Posted by
Always To The Right on Thursday, February 05, 2009 2:52:20 PM
Greg points this out:
Congressional Quarterly is reporting
that the director of the Census Bureau will report directly to the
White House and not to Commerce Secretary-designate Judd Gregg. My
sense from the story is that this is mostly about political optics.
Black and Latino advocacy groups aren't fond of Gregg period, and
they're not happy about the fact that he pushed back against emergency
funding for the 2000 Census.
Now, why would the president want to take the census out of the
hands of the people who have traditionally handled it and into the
heart of his political apparatus? "Political optics," indeed. Obama
accused the Bush administration of "politicizing" everything—science,
the Justice Department, &c.—but there's no way he's putting one of
his token Republicans in charge of the census, because the census plays
a huge role in drawing up congressional districts and the like. This
fact has not been lost on the Left:
Did we work so hard, raise so much money, spend so much time
sleeping on floors and couches, trudge through the snows of Iowa, toil
in the barrios, to give a rightwing conservative Republican control
over the 2010 Census when history has shown that Republicans consider
the Census just another dataset that can be altered to suit their
political needs?
We can be sure that if the census is to be altered to suit anybody's
political needs, Obama is taking steps to ensure that things go his way.
CQ coverage here.