It’s been a rough couple of months for supporters of Proposition 209, the ” California Civil Rights Initiative” that would ban the use of ethnic and gender preferences in state employment, contracting, and public education. Though CCRI maintains its steady 15-point public-approval margin in the latest statewide Field Poll, the “yes” tally hovers perilously close to 50 percent — and on this sort of referendum, undecided voters tend to pull the ” no” lever. Proponents have been struggling — so tar unsuccessfully — to finance a televised ad campaign on behalf of 209. And they have at the same time been forced to contend with a ghastly fusillade of innuendo and dishonesty fired their way by defenders of the preference regime.
Up north, Bay Area groups like Californians for Justice and the Ecumenical Peace Institute have been circulating “Vote No on 209” flyers featuring a white-hooded man with a baseball bat and labeling CCRI “Klan-approved.” Down south, Cal State University-Northridge has hosted a widely publicized September 25 “debate” on 209. Speaking in the affirmative, over the vehement but fruitless objections of CCRI chairman Ward Connerly: former Klan kleagle David Duke. Northridge spokesmen offer pro forma denials of partisan trickery in the affair, which involved taxpayer dollars. But the president of the school’s student association did say, “I don’t care if it’s fair,” and campus president Brenda Wilson — who had authority to block the farce, and didn’t — is a donor to the anti-209 cause, which now routinely uses Duke’s visit as ” evidence” of CCRI’s “essential racism.” A forged letter from Duke to Connerly, who is black, expresses gratitude for private “words of encouragement” and a “very generous” financial contribution.
Hot on the heels of Dukegate, and less than a month before the election, came an October Surprise: There was a news leak about a lawsuit filed against Connerly by a disgruntled former employee. Plaintiff’s attorney Thea Offenbacher originally acknowledged to the Sacramento Bee that the case might have a certain, well, CCRI-relevant educative effect: “If we can help the world in that regard — to show what kind of mentality he really has — all the better.” Offenbacher now insists the suit is totally legit. In fact, she speculates, Connerly “may have put himself in the spotlight on 209 to avoid this thing.” Interesting theory. In any case, suspicions about the timing of the disclosure, according to Offenbacher, are flatout ” incorrectamundo.” Right.
Least but not last, the Republican party, with much the same spirit of dull- witted squishiness that now thoroughly infects California’s business community (see Heather Mac Donald’s cover story, which begins on page 24), has pooh-poohed CCRI and affirmative action as appropriate political issues for most of this year. Jack Kemp has been the worst offender. In his debate with Al Gore, Kemp failed to correct a badly inaccurate account of his position on CCRI and instead said “thank you” — thank you! — when the vice president twice praised Kemp for being “a lonely voice in the Republican party” against racial discrimination. Two weeks earlier, at a press breakfast in California, Kemp had worried aloud that 209 might “tear up” the state, and he promised that Bob Dole was “not going to campaign on a wedge issue” like that.
Incorrectamundo, Jack. Four days after the Gore-Kemp debate, Dole issued an elegant five-paragraph endorsement of CCRI during a speech in San Diego that formally inaugurated the Republican “gloves-off” initiative against Bill Clinton’s public character. Twenty-four hours later, in his second and last debate with the president, Dole went out of his way to express support for 209 again — in the course of a deft 30-second critique of crude official quota classifications. “I’m disabled,” Dole pointed out. “I shouldn’t have a preference.” All indications now are that the Republican presidential campaign plans an all-out, high-dollar grab for California’s 54 electoral votes. And that CCRI will be a more than minor part of the effort.
Should men of good will who long for the race- and gender-neutral polity that 209 portends be pleased by this development? That depends. In any forthcoming controversy about affirmative action, Dole will certainly have the better and more honorable arguments at his disposal. Where federally administered preferences are concerned, President Clinton performs a particularly seedy cup-and-ball routine. While “I favor the right kind of affirmative action,” as he told his town-hall audience in the second debate, Clinton claims also to be “against quotas” and “any kind of preference” for the unqualified. Why, “I’ve done more to eliminate affirmative-action programs that I didn’t think were fair and to tighten others up than my predecessors have since affirmative action has been around.”
Once more — is anyone still counting? — a lie. The president has proactively eliminated nothing. In March 1995, he signed congressional legislation that killed a widely derided tax break for broadcasting corporations that sell properties to minority investors. He hadn’t wanted to do it. (Six months later, his government-wide review of affirmative action concluded that the very same tax break had been a good idea.) A few weeks after that, the White House grandly abolished a lone contracting set-aside for “disadvantaged small businesses” at the Pentagon. And three months after that, the Defense Department quietly restored the program.
That’s the Clinton affirmative-action record in its entirety. The Supreme Court has ruled that federal preferences are constitutionally permissible only in response to identifiable discrimination — not for reasons of ” diversity” or generalized disadvantage — and only on behalf of identifiable victims. The Clinton administration has simply ignored the court.
Where California in particular is concerned, the president now says he is opposed to CCRI because “I’m afraid it will end” what he calls “those extra- effort programs” to ensure that qualified people aren’t overlooked in hiring and educational admissions. His aides elsewhere warn, echoing California opponents of 209, that the initiative would cripple gender-discrimination protections for women. Women might be fired by their employers when they become pregnant, they suggest.
An even worse lie. CCRI’s “clause C” carves an explicit exception to its general prohibition against discrimination for “bona fide qualifications based on sex which are reasonably necessary to the normal operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.” The language is lifted almost directly from the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964. It is plainly intended to preserve such women-friendly things as secondary-school field- hockey programs. The state constitution’s overarching strictures against gender discrimination would otherwise remain fully in force. As would comparable federal law.
And is affirmative action in California now simply a matter of “those extra- effort programs” the president sweetly invokes? Are Californians never advanced over their fellow citizens purely by dint of race or gender or ethnicity? The average SAT scores of newly enrolled black students at Berkeley are hundreds of points lower than those of Asians and whites. Almost a sixth of black students who entered the school in 1994 were “admitted by exception,” meaning they failed to meet minimum eligibility requirements. Meanwhile, the California civil service now contains many more black and female employees, on a proportional basis, than their percentage of the statewide labor force would suggest, and the state has lately adopted a regime of “goals and timetables” to redress these employment imbalances. State agencies now employ 54 separate hiring goals for whites and men. In fact, so perverted has California’s affirmative-action system become that there are now more white goals than black ones.
This “idea,” if that’s the word, deserves to die.
Dole has taken up the CCRI cudgel because he’s decided California is his last chance at the White House. There’s reason to doubt the gambit can work. True, the campaign is buoyed by a recent Field Poll that has him down just 10 points from 22 in the first week of September. But that September poll reflected a Democratic post-convention bounce, and a pre-convention August poll had Clinton’s California advantage over Dole at . . . 10 points, just where it is now. The West Coast race may not have moved quite so far in the Republican direction as Dole would wish, in other words. And no presidential candidate has ever come from 10 points down, this close to Election Day, to carry California.
Will Bob Dole’s sudden intervention on behalf of CCRI help the initiative? It comes late. Bob Dole is “getting tough.” His pronouncements on preferences will be decried as so much raw-meat desperation. In short, he could take 209 down with him.
Which would be awful. Still, supporting CCRI is the right thing to do. Having complained that Dole didn’t do it sooner, we’re not prepared to suggest that he not do it now. But he and his campaign should take the trouble to do it well — as Dole has begun to do during these past few weeks.
The passage of CCRI might not redeem this miserable election. But it would be a start.
David Tell, for the Editors
