Catastrophe - Dick Morris [56]
Sabato adds, “I’ve always remembered what Joseph Stalin said: ‘Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.’”189
On April 2, 2009, Obama nominated Robert M. Groves to be the census director. Groves is a long time advocate of the use of sampling in the census counts. The Associated Press noted that “when he was the [census] bureau’s associate director, Goves recommended that the 1990 census be statistically adjusted to make up for an undercount of roughly 5 million people, many of them minorities in dense urban ares who tend to vote for Democrats.”190
At the time, Bush’s commerce secretary, Robert Mosbacher, overruled Groves and called the proposed statistical adjustment “political tampering.”
But now, when Groves tries his political tricks, there won’t be anyone there to stop him.
ACTION AGENDA
There is no doubt that Obama will attempt to manipulate the 2010 census for partisan advantage. The question is: What can we do about it?
In this case, plenty. The Supreme Court has already established its jurisdiction over the census, citing the fact that it is a constitutional, not a legislative, requirement. In the past, the Court has resisted efforts to use “sampling” in making the final count. But each census poses its own particular issues—and we can’t stand by and trust that Obama will adjudicate them fairly.
So it’s almost inevitable that any attempt he makes to manipulate the census will be challenged in court. But that will require a lot of funding—and support for collecting evidence and for preparing the challenges. Through www.dickmorris.com, we’ll keep you posted on where and when you can help this process along.
We can’t let Obama steal the census.
PUSHING UNIONIZATION
Labor unions, long diminishing as an industrial force, have resurrected their political punch in the past decade. Their donations and manpower are vital to the Democratic Party and have made up a large part of the offensive that returned their party to power last year.
Now it’s time for payback.
From its high point in the 1940s, when 30 percent of all American workers belonged to a labor union, the percentage of the workforce that’s unionized has dropped to only 12 percent. And union membership has shifted away from blue-collar industrial unions and toward government workers’ organizations, such as those representing teachers, police, firefighters, and hospital workers. Labor representation of private-sector workers has fallen dramatically.
With the growth of foreign competition, particularly in manufacturing, union membership is likely to decline further—unless labor leaders can induce more workers to organize and vote to be represented by a union.
Thus far, despite years of trying, they have largely failed to expand the union base. Now they’re trying to change the rules to do so.
What makes this a political issue, not just a business problem, is the tendency of union members to follow their leadership into the Democratic camp. If, by slanting the election procedures, Obama can increase the proportion of the workforce in labor unions, he can do a great deal to assure himself of the decade of political supremacy he covets.
And since labor unions donate huge sums to the Democratic Party and its candidates, anything that swells union coffers—as an expanding membership would do—would be a big financial help to Obama’s allies.
So Obama isn’t just pushing unionization as a way to pay labor back for its political and financial support; his deeper plan is to increase the number of union workers so that he can add them to his political machine and be able to count on their votes and their union’s contributions.
On April 2, 2008, during his campaign for