and soft data...

...They convey—to the journalists, academics, and lobbyists who are the main consumers of the Almanac—the richly textured historical and demographic factors that influence local politics...

...The anonymous Congressional Quarterly writers concede little to Barone when it comes to placing member-related information into historical perspective...

...But what gives the volume its character, and what sets it apart from run-of-the-mill statistical reference books, are the narrative descriptions...

...Additionally, the authors point out that the district has become home to more than 24,000 Hmong immigrants—the largest concentration in any American city—who resettled there after Laos fell to Communist insurgency...

...In a second introductory essay to Politics in America, Gregory Giroux observes that the number of "split" districts in the House (those in which a majority voted for different parties in the 2002 congressional election and the 2000 presidential) has dropped from 192 in 1972, when Richard Nixon inherited a solidly Democratic Congress, to 62 in the current Congress...

...During this same period, a heightened decentralization of power within both the Senate and the House of Representatives has raised the profile and influence of individual senators and congressmen...

...Califano should not have been so stunned...

...In '§ his introductory essay analyzing the ¡£ current state of American politics, Barone argues that for the first time since 1952, redistricting worked against the Democrats election by creating more favorable districts for Republicans and by diminishing the number of competitive districts through the implementation of numerous "bipartisan incumbent protection plans...

...Given how few House members have announced plans to retire, that body can expect little change in the short term...

...What author Michael Barone and his original coauthors wrote over thirty years ago remains true: "Talking about a congressman without taking his district into account is like talking about Roosevelt without mentioning the Depression, or Henry VIII without talking about his wives...

...Curiously, while giving strong emphasis to this trend, Barone says little more about the otherwise invulnerability of incumbents, a trend that was reinforced in 2002 with only eight members losing their seats in the general election and eight in nominating primaries, for a whopping success rate of 96 percent...

...The new volume also looks at the contribution of each state to presidential politics, offering accounts of recent primary and general election campaigns and their relevance to the upcoming race for the White House...

...She won her third full term in 2002 with four-fifths of the vote...

...Take this description of Minnesota's fourth district, which encompasses St...

...Anthony, became the nation's largest grain milling center...

...Since Califano's White House days, moreover, members have seen their offices besieged by a growing number of lobbyists, whose ranks began to swell in the late 1960s with the emergence of a broad array of "citizens' groups...

...Playing to its strength—a stable of knowledgeable reporters who cover Capitol Hill—the Congressional Quarterly volume focuses on individual members, with less emphasis on the state or district they represent...

...The result is a volume that only partly overlaps with the Almanac of American Politics...

...Since the American Founding, congressional power has ebbed and flowed, but it is undeniable that the United States Congress has far more authority than the legislatures in the world's other democratic countries...

...Barone's essay identifies those districts most susceptible to partisan change in 2004 in this era of straight-ticket voting: the thirty-two (down from forty-six in 2001) in which Democrats represent districts carried by George Bush in 2000 and the twenty-six (down from forty) in which Republicans represent districts carried by Al Gore...

...A decade after the Almanac was first published, Congressional Quarterly entered the reference-book sweepstakes with Politics in America...

...BY DAVID LOWE A decade ago, Joseph Califano contrasted the "stunning ascendancy of congressional clout" with the submissive-ness of Congress he had known while serving in Lyndon Johnson's White House...

...If there is a theme that can be gleaned from these two massive volumes of maps, charts, statistical tables, and disjointed narratives, it is the growing partisan homogeneity both in and out of Congress...

...Key electoral information is also provided, including the 2000 presidential vote, the statistical results of the previous two elections, and a new index, attributed to election analyst Charlie Cook, that expresses the relationship between the last congressional and presidential vote...

...It's also true that the period since Lyndon Johnson has been marked by extraordinary congressional assertiveness: impeaching one president, forcing another to step down, terminating the funding needed to continue a major war, and killing high-priority nominations to both the cabinet and federal judiciary...

...can hire their own experts, initiate investigations, exercise control over executive branch personnel, and play a role in policy-making...

...It should therefore come as no surprise that the party unity voting scores for both Republicans and Democrats now push 90 percent...

...So they developed a framework for explaining not so much how Congress works as the forces that shape the individual member, and they have updated the information in volumes that have appeared every two years...

...The young Michael Barone was the driving force behind the original edition, as he remains today, and it was an astonishing piece of work...

...both industries stoked the ire of farmers in the Dakotas who had no choice but to deal with them to make a living...

...Congress has become the King Kong of Washington's political jungle," he declared...

...Using an array of electoral and census data, the Almanac offers descriptive political analyses of each state and congressional district, which become the backdrop for introducing all five hundred and thirty-five voting members of Congress...

...It was largely in response to the needs of these groups for a road map to Congress and its members that National Journal commissioned The Almanac of American Politics in 1972...

...Unlike Barone's sweeping analysis of the 2002 election and its implications, the editors of the Congressional Quarterly's volume, David Hawkings and Brian Nutting, offer a relatively unimaginative overview of recent member-related trends, pointing out that for the first time Baby Boomers hold a majority of seats in both Houses, the number of lawyers has dropped to just over 40 percent, and the percentage of those with state legislative experience has grown steadily (from 32 to 51 percent) over the past decade...

...There is additional demographic and political information for each state, including the all-important partisan composition of the legislature...

...Paul: the Minnesota Capitol and Archbishop Ireland's Cathedral...

...District statistics include area, population (broken down into urban and rural), median income, percentage of military veterans and those below the poverty level, occupational percentages (white, blue, and gray collar), and race and ethnic origin...

...After comparing that dissenting vote to those of Jeanette Rankin, the Montana Republican who was the only member of Congress to vote against entry into both world wars, the profiler adds: "But while Rankin left the House one year after each of those votes—she lost a Senate bid in 1918, and she did not run for re-election in 1942—Lee's vote did nothing to weaken her political standing...

...For obvious reasons, many have been lifted wholesale from previous editions, but they rarely fail to reward the political junkie...

...And there is the occasional nugget, as in this description of Rules Committee chairman David Dreier: "The telegenic Dreier is at his best when playing to an audience, whether on the talk-show circuit, in the well of the House, or kibbitzing in the press gallery with radio and television crews...

...Since the 2002 edition, the Almanac's | O congressional profiles have profited § from the addition of Barone's coauthor, f National Journal's veteran congression-| al expert Richard Cohen, author of a $ first-rate biography of former Illinois £ congressman Dan Rostenkowski...

...It also includes those nonvoting delegates representing Washington, D.C., and the four insular American territories...

...Note the discrepancy with Barone's count of 58...

...Paul and surrounding suburbs: Above the Mississippi River bluffs, forested when the first settlers arrived in the 1850s and one of America's great urban vistas today, stand the two great landmarks of St...

...As the book's authors noted at the time, up until then there had been no single source "to help the interested citizen make sense of the flux and confusion of Capitol Hill politics...

...Take the profile of Barbara Lee, the congresswoman who cast the lone vote against authorizing the use of force to enable the president to respond militarily to the terrorist attacks of September 11...

...As such partisan voting increases, the impact of district-related factors is likely to diminish...

...In £ the current volume, the state and dis-| trict descriptions have been updated | and, in some cases, rewritten to reflect s the political impact of the redistricting | that resulted from the 2000 census...

...Paul became a major transportation hub, a railroad center and river port, while Minneapolis, farther up the river at the Falls of St...

...Much of this growing partisanship is the result of redistricting, and little can be expected to change on that front until the next census in 2010...

...Member information for both the Senate and the House includes basic biographical data, voting percentages for each previous election, committee assignments, key votes, and ratings by labor, business, and ideological interest groups...

...Each entry begins with a brief political history of the state or district with a heavy emphasis on patterns of immigrant settlement and economic development...

...Although members of Congress, and the influences that help shape their behavior, are still the primary focus of the Almanac, the book contains lengthy entries on internal state politics, along with individual profiles of governors...

...Coupled with a closely balanced and increasingly partisan Senate, in which the Democratic minority is prepared to obstruct at will, the congressional ascendancy of the past thirty years could soon be on a reverse course...

...A comparison with the same entry a decade ago turns up several interesting updates, including the fact that this Democratic stronghold reelected Norm Coleman as its mayor in 1997, even after he switched parties, and the equally interesting fact that Coleman failed to carry a single precinct in the district in his successful run for the Senate against Walter Mondale last year...

...Today, very few, if any members at all, owe their electoral victories to the president...

...But though he is often in the limelight, Dreier has been known to disappear into his private hideaway in the Capitol for a quick game of pinball on his vintage 'Voltan Woman' machine...

...As a result, no longer is it just a handful of committee barons who David Lowe is the vice president for government and external relations at the National Endowment for Democracy...

...This is the older and smaller of the Twin Cities, settled mainly by Catholic Irish and German immigrants, while Minneapolis was attracting Protestant Swedes and Yankees...

...In explaining the need for a bicameral legislature in the Federalist Papers, Madison asserts that in republican systems of government, "the legislative authority necessarily predominates...

...For the most part Congressional Quarterly's member profiles are informative and crisply written...

...The institutional focus of Politics in America is underscored in the editors' introduction...

...How all of this will affect the relevance and popularity of these two volumes is anyone's guess, but it can only be hoped that they will continue to grace the political scene for years to come...

...This no doubt explains why at a recent congressional hearing, second-term congresswoman Betty McCollum was so intent on hearing from an assistant secretary of state oo about American policy toward Laos...