Head-Count Case
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Monday, February 09, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Census: Naming Republican Judd Gregg as Commerce secretary was a real act of bipartisanship. Now the Obama administration is trying to undo that good deed with a power grab
We're beginning to see a recurring problem with this new White House team: It makes appointments with half its brain disengaged. Its vetting process is supposed to be the most thorough in history, but it misses basic stuff, like massive bills for back taxes. Blinded by its own brilliance, it trips over something obvious and falls flat on its face.
The naming of Judd Gregg to be commerce secretary may be another case of this, though here the appointee is not the problem. Just the opposite. The senior senator from New Hampshire is a fiscal conservative apparently untouched by scandal. Like any good Republican, he opposes high taxes but does pay them. In fact, appointing him was a truly bipartisan act. It showed the Obama administration walking its talk.
After all, Gregg as commerce secretary would oversee the Census Bureau. He would balance the influence of a Democratic White House and Democratic Congress, which otherwise would have the whole game to themselves.
One of the first to note the significance of the Gregg appointment was conservative columnist Michael Barone, who said Gregg's supervision might prevent the abuse of sampling to cook the numbers. (Sampling, rather than a straight head count, is preferred by the Democrats because it tends to produce higher census numbers in areas where the poor and minorities predominate).
If Gregg can keep statisticians straight, Barone said, "maybe it's worth his leaving the Senate."
The Democratic base could see what was going on, and it didn't take the news as well. The Congressional Black Caucus voiced its "troubling concerns." The National Association of Latino Elected & Appointed Officials questioned Gregg's "willingness to ensure that the 2010 census produces the most accurate possible count of the nation's population."
At that point the administration could have stuck to its guns and said something like, "We named Judd Gregg because he's a man of integrity. We trust him to oversee an honest, transparent census." Instead, it said it would be cutting Gregg out of the loop.
A "senior White House official" told Congressional Quarterly last Wednesday that the director of the Census Bureau (in CQ's words) "will report directly to the White House and not the secretary of commerce."
The administration later stepped back a bit, saying it wanted the census chief "to work closely with White House senior management" while apparently still reporting to the commerce secretary. But the import was much the same: The White House was not going to let this census get away.
Now it's the right's turn for outrage, and with good reason. Even in the watered-down version of the story, the census director would be nominally working under Gregg but, in reality, answering to Obama's hyperpartisan Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel will have a role that Karl Rove could only dream of.
So much for bipartisanship, transparency and a credible census.
At this point in the story (which we're sure is not over), the Obama administration has generated distrust of its motives in both parties. Also, and not for the first time, it seems not to have thought things through.
Had it remembered that a census was coming up and that Gregg would oversee it? If it had, it should have had the spine to insist that Gregg would exercise the full power of his office. But maybe it missed the census angle — that half-a-brain thing again. Is this what on-the-job training looks like at the White House?
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