The Almanac Has Arrived!

The 2008 Almanac of American Politics has finally arrived!  If you’ve never read the almanac before, it’s a doozie:  weighing in at over 1,800 pages and a list price of $74.95, it contains detailed profiles of every current governor, congressperson and senator in the United States.

In his introduction, principal author Michael Barone makes the observation that we are entering a period of “open-field politics”:

It seems to be a time when there are no permanent alliances, when new leaders arise with new strategies and tactics, when the voters, instead of forming themselves into two coherent and cohesive armies, wander about the field, attaching themselves to one band and then another, with no clear lines of battle and no landmarks to rally beside.

Barone and Richard Cohen, the other principal author, make some questionable assertions about Minnesota’s caucus process, however:

But by the 1980s the conventions came to be dominated not by laborite Humphrey followers or the wives of management Republicans, but by left-wingers and counterculturites, right-wing abortion opponents and religious hardliners.  The result was the nomination of left-wing and right-wing candidates often rejected by the voters in primaries or general elections and in shrill, off-putting political rhetoric.

The authors use the conventional wisdom as a lead-in to the story of Jesse Ventura’s rise to the governor’s office, but Minnesota readers on the left wing might bristle at the suggestion that a gun-toting Mike Hatch is one of them, as those on the right-hand extreme sometimes  raise a stink at moderate votes taken by Norm Coleman and Jim Ramstad.

Nevertheless, the almanac provides some great anecdotes from the 2006 campaign from all corners of the state, including the story of Tim Walz taking a break from campaigning, 11 days before the election, to help a carload of Independence Party workers fix a flat tire.  Asked about this incident, a Walz staffer confirmed its veracity, but could not confirm the exact date.

With a simple layout, useful statistics and a very decent narrative style, the almanac figures to be a great resource in the remaining months of the 2008 cycle.  Once that’s over, however, it’s back to the grindstone for Barone and Cohen.