(FORTUNE Magazine) – ; The phrase has been grating on a fellow's ears for some time, yet it obviously won't go away quietly. Nexis, ever our guide to cant in the politics industry, reports more than 500 media sightings of ''looks like America'' since Bill Clinton began invoking this bean counter's phrase (while simultaneously denouncing bean counting). It appears to have surfaced first last spring at a Hispanic event in San Francisco -- the Cinco de Mayo celebration, which memorializes the May 5, 1862, triumph of Mexican troops over a French army. Addressing the Francophobe throng, Bill intoned: ''Look around this great crowd today in this wonderful city, and you see America. If you vote for me, I will give you an Administration that looks like America.'' On the gloomy assumption that resemblance to America is now judged only by gender and ethnic criteria, and that these are here to stay for a while, your servant has been working on a formula to generate an LLA score for the 16 presidential Cabinet-level appointments. The formula evaluates the extent to which an Administration has succeeded in putting white, black, Hispanic, and ''other minority'' males and females in the Cabinet in proportion to the number of American adults in each group. For example, white males constitute 37.18% of the adult population and should therefore get six of the 16 slots (because 0.3718 X 16 = 5.95, which we round to the nearest integer). ''Other minority'' females constitute 1.81% of the adult population and should therefore get no Cabinet posts (because 0.0181 X 16 = 0.290, which rounds to zero). Going back to the adult population distribution, we now discern the shape of a ''perfect'' LLA Cabinet. It would have six white males, one black male, one Hispanic male, zero other males, six white females, one black female, one Hispanic female, and zero other females. Our formula hits each Administration with penalty points reflecting deviations from this base-line model of heart- throbbing perfection. The name of the game in the future will be to come in with a minimal number of penalty points. To see how the formula would work in practice, take the outgoing Bush Administration. It had 11 white males, and therefore is instantly tagged with five penalty points. It had only three white females, when six are clearly called for -- a three-point penalty. Adding on formulaic punishment for the absence of one black female and one Hispanic female, we find the Bushies regressively weighing in at ten points from perfection. This brings us to the Clintonians, and some surprising arithmetic. As we went to press, Bill picked a ''person of gender'' for Attorney General, namely Janet Reno. The selection of a white female caused Bill to end up with eight penalty points. Not all that different from Bush, eh? Let us fancifully suppose, however, that the White House backgrounders who claimed to be including males in their search had told the truth. A male AG would have been a stunner. It would have meant that, after all the babble about LLA, Clinton too was ten points from perfection, with a Cabinet that looked no more like America than did George's. True, Bill still would have had fewer excess white males. But he has far too many black and Hispanic males: five, when the population calls for only two (what the Bush Cabinet had). A male AG would also have meant he had done worse than Bush at giving white women their fair share. Counting beans is tough.