Head counts and head cases
How the census stirs the partisan juices
Head counts and head cases
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
My Sunday print column, revised and expanded:
After two successive electoral thrashings, after being told by the voters in 2006 and 2008 that they were unfit to govern, the minority Republicans have few potent weapons left in their arsenal. Whipping up hysteria is one of them.
Right now, for instance, they’re going bonkers over the U.S. Census, which is soon slated to begin its decennial mission of counting every American. The census might not strike you as being a particularly sexy issue, but inside the Washington hothouse, the census always bestirs the partisan juices. Despite Barack Obama’s inaugural plea that politicians should put aside "childish things," there remains an overpowering urge to rant in the sandbox.
But before we critique the latest bestirrings, let us first stipulate that, of course, things could be a lot worse. Back in 1936, on the flip side of the world, Joseph Stalin announced plans for an ambitious Soviet Union census. He predicted that his head-counters would tally 170 million citizens. The problem was, he had forgotten about the millions he had killed in his purges, plus the millions of peasants who had recently died in famines. His head-counters wound up tallying only 162 million. Stalin had a simple response. He shot some of his head-counters, and sent the rest to the gulags.
American political leaders merely do battle with words; the head count typically brings out the head cases. The ’09 census flap began earlier this month, when the president, still pursuing his post-partisan dream, agreed to tap Republican Senator Judd Gregg for the job of Commerce secretary. Big mistake, bad symbolism. Whoever heads Commerce also oversees the Census Bureau, and the liberal minority groups – recalling that Gregg once tried to cut the census budget, and suspecting that Gregg might prefer to undercount minorities – strongly protested his ascendence.
Those protests prompted the White House to mollify the minority groups, promising them that Gregg’s census director would "work closely with White House senior management." And that’s the line that has sent the Republicans, and their messengers, into fits of apoplexy. Gregg has since withdrawn his name, but the emotions persist. On Fox News, Sean Hannity has been inveighing against "the biggest White House power grab ever," which is quite the priceless remark, given the recent Bush-Cheney "unitary executive" assaults on the U.S. Constitution.
GOP headquarters insists that Obama’s "Chicago-style" "hijacking" of the census is "unprecedented," and that outraged donors should send money to fight it. A prominent religious-right group, the Family Research Council, insists that even "the liberal San Francisco Chronicle" is outraged. It quotes the paper as warning that Obama may well "destroy the integrity of one of the U.S. government's most trusted institutions" – although, as I discovered during my fact-checking, the group actually plucked that line from a letter to the editor.
Hyperbole aside, it’s not surprising that the census is a flash point. Numbers are power. The population count determines who will most benefit from billions in federal aid, and where it will go; it determines which states will gain congressional seats and which states will lose. Both parties have a huge stake in the census. In the broadest terms, Democrats figure to gain clout if minorities and immigrants are overcounted; Republicans gain if these folks are undercounted.
John Boehner, the GOP House leader, intones that the census "should remain independent of politics," but the reality is that the census has been hotly political since the dawn of the republic – a scholar once said that "trying to rid the census of politics is like trying to rid horse racing of competition" – and, current GOP rhetoric notwithstanding, presidents have always shown an abiding interest.
The very first presidential veto, exercised by George Washington, was about the very first census. He and a close White House advisor, fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson, decided that the census-related formula for congressional seats was too favorable to the northern states, so they nixed the formula. By today’s rhetorical standards, that veto was a Virginia-style "power grab." And it was surely a "power grab" in 1970, when Republican Richard Nixon – who, at the time, was making a play for future Hispanic votes – ordered the Census Bureau at the eleventh hour to add a new survey question about Hispanics.
Will Obama and his team show an interest in the 2010 census? Absolutely. Will they indeed appoint their own census director to fill the currently vacant job? That’s how it works. But will that director become a White House lackey, skewing the numbers as part of an Obama conspiracy to craft a permanent majority? Only in the GOP’s most fevered dreams. The census will stay within Commerce, and the same congressional oversight committees will oversee as always.
(The GOP, during this marginalized phase of its existence, seems overly focused on fighting phantoms. Aside from the purported census "power grab," we have the purported Obama assault on conservative talk radio. The other day, an Obama spokesman specifically stated that Obama opposes any such assault. Religious-right leader Gary Bauer insisted in response that he didn’t believe the statement, that it was simply a trick.)
Anyway, on the census front, the Obama team is reportedly considering Kenneth Prewitt to run the Bureau again. Prewitt ran the 2000 census, and garnered bipartisan praise for his work. One key Republican said of Prewitt, "I thought he did an excellent job." That Republican was Judd Gregg.
Prewitt also authored a 50-page treatise on the census process, in the aftermath of his 2000 stint. He put to rest the paranoid notion that any single institution, such as the White House, can successfully stage a partisan takeover of the census; there are too many watchdogs on the prowl, at the Government Accountability Office, on Capitol Hill, and in the Commerce department’s inspector general office. Prewitt also wrote that "neither the culture nor the competencies of the Census Bureau are suited to advancing a partisan agenda. The professional statistical community inside and outside the government is the bureau's peer community, and the bureau would not jeopardize its high standing among its peers for a short-term political purpose."
(Actually, the faux issue of a White House "power grab" would probably go away forever if the Census Bureau was set up as an independent agency. A New York Democratic congresswoman is currently sponsoring such a bill, and seven former census directors have endorsed it.)
Granted, Democrats in the past have certainly sought ways to maximize the minority count. Ten years ago, mindful that the 1990 census had missed eight million people, most of whom were underprivileged, Democrats suggested combining the results of the traditional head count with statistical samplings (a process similar to public opinon polls), in order to hike the tally of those minorities and immigrants who had ignored or eluded census inquiries. But Republicans had a very credible response – the Constitution requires "actual enumeration" – and the Supreme Court nixed the idea anyway.
That ’99 court ruling was a big political win for the Republicans (business columnist Robert J. Samuelson once observed that "Democrats' passion for sampling is no less political than the Republicans' aversion to it"), but clearly there’s something about the census that drives the GOP batty. Back in 2000, top Republican senators shrieked that certain questions on the census form constituted a government invasion of privacy; for instance, they ridiculed the inquiry about whether Americans had "complete plumbing facilities," including “a flush toilet." It turned out that the question had been asked in every census since 1940.
And once George W. Bush took over...well, it won’t shock you to learn that, for the past eight years, the Census Bureau has been a mess, just one more victim of the departed president’s penchant for institutional wreckage. Each of the top three bureau jobs turned over three times; none of those officials had any national census-taking experience; and the necessary preparations for the 2010 census were (and remain) chronically under-financed.
No wonder Obama has an abiding interest in the census; it’s yet another fine mess that he is compelled to clean up. The rants on the right are the least of his problems.
-- With research assistance from UPenn student political writer Emily Schultheis.
The failures of our current President can be summed up by the USA Today (a paper that actually makes money) in today's paper:b "Wall Street gave the government's $787 billion stimulus package signed into law by Obama last week a chilly reception, arguing that it was long on so-called pork spending and short on programs that would provide a quick shot of adrenaline to a worsening economy".— CD75- What's the problem here? The Census counts the number of people. It's hard for me to believe that this simple process is being politicized. Seems to me that which ever party is NOT doing the counting is always the one doing the complaining. No wonder we have such big problems in this country. It seems that nobody really cares if anything gets done. It's all about power. You people think of these political parties like they are sports teams! You cannot look at things this way when you're talking about people lives! We tried the republican way for eight years and it got messed up. It's the democrats turn now. This partisan political stuff makes me sick! Since things weren't working under the republicans, it's time to go the other way. There are only two viable alternatives. If Obama and the democrats don't fix our problems I guess it will go back to the republicans again. For eight years, the democrats did little else but whine and complain. Now apparently it's the other sides turn to whine. Until we stop this s---, expect more of the same. Nothing friutful will ever get done as long as all we do is fight each other. Rant over... lol— James TL
Comment removed.- Comment removed.
- CONSE 'PUBS: Bill Ayers, Obama's citizenship and the most scandals B4 day one are among the many issues your side has presented. .......... I cannot remember any ONE issue ever being resolved to your satisfaction if you were wrong, not ONE! Please, if there is ONE, I'd like to hear it.— Talvenada
- Madmojo- please watch this video of congressional hearings and you can see that Democrats stood in the way of regulation of Fannie and Freddie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs
- Comment removed.
- Does anyone think it's ironic to have a fiscal responsibility summit within a week of increasing the deficit by 1.5 trillion dollars? Vote Democrat it's easier than thinking
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- Madmojo-Did you watch the video? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs
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- SWEDE: I was stupid enough to watch it, based on your jumping up and down. I agree that ALL who are NOT Conse 'Pubs show watch it w/ your reputation on the line. Ergo, if they feel stupid, as I did, they can ignore ALL of your upcoming going-to-other-sites discoveries. They will find that Dems are liars in HUGH print, and how B4 each clip you're told all positives for 'Pubs w/ all negatives for Dems. Sometimes, you're told longer what 2-4 2 second clips say. ............. SWEDE: Put your bottom on the line, if this proof is so overwhelming, no?— Talvenada
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- MadMojo: SMike is still trying to sell that bogus video from YouTube. Don't waste your time. It's not what he thinks it is (he calls it a CSPAN production). Here's my comment from yesterday after watching the video: "At the end, it says it's done by Naked Emperor Productions. That means some whack-a-doddle outfit by that name went on CSPAN, gathered some snippets out of context, put them together into a fairy tale about Fanny and Freddy, made up some biased (and really not too sophisticated) text and slapped it all together. Any fool can do that, and you can find plenty others like it on YouTube. Ah, the truth according to YouTube. Is that what it's come to?"— Djoko Pritza
- I don't know if Barney Frank is worth all the attention he's getting here, one way or another. He's a congressman from Cape Cod. His party had two years of oversight over Fannie/Freddie. In the meantime, the republican administration had complete control of banking regulation and the Federal Reserve. And there was a huge unregulated private mortgage industry out there. All of them went nuts for about 10 years, as we now know. And obviously from the facts, Barney Frank from Provincetown is the guy responsible. You see what I mean about the computer-generated nature of a lot of right-wing posts on this blog? No human being could make this kind of assertion.— liberal
Cited by the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the nation's top political reporters, and lauded by the ABC News political website as "one of the finest political journalists of his generation," Dick Polman is a national political columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is on the full-time faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as "writer in residence." Dick has been a frequent guest on C-Span, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and the BBC. He covered the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential campaigns.
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