The Bush Administration's manipulation by special interests is easiest to see in broadly accessible situations, like a decision to open federal lands to strip mining. It's harder to grasp when the interest is buried in a mountain of regression analyses, like global warming or the approval of drugs. So let me try to run through some basics. Let's say you have an exclusive political club of 100 members. Ninety are Whigs. Ten are Tories. Mary, a Whig, is married to Tom, a Tory. After a particularly personalized debate, Mary and Tom get divorced and drop out of the club. This means that 10 percent of the Tories have dropped out, but only about 1 percent of the Whigs. The next day, the Fox Planet Post publishes a breathless story that Tories are failing to thrive at the club in shockingly disproportionate numbers compared with Whigs and that therefore Whigs are clearly the more politically adept.

The problem with the Planet's story is that it fails to account for the relationship between rates and real numbers, or percentages and proportions. Moreover, it inflates the significance of the disproportion by assigning a social meaning to the percentages belied by the situation on the ground. It's not mathematically wrong, in other words, but it's factually absurd. The Planet chooses to focus on a binarism of Whig and Tory that fails to tell the whole story, or perhaps the most important part of the story. What might the data look like if they examined a full spectrum of reasons for which club members might drop out: i.e., by married versus nonmarried status or by ability to pay alimony versus the hefty club dues?

I say all this to get to the following: The Administration's Civil Rights Commission--reconstituted with neocons like Abigail Thernstrom--just issued a major report endorsing a 2004 article by UCLA law professor Richard Sander, in which Sander asserts that affirmative action hurts capable but less qualified black students by setting them up for lifelong failure. He starts with a theory that affirmative action actually harms black students by putting them in situations where, supposedly, they can't keep up. It's called the "mismatch" hypothesis: To wit, if only these poor lost souls had gone to second-tier schools where they belong, they'd have more self-confidence to compete against comparable second-tier peers, and the world would be a better place. Based on this, the Civil Rights Commission recommends that California publish black bar-exam-passage rates; that the National Academy of Sciences start studying the disparity of black-white graduation rates and that Congress deny federal funding to any law school that does not specifically track the progress of black students.

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