One especially severe disappointment involves census sampling. Despite signs all week that Republicans were going to get what they wanted--a six-month appropriation for the Census Bureau, or perhaps the Commerce Department--they seem to have collapsed within the last 24 hours. Now the departments of Commerce, Justice, and State will all receive full funding for nine months, at which point another budget struggle will arise--except that the GOP won't be able to isolate the sampling issue, as it had intended. Clinton will threaten a shutdown, and Republicans, once again, will cave. They've been totally rolled on sampling; their single hope at this point is a broad ruling from the Supreme Court. Don't count on it.

Here's a prediction: The 2000 Census will sample widely, perhaps not for purposes of distributing Congressional seats among the states, but for just about everything else, such as drawing district boundaries, creating spending formulas, etc.

It looked like Republicans had this one in pocket, but Clinton and the Democrats picked it at the last moment.

Fed Follies
The Right's economists haven't been a source of much distinctive wisdom over the last year. Is devaluation the problem, or fixed exchange rates? Is deflation or inflation on the horizon? If deflation, could that be a good thing, as George Selgin has argued in NR ("The Price is Right," March 23rd)? Should the Federal Reserve ease monetary policy? Conservatives have been all over the map. That's not necessarily a bad thing; there doesn't have to be a "conservative position" on everything, especially matters which turn on disputed empirical questions.

But one thing every camp should be able to agree on is that if the Fed is going to loosen, there are better and worse ways to do it. As Alan Reynolds wrote recently in Intellectual Capital, "Of all the decisions the Fed might make, the worst would be to do what they usually do when the real economy weakens"-and what their second quarter-point rate cut in a month suggests they may be doing now-"a series of tiny interest-rate cuts spread out over a long period. That makes people expect rates to be even lower in the future, providing a perverse incentive to delay interest-sensitive purchases such as autos and business equipment." It's the same reason supply-siders in the early '80s opposed staggering tax cuts into the future: they would actually depress the economy until they took full effect. They lost that fight, and not much good happened until 1983, when the last round of cuts kicked in. Timing is everything.

Losing California
The Republican Governors Association on Friday released a roundup of recent polling for 20 of the 36 gubernatorial races currently underway. Good news for the GOP includes strong incumbent performances, a close race in Georgia, and a possible pickup in Hawaii. Missing from the analysis is any mention of the most important race in America this fall: California governor. There, Attorney General Dan Lungren continues to lag behind Lt. Gov. Gray Davis. Republicans hope Lungren will benefit from the late surge that has helped Pete Wilson and others to victory in the past, but the odds of this happening grow longer each day.