Michael graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law School and is the author of ‘Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan,’ ‘The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again’ and ‘Hard America, Soft America.’ A former editorial page writer for the Wall Street Journal, in 1989 he joined U.S. News & World Report, where he is a senior writer. He has traveled to 37 foreign countries, reporting on elections in several of them, and is a contributor to Fox News Channel.

Michael Barone - On a political journey from Detroit to every county in the nation

In college I was an editor of the Harvard Crimson and the Yale Law Journal. In 1971, I co-authored my first Almanac of American Politics which was started by a friend from college, Grant Yujifusa, and I have produced it every two years since. I was a volunteer and occasional paid staffer for Democratic campaigns in the 1960s, and a liberal supporter of Kennedy in ‘68 and McGovern in ‘72.

I gradually moved right as a result of long-lasting changes that began in 1967, when I was an intern in the office of the mayor of Detroit. To a very considerable extent, Detroit followed liberal ideas — and now Detroit is a city that has been vastly depopulated. A second influence on me was watching liberal leaders’ impotence against the Iranian hostage-takers under [President Jimmy] Carter. I remember feeling in line with Pat Moynihan at that time, that we ought to bring fire and brimstone to the gates of Tehran. Instead, it was about sending Christmas packages to the hostages and trying to melt the hearts of their captors — a terrible failure. Third was witnessing stagflation — the failed liberal idea that markets don’t always work so we manipulate markets to make them work. All wrong. From 1974 to 1981, I was in the Democratic polling business, with Peter D. Hart Research Associates, and I liked it very much. But I found I was not agreeing with my clients, and at some point you cease to be effective.

Now, I’ve traveled to all 50 states and to all 435 U.S. Congressional districts. I am one of the few people I know who has done that. I know a lot of voting data that I can cite on TV. It’s not that hard to keep track of the country when you consider that there are only 3,141-plus counties in the U.S. So you only have to keep a finite amount of information in your head. That’s how I do it when you see me rolling out detailed data.

On our direction

Obviously, the blogosphere is a very good antidote to the mainstream media, which has become increasingly, shrilly partisan — and less reliable as a result. I read the New York Times from 1960 to 2002. No longer. They were running anti-Israel biased articles, and when they ran an article saying all these prominent Republicans were against the Iraq war, including Kissinger, I just said, ‘This is propaganda and not even accurate.’ I couldn’t rely on them anymore, especially since I have to go on TV and be accurate.

I became a big fan of Instapundit after 9/11 when I found it a better way to get information than regular media. The blogosphere lets you access all sorts of local things or global things. One example is this young Notre Dame student who became the most important blogger on Katrina. The kid, Brendan Loy, is a weather nut who seemed to know more than the mayor. Hmmm! Brendan Loy was begging New Orleans leaders on Saturday morning, ‘Please evacuate the city now!’ He pointed out the National Weather Service’s prognosis that Katrina would probably make landfall at New Orleans. At the time, this Category 5 hurricane had a better chance of hitting New Orleans than anyplace else. I’d never heard about Brendan before August 27, but this kid had a far better grasp of the gravity of New Orleans’ situation than its own mayor.

Another reason I welcome this is that I am dismayed over a mainstream media whose people are about 90% Democrats. That is just plain asymmetrical! Most try to do a fair job, yet their coverage has an obvious tilt. We hear all these pretensions about being objective? Come on! Liberals and conservatives just don’t see the world working the same way, and journalists tend to find the stories where they look for them. And frankly, not all journalists try their darndest.

So I see this as a good corrective — for example, Iraq coverage by military blogs and writers like the spectacular Michael Yon. The mainstream makes some good efforts but mostly just gives us body count. We’d have no idea what had actually happened on D-Day if the only thing reported was ‘5,000 dead.’ In World War Two, the media covered death and war and hardships but they also covered the larger strategy story about how we were fighting evil. Today’s media is failing in that.