May 27, 2001
Don't Know Much Geography
An examination of how creative cartography affects U.S. politics.
By RICHARD L. BERKE
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BUSHMANDERS AND BULLWINKLES
How Politicians Manipulate Electronic Maps and Census Data to Win Elections.
By Mark Monmonier.
Illustrated. 208 pp. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press. $25.
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o wonder people often cannot come up with the name of their own representative in Congress. The boundaries of Congressional districts can be so contorted for political motives that it is sometimes surprising that candidates know where to campaign. Tip O'Neill said famously that ''all politics is local.'' But what is local if you have to ferry from one part of a district to another? Or if a city is so cut up by districts it looks like it was slit with a scalpel?
All the attention has been on campaign fund-raising and venomous television commercials. But ''Bushmanders and Bullwinkles,'' by Mark Monmonier, provides a pointed reminder that many candidates made it to Congress not because they were conspicuously successful at attracting voters but because of who those voters were. The book also calls up memories of last year's post-election standoff in Florida because it shows how supposedly apolitical forces -- from local judges to Supreme Court justices -- can alter the contours of a Congressional district and the outcome of a race.
All over the country state legislatures have begun tinkering (some might say, tampering) with lines of Congressional districts to account for population shifts that turned up in the 2000 census. ''Bushmanders and Bullwinkles'' is something of a primer on the history of redistricting, demonstrating how for generations politicians have twisted district boundaries for the sake of helping themselves or their favored candidates.
The title is a play on ''gerrymander,'' a term coined after Gov. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, a Jeffersonian who in 1811 signed a bill that remade state senate districts to weaken the Federalists by shoehorning their supporters into a few strongholds. A district in the resulting map looked so reptilian that one newspaper editor said, ''Salamander! Call it a Gerrymander!''
Monmonier comes up with a new coinage, ''Bushmanders,'' to remind us that the Justice Department, under former President George Bush, urged states to fiddle with borders to create districts that are dominated more heavily by minorities, and to add white voters to formerly Democratic districts to turn them Republican. In 1992, the 12th Congressional District of New York State was so peculiarly tugged and stretched to accommodate a Hispanic majority that its shape was often likened to the antlers on Bullwinkle, the animated moose. Hence the book's title.
The proliferation of computers has led to an almost obsessive preoccupation with cartography among some politicians, Monmonier says, and it has made manipulation of boundaries easier than before. Maps have the stamp of authority, and their intricacy can make them so intimidating that politicians are naturally tempted to use them to perpetuate their own power. ''Despite this potential for manipulation,'' he writes, ''maps enjoy enormous credibility with a public not accustomed to questioning their crisp, professional-looking lines and labels. Location is fact, maps show location, so maps are factual.''
Still, a district's odd configuration may be less important than whether its citizens share common concerns and ideologies, he adds. ''Who can argue that the weirdly shaped or questionably contiguous districts drawn to promote minority representation are more difficult to represent than the far larger districts stretched across sparsely populated reaches of the American West?''
Monmonier is especially distressed about the racial composition of districts. He suggests considering alternatives like proportional representation -- leaving more than one politician to represent a larger area -- so that minorities can be better represented. That was one position advocated a decade ago by the legal scholar Lani Guinier, and Monmonier laments that President Bill Clinton withdrew his nomination of her as assistant attorney general for civil rights after critics denounced her as a ''quota queen.'' ''Had Clinton not withdrawn the nomination before Guinier could defend herself,'' Monmonier writes loftily, ''the American public might have enjoyed an enlightening discussion of a better way to draw political boundaries and elect legislators.''
Unfortunately, there is too little such analysis in the book, and no clear point of view. It is constructed like a technical manual by someone whose passion is stronger for maps than for politics. As a result, much of it is tedious, even for politics fanatics. Monmonier often does not follow through in making broader political points. And he misses opportunities to exploit ridiculous manipulations of district lines. Thus, he tells us how Sam Stratton, a Democrat from Schenectady, N.Y. who was a member of Congress for many years, repeatedly confounded Republicans who persisted in trying to end his career by changing his district. But he doesn't flesh out his story with much evidence of how exasperating Stratton's survival was to his opponents.
He might also have laid out more common-sense challenges for legislators as they go about the 2002 redistricting. He might have analyzed, for example, how the surprising population gains of minorities in suburbs close to the cities might affect Republican efforts to limit the influence of those voters.
Monmonier does occasionally reach for some entertainment value in this book. But the biggest chuckles pop up inadvertently when he catalogs the creative descriptions used for assorted bizarrely shaped districts: ''baby elephant,'' ''jellyfish tentacle,'' ''ugly, meatball-like blobs,'' ''resembles a lower intestine,'' ''gnarled appendages,'' ''like the mark of Zorro,'' ''earmuff-shaped'' and ''bulbous protrusions.''
This book is timely and painstakingly researched, and it raises vital questions about the art (not the science) of how politicians manipulate maps to win elections. That makes it all the more disappointing that much of the prose, and often the illustrations, seem designed mostly for die-hard cartographers. Still, readers cannot help thinking there is something wrong with the way districts are carved. As Monmonier put it, ''Citizens should not have to consult a 1,272-page atlas to find out who represents them.''
Richard L. Berke is the national political correspondent of The New York Times.
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