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Numbers game Are People Coming to Their Census?By Rick Horowitz
A tip of the hat, ladies and gents, and a hearty "double-ditto" for those princes of the airwaves, those masters of bombast, those sultans of chat: America's right-wing talk-radio jocks! These are the people who set the agenda, who make things happen. Politicians quake at their power. Millions thrill to every twitch of their razor tongues. They point the way, and a grateful nation follows. Who can forget how just this year, for instance, they railed and fumed against the census? "A government plot!" they cried. "An invasion of privacy!" We should resist, they instructed us. Don't fill it out -- throw it out. And now the first numbers are in, and the results of their tireless efforts can be seen by one and all, and -- How curious. The numbers are...up. Strange but true: A higher share of America's households completed and returned questionnaires this year than they did in 1990. In 1990 -- back before most of the Angry Brigade even dreamed of drooling on microphones for a living -- the response rate was 65 percent. This year -- with the Angries pounding on the census as if it were the work of John Q. Satan himself -- the response rate was up to 67 percent. That's the first increase in three decades! Let's be fair here. (We know how important fairness is in Talk-Radio Land.) Some of the jocks concentrated their fire on the long form -- after all, the last thing you'd want is the government asking about plumbing facilities and such, so it could figure out which areas might qualify for public assistance, or might be in danger of ground-water contamination and disease -- and the long-form response rate was down a bit. (They must be so proud.) But the short-form response rate more than made up for it. And response rates were especially improved in many minority communities. You think the conservative jocks wanted it to turn out that way? Whites underrepresented, and minorities stepping it up? They're crafty, those talkers, but that's way too subtle for me. "Stunning" -- that's how one expert characterized the upturn in the numbers, particularly when so many other community-based activities -- voting, churchgoing, charitable giving -- are continuing to slide. And here you had the Mighty Mouths launching a nationwide crusade against the thing, blasting away from every antenna that would have them, and the numbers still went up. What are we to think? Could the gabbers be losing their clout? Are they even becoming -- gasp! -- counterproductive? You know what they're going to say. They're going to say that they're the victims of -- what else? -- another government plot! With taxpayers' money! They're going to point out that the feds threw a multi-million-dollar ad campaign into the mix, encouraging people to fill out their forms. They're going to say that the feds played the public like a violin, making them hungry for government services and antsy about missing out. Of course, this is the very same federal government that these very same jocks are always saying couldn't organize a two-car parade, couldn't scramble an egg without stealing the chicken or burning down the kitchen. And now we're supposed to believe that these same incompetent bureaucrats, these same pathetic suckers at the public teat are the people who went toe-to-toe with the most persuasive voices in this great big land of ours -- and clobbered them? It must have been the black helicopters. Posted 9/21/00. Count
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Rick Horowitz