From our Dollars & Census bureau:

Former House of Bush consigliere and current Wall Street Journal contributor Karl Rove is now appearing in TV spots for the U.S. Census Bureau.

From an Associated Press report (via The Daily Caller):

Karl Rove, the former political adviser to President George W. Bush, is appearing in a public service announcement asking people to fill out and mail back their 2010 census forms.

Rove invokes James Madison, the nation’s fourth president and principal author of the U.S. Constitution, in the ad released Monday.

“If you’ve not yet mailed back your 2010 Census form, it’s not too late. Please answer the 10 easy questions,” Rove says. “They’re almost the same ones that Madison helped write for the first census back in 1790.”

Rove video:

So why is the guy George W. Bush dubbed The Architect trying to build response to the decennial census?

Answer: GOP leaders are concerned that the anti-government mojo exemplified by the Tea Party movement will translate into a Census holdout, as this CBS News piece notes:

In June, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, a darling of the Tea Party movement, said she would not fully fill out her census forms because “the Constitution doesn’t require any information beyond” the number of people in one’s household. Bachmann also cited her concerns about ACORN’s involvement in the census-taking process. (Republicans later urged Bachmann to change course; for what its worth, census participation in her district is above-average.)

Texas Rep. Ron Paul, the Libertarian-leaning former GOP presidential candidate, has also complained about the ten-question census, which asks about race and age among other topics. Anything beyond a simple count of the number of Americans and where they live, he suggested, is beyond the scope of the Constitutional mandate.

Republicans are fretting about the impact, as North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry told the Wall Street Journal, of a failure by conservatives “to separate overall government intervention from a question as simple as the census.”

And here’s from a Newsweek blog post:

The roll-out of Rove’s pro-census spot came just as conservative talk-show kingpin Rush Limbaugh propounded the latest in what seem to be an increasingly outlandish set of conspiracy theories about alleged attempts by the Obama administration to misuse the census.

In his Monday broadcast, Limbaugh charged that the Census Bureau is deliberately undercounting Republican voters by skipping neighborhoods where they live. “I haven’t seen a census form since I left home in 1970,” Limbaugh declared.

He concluded, somewhat conspiratorially: “I wonder how widespread this is, that areas thought to be Republican are either not getting forms or not being visited by the census workers. Nothing would surprise me.”

Census spokesman Jost retorted: “We have a mandate to count everyone. We wouldn’t know how to skip anyone.”

Limbaugh is only the latest in a series of right-wing provocateurs to suggest the Obama administration had some sinister intent for the 2010 census. Fox News hosts have been among the most strident critics, with Glenn Beck suggesting that by asking for information about a person’s race, the census somehow was promoting slavery.

Another prominent conservative personality, Michelle Malkin, suggested that the census was some kind of brainwashing exercise designed to create a permanent Democratic Party majority.

In a word: Oy.