Political Horizons for Nov. 20, 2011

Truth ... and the whole truth

Chris Moore, an executive with the advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather, said during a recent speech about “ethics in advertising” that reputable companies “almost never lie.”

There are legal issues, regulatory concerns, and the problem of looking in the mirror each morning, Moore said according to a transcript on the Advertising Educational Foundation website.

“So we tell the truth — but not always the whole truth,” Moore said.

Leaders rarely receive much of a premium for being frank. Ask President Barack Obama or George W. Bush before him. Instead, politicians, especially those seeking their next job, get much more mileage out of focusing on the spoonful of sugar rather than on the medicine.

Gov. Bobby Jindal, for instance, claims he cut $9 billion from the state budget. True, the state’s budget dropped from $34.3 billion in 2008 to $25 billion in July 2011. But most of that decline was the result of federal government hurricane-recovery dollars that dropped away because of circumstance, not because of the governor’s design.

Jindal says, to cite another recent example, he is spending more on public schools. True, but that was a function of the formula that funds the school system, which is generally based on the number of students. Enrollment grew, but the amount spent on each student was not increased.

Then there is the state’s longtime problem of more people moving out of Louisiana than are moving in.

Jindal released a prepared statement before the election that said the U.S. Census Bureau reported that for four consecutive years more people moved into Louisiana than were moving out.

“This is a huge turnaround and we’re reversing Louisiana’s old problem of outmigration,” Jindal stated. “Our sons and daughters are beginning to move back.

The claim was dutifully picked up by syndicated conservative columnist Cal Thomas who spread it across the country in a fawning tribute to Jindal.

However the Census Bureau, based in Suitland, Md., wrote no such news release, said agency spokeswoman Stacy Vidal. “They (Jindal’s aides) probably took that from the American Community Survey reports,” she said.

The Census Bureau on Tuesday released the figures that Jindal recited in his statement a couple months ago. The ACS stats do show that when the number of people moving out of the state is subtracted from the number of people moving in, Louisiana had an increase of 9,758 in new residents in 2010.

Left unsaid by Jindal is that the ACS has error rates of more than 8,000 for both in and out migration figures, making the value of the difference between the two as an actual number, negligible at best.

Jindal “finds an extraneous number and grabs it to make an outlandish claim, and no matter who challenges him, he waves that extraneous number in your face,” said Elliott Stonecipher, a political consultant who studies Louisiana demographics and frequently criticizes the governor. “He is deliberately fuzzing up what would be the natural questions, if he had to debate these claims.”

Kirby Goidel, the professor in charge of LSU’s annual “State of the State” survey, says because of the size of the ACS sample — 3 million or so households each year — the findings should be seen as an indicator of, rather than a fact about, a demographic situation. Early suspicions indicate that some people may be attracted to Louisiana’s economy, which is doing better than the national average, but there are no statistical evidence yet that proves the surmise, he said.

A sluggish economy has kept the historically nomadic Americans from changing residences in fewer numbers than at anytime since 1960, wrote William H. Frey, in a the Brookings Institution article published Thursday.

Widely considered the nation’s leading expert on migration, Frey said in an interview Thursday that reaching the 2010 Louisiana number requires subtracting an estimate from an estimate. When discussing migration statistics, the Census Bureau would prefer people use a different report, he said.

Still, Frey said, the ACS findings do imply that people might be moving to Louisiana. The ACS also indicates that those numbers probably are not enough to repopulate the loss from the 2005 evacuations, much less from the years and years before Hurricane Katrina when people were leaving the state in droves. “What we can say: There’s a big out-migration, but they are trickling back,” Frey said.

Mark Ballard is editor of The Advocate’s Capitol news bureau. His email address is [e-mail].