As a member of a clan once antsy about venturing far from Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood, Bill Daley can now be praised for having made it to the wilds of Pascagoula, Miss. One hopes he brought a Burroughs adding machine.
The commerce secretary was in Pascagoula on Friday for a government event not overshadowed by Monica Madness, namely commissioning a ship for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. No, this Kodak moment would have prompted no attention regardless.
It was fitting that he was there with Sen. Trent Lott, the U.S. Senate majority leader, a proud Republican son of Pascagoula and a vigilant protector of its shipyard. Lott might have urged Daley to use his spare time to count the heads of as many townfolk as possible.
That’s because Lott is one of many Republicans in the vanguard of a Luddite crusade against Daley and his minions in a well-known Commerce appendage, the Census Bureau.
You would think, listening to the Republicans, who include the normally sober Rep. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, that our very constitutional essence is at stake. It ain’t. Meanwhile, the Democrats blow no shortage of hot air on the politically charged topic at issue, namely sampling.
Yes, sampling. It’s a way of counting. In fact, it’s the method now much preferred for the most important year 2000 census by Daley, who didn’t know the difference between census sampling and a Whitman’s Sampler, upon taking his august post.
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But now he does and realizes, as does the august National Academy of Sciences, that it’s clearly the best way to go because it uses scientific methods to ensure that certain groups of Americans, including urban minorities and the rural poor, are not underrepresented. They are groups which, for a variety of reasons, are hard to track down and actually count on a one-by-one basis.
Much would seem to be at stake, including how much money certain states get. Those amounts are often dependent upon census figures. It’s why California’s politicians, just to cite one example, were screaming last week after a three-judge panel, in a most obtuse decision, supported the Republican position against sampling.
California has many of the people who are hard to track down, and its representatives claim that as much as $1 billion in aid over several years could be lost if the Census Bureau was forced to simply do an actual head count.
In Illinois, the 1990 census is estimated to have missed 113,931 people, according to a 1992 Census Bureau study. Of those, 68,315 were in Chicago, meaning the government undercounted the city by 2.4 percent.
Political wrangling, not any high-minded intellectual dispute or claims that the Constitution insists on an actual head count, is at the center of all this. Republicans think that sampling will result in more minorities (read: Democrats) being counted and perhaps more Democratic-leaning congressional seats being ultimately created. The Democrats buy into that prospect.
Daley does not. In fact, he suspects that the Democrats seeing sampling as a savior is “as far off as the Republicans, who think this is the end of the world.” The GOP, with Hastert in the lead, are chastising Daley for continuing the bureau’s sampling preparations in light of the court ruling, which Daley will appeal.
Daley correctly notes how conventional wisdom has been totally wrong with moves to so-called motor-voter laws and other make-registration-easier schemes. They haven’t worked, Election Day turnouts have continued to decline, and there are not scads of new Democrats, as the GOP feared.
“The notion that you’d (greatly) increase the number of Democrats, it won’t happen,” Daley said.
“Nobody has a real idea of what will happen” with sampling, Daley told me. “The notion that there’d be some 30-vote swing is nuts.”
“Will there be changes in districts after this? For sure. But that’s because of natural shifts in population. And you can just look at where the growth states are, places like California, Arizona and Nevada. And they tend to be more conservative politically than states which will likely lose representation.”
He’s on the mark. And this consumer reminder: What’s at issue here is about 10 percent of the 2000 census count. The Commerce Department plan is to still do an actual head count for 90 percent of the population, sampling for the rest.
A loyal self-serving servant
A day after President Clinton’s awful address to the nation on Monica Lewinsky, a woman surfaced in front of the federal courthouse with press releases in hand. She then went on for about 15 minutes defending Clinton and declaring why other women also should, exhibiting a mix of the plaintive and grasping which bordered on the pathetic.
It was a Full Laszlo.
Jennifer Laszlo is a self-described political consultant whose seemingly modest array of clients includes the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago; an official of the AK, or Austrian Labor organization; the United Labor Party of St. Vincent and the Grenadines; and Florida Democratic congressman Dave Weldon.
She may be the town’s only consultant who regularly faxes one-paragraph comments on the day’s big events–as if the world awaited her insights. But there may be a method to her self-absorption, namely the naked self-promotion does get her into the Rolodexes of television bookers and onto the tube, at least sometimes.
Now, she stands as one of the few consultants to produce a fancy, four-color brochure largely touting her television appearances, claiming she is the “first Democrat to stand up for President Bill Clinton in America’s hottest new media: talk TV.”
By my count, there are 15 photos of her, many while appearing on such august commercial enterprises as the Montel Williams show (one wonders if she noticed the show’s misspelling of her segment which she proudly reproduces, namely “A Rush to Judgement?”). And I count the first-person pronoun used at least 24 times, such as:
“During the ’96 presidential election, the key swing voter group was `soccer moms,’ and political research showed that while I’m not a soccer mom that I `look like one on TV.’ ” Huh?
There’s more. “I was booked frequently as a Democratic guest on Fox, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC.” . . . I was in the makeup room of CNBC’s `Equal Time,’ just minutes before air time.” . . . “It seemed I was the only Democratic `get’ for producers trying to fill air time and increase ratings by talking about Monica Lewinsky.” . . . “I dug in my heels, determined not to let Ken Starr use the news media to intimidate witnesses and undermine the presidency.”
Enough. Let’s hope Starr indicts her for subornation of tackiness.
This machine doesn’t quit
Evidence of the renowned White House publicity machine at work comes in the form of a letter. dated Aug. 21 and postmarked Aug. 26, which arrived here for my colleague Clarence Page:
Dear Clarence:
Thank you for participating in the “PBS Dialogue on Race.” I was pleased that you were able to join the other panelists for a frank discussion of the state of race relations in America.
I was especially interested in your thought-provoking comments on the future of affirmative action. It is vital that we, as a nation, focus more on what unites us than on what divides us. The success of my Initiative on Race and the realization of my vision for One America depend on the full participation and creative energy of all Americans, and I hope that by engaging in these discussions, we can help bring people closer together and truly become one nation.
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I appreciate your assistance on this critical and sensitive issue.
Sincerely,
Bill Clinton
Clinton clearly has a large reservoir of tolerance or he doesn’t read the Tribune. On Aug. 19, Page’s column called for Clinton’s resignation.