The Almanac of American Politics, 2006

Michael Barone has edited this screed for over 25 years now. I first started reading this book in the early 90s as a political and geography junkie. A look at the cover one would expect it to be a straightforward encyclopedic reference guide to congressional districts and biographies of our elected representatives. Alas, while reading subsequent editions (especially after the '94 election!) I kept thinking "Is it me or is this guy biased?". Well, it wasn't me. Barone is not the most fringy or even inflammatory of right-wing pundits. However, I still think he is one of the worst and most sinister righties out there. There is something about his champion-of-the-overdog and free-market-absolutist mentality that is just disgusting to me. He cloaks it in a veneer of supposed fact-spouting. The reality, however, is Barone is obsessed with a certain vision of America: A vision that glorifies money-making and free-market absolutism above ALL ELSE, one that scorns environmental stewardship as the mamby-pamby invention of supposedly out-of-touch eastern "elitists", one that thinks government itself is almost the source of all evil and dysfunction, and that the military and war-mongering jingoism and ultra-hawk cowboy diplomacy are just misunderstood virtues distorted by the SCLM ("so called liberal media") and those damn European countries are on the road to ruin and that we should try so hard to avoid becoming like them. I live in Massachusetts and my state naturally is a favorite target of Barone's. He writes in a smug, condescending tone in edition after edition about how Massachusetts (read: Massachusetts LIBERALS) is tired, irrelevant, a thing of the past, "discredited", "out of touch with the rest of the country"(TM), etc. etc. (his Mass. entry always ends with the same "Massachusetts still has much to teach the nation but it now needs to do some learning." Hey, Barone--"learn" THIS: WE ARE AMERICA!!!!) His snide contempt for Ted Kennedy is so blatantly obvious that he is oblivious to the condescention he dishes out while decrying the same condescention that Kennedy supposedly epitomizes to the rest of his "real America". To Barone, sprawl is not a bad thing at all! Hey, it's giving contractors jobs and giving families a new place to live like their God-given right as "Real Americans!"(TM). Read his ludicrous take on Henry Hyde's Illinois district about how working at McDonald's is such a better and wonderful thing for young people... so much better than those rotten public schools that are bastions of squabbling nitwits quarreling over political correctness!!!!! Barone just loves the south and west...they are the "real" America to him while the Northeast "is not as important as it thinks it is" (his quote--hey, news to me, Barone! Personally, I think ALL of the US is important, you blowhard!) No, Billy Graham and the Southern Baptists are not not bad...they are America at its finest and the world needs more of it!!! Screw the spotted owl!!! God-fearing gun owners in Idaho will take care of that!!! Survival of the fittest, baby, and if you don't like it, you don't deserve to survive!!! Sigh. Read Barone's "Hard America, Soft America" for more "insight" on this man's Social Darwinist view of how America should be. God forbid anyone should aspire to anything in life but running a business and making nothing but the almighty dollar and moving into a big huge house in Sugar Land or Rancho Cucamonga or Marietta or Wheaton. No, his biggest sin is cloaking what should be an objective encyclopedic overview of America's districts, geography, and elected representatives into a volume that Grover Norquist probably drools over night after night while working to destroy what's left of anything good and decent about this country. Sad indeed. :(

As a serious political junkie I have faithfully bought this book every year since my friend gave me the 1st in 1972. I have won so many arguments, answered so many questions and just satisfied curiosities over the years that it defies counting. It is everything you will need to spend hours of time qetting well researched thoughtful information. Are you a union brother or sister well how did your Senator or Rep vote on the new overtime rules. Is you congressman really in favor of choice well let's see how s/he voted on school vouchers. Are you a liberal check out the ratings that the ACLU or the ADA gave them. Same with conservatives ( the NTU or ACU). By the way if you need to ask what those mean you're not a true junkie.Every congresssional district Governors race etc. Now the part I didn't understand at first. I buy this through the National Journal but I haven't heard from them yet so I went to Amazon to see if it was out yet. I started read the reviews which of course were mostly positive then I came across a couple that claimed it was biased put out by Fox News (as if that would make it in and of itself bad) etc. Well dig a little deeper and you find out these wack jobs idea of fair, honest writting is Al Franken. Do I have to say any thing else. As to the cost the 2006 version is over 1900 pages. Must be a CEO complaining they're the ones who think we should all work for minimum wage so they can buy things for nothing. Let's see lots of research updating constantly changing info 1900 pages on a moderate run book and oh yeah you get a code for the online edition updated regularly all for 75/95 sounds like a great deal to me.

The outrageous list price for this item ($70 for 2006 and $75 for the 2008 edition) is a sad comment on the the high price of access to accountability in goverment. Few ordinary voters will want to pay the high price.

This informative if biased political almanac provides a wealth of historical and demographic information about all 50 states, and every one of the 435 U.S. congressional districts. Readers learn a lot about each state's people, traditions, industries, etc., and the same applies to each Congressional district. One also gets a revealing snapshot of the abilities, campaigns, and political views of all 50 Governors, 100 U.S. Senators, and 435 members of Congress. The information is presented in a reasonably concise manner, dividing up the information by state and congressional district.

Some readers may dislike the authors' pro-Republican bias, which includes contempt for certain liberal politicians (but never right-wing ones), and their idiotic claim that the Bush/Gore 2000 election in Florida was beyond reproach. Also, the book no longer has re-election forecasts by analyst Charles Cook (Cook's Call). Despite these weaknesses, readers can learn much about the nation's demographics, sociology, and political traditions from this book.

I share the reservations of others here who remember the oldest
version of Almanac, written with Grant Ujifusa. The Almanac was fun, then: witty, balanced, wry, sharp. It spoke often to
the real worth--or lack of it--of the Congress members and Governors reported on. It dared to note who was a pompous charlatan and who was an unappreciated workhorse. Its criticism and encomiums seemed to me to be balanced. Now, unhappily, the reporting is bland, and radicalism of any kind is
decried--particularly on the left. Probably it sells more copies now--I know that it's much more expensive. It's worth it for the assemblage of data in a single place, but reads rather like the average telephone directory. Surely the dullards of today in Congress deserve to be as bitingly outed as the old Almanac began?