KILLING CALIFORNIA’S QUOTAS

To collect the 694,000 valid signatures needed to place the initiative before voters, Stalinberg estimates it will be necessary to gather more than one million signatures by late February. The total cost of the CCRI campaign, he says, will be around $ 1.75 million. “We really need to get a chunk of money in September and October,” he says. “By October 1, our cash flow requirements could easily be $ 50,000 or more a week.” Manager Joe Gelman says they have raised over $ 400,000 so far, but acknowledges there is little more than $ 100,000 in the bank.

The initiative needs money fast. Ken Khachigian, a veteran California GOP campaign strategist, draws parallels with the failure last fall of a school- choice initiative that was also prominent nationally but a bust locally. “On school choice it was rather simple,” Khachigian says. “We got outspent 1’0 to 1.” He thinks the civil rights initiative could succumb to the same problem. ” I’ve sort of been worried that they’re not going to get the signatures, and that would be a disaster,” he says. “But if they do get the signatures, they’re going to need some seed money to get it going. I mean, they can’t wage a zero-expenditure campaign.” The kind of money an initiative campaign needs is not likely to come through individual donations, either. Donations made by individuals are solicited through direct-mail campaigns. The results are never reliable, and they are always costly. The big money, the dependable money, the easy money, has to come through corporations.

But most corporations d on’t want to get anywhere near the civil rights initiative. “Name a company that’s going to write a check for $ 100,000 and be the first one out of the box to boot,” says a Democratic campaign veteran.

The initiative’s backers concede the point. Ward Connerly, the University of California regent and black businessman pilloried for leading the move to ban racial preferences in university admissions, is also a board member of the state Chamber of Commerce. After a Chamber speech attacking preferences, Connerly says he got a standing ovation. “Everybody walked up afterward and said, “We certainly agree with you,'” Connerly says, “but you ask somebody to write a check to put their money where their mouth is, and they get very shaky in their boots.”

And after his experience with the big regents battle, Connerly cautions against underestimating opponents. “I don’t think there are many initiatives that can pass on the sheer strength of being the right thing,” he says.

Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who made a strong bid against Pete Wilson in last year’s gubernatorial primary, says the usual money sources, business-type Republicans, “are very cowardly on this issue.” Unlike a candidate who can do favors, the civil rights initiative addresses “a social issue that . . . establishment businesses have pretty much made their peace with,” Unz says.

“It’s not our issue,” explains an official with a large California corporation, “and I think there are a lot of companies who feel that way.” He further argues that with the CCRI, “what you have is no upside and all downside. If you don’t perceive any major positive results and all you can see are negative consequences, your decision is made for you.”

Besides, virtually every malor corporanon made affirmative action part of personnel policy a long time ago. “There’s no compelling business need to dismantle affrmative action,” says a spokesman for another major California corporation. “It’a fact of life. Our feeling is that regardless of how this debate comes out, we’ll probably continue to promote diversity and use affrmative action efforts to get there.”

Steinberg’s reaction to such thinking is blunt: “There were companies in the South that were comfortable with Jim Crow,” he says, “because that was the status quo.”

Darrell Issa, a southern California auto-alarm manufacturer who is co- chairing the initiative’s campaign, says that whatever one may think about the corporate instinct to play it safe, there’s no changing it. “It’s very difficult to get corporations very ecited about giving large dollars to something they cab be traced back to and asked, “Well, wait a second, are you against affirmative action?'” He believes the initiative will have to survive on individual donations.

Historically, corporations have tended to finance only those initiatives in which they have a clear financial stake. If an initiative will help them, they’ll put up the cash; if an initiative will hurt them, then they’ll put up the cash to stop it. If It doesn’t do one or the other, they’re not interested.

In 1990, the environmentalists’ wish-list initiative known as Big Green was defeated because corporations believed it was a threat to their pocketbooks. The civil rights initiative, on the other hand, offers no immediate financial rewards if it passes. What it does offer is the likelihood that corporations which sponsor it will face bad publicity, boycotts, and on-site demonstrations.

One public relations executive laughs at the idea of donating to CCRI: ” Frankly, for companies, including mine, that make a very big deal about their efforts to diversify the workplace,” he says, “the idea of putting one’s name on an anti-affirmative action campaign sort of destroys all the good will we’ve been attempting to build by creating a diversified workplace.”

Nothing scares the California business establishment more than talk of boycotts and charges of racism over a social issue that does not explicitly slash their taxes, cut their regulation, or minimize their exposure to litigation. Already, the National Urban League has pulled a $ 10 million conference out of Los Angeles and others are following. California corporations take such punitive measures seriously.

But corporate timidity is not the only problem. Because other GOP fundraising campaigns are underway, there are an increasing number of political mouths to feed. Wilson, the state’s fundraising heavy-weight, is sucking up money for his presidential campaign, along with eight other GOP candidates, and 10 other initiatives, not to mention four assembly recall campaigns stemming from the chaos in that chamber inspired by former Speaker Willie Brown. “The competition for dollars is very, very high,” says John Herrington, the state GOP chairman.

In such an environment, it is all too easy for Republican sympathizers to evi nce loyalty simply by sending dollars to this or that GOP candidate instead of sending money to the CCR I. By doing so, a corporation or individual could claim to be supportive of the Republican agenda generally, while avoiding the dangers of backing a specific initiative that takes on the well-entrenched preference colossus.

Opponents of the civil rights initiative, on the other hand, have an established grass-roots network that has no difficulty mobilizing for the cause, and they will probably get money from unions and civil rights groups around the country who perceive the initiative as a national threat. One of the most active — and, by some insider accounts, vehemently alarmist — opponents is Peg Yorkin, the former wife of a prominent Hollywood producer, who heads the Feminist Majority Foundation.

The Foundation paid for a Lou Harris poll that undergirds the opposition strategy of painting the initiative as a fraud which seeks to roll back all anti-discrimination efforts. The poll found voters confused about the definition of affirmative action. They do not necessarily equate it with preferences, and they generally favor policies to aid women and minorities. When voters were told that CCRI would outlaw all afirmative action, support for the initiative suddenly sank. Some voters were even angry, believing they had been deceived. Says Michael Harris of the San Francisco-based Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, “Our strategy is going to be to point out the deceptiveness and dishonesty of the measure.”

He also attacks the initiative as a cynical, professionally-crafted GOP ploy, “tested, revised, polled and focus-grouped,” a charge the sponsors vigorously deny. Tom Wood and Glynn Custred, the drafters of the initiative, are “front guys,” Harris argues. “They try to affect this appeal as a couple of homespun professors who worked on this Chevy the backyard under the shade tree and came up with it together.”

Initiative backers insist that they want to keep the measure non-partisan and multiracial to avoid fueling the bitter polarization it is intended to salve. They asked the legislature to put the initiative on the March ballot instead of November’s, but Speaker Brown strong-armed a party-line vote to deny it. At this point, non-partisanship seems unlikely.

Still, if the initiative’s populariy stays high, Democrats in marginal districts could nd up backing it. Its simple language contains a powerful appeal to equal-opportunity liberals. Democrats openly fear it as a classic party-splitter. “It drives a wedge right between our policy base and the people we have to get votes from,” says Darry Sragow, a California Democratic strategist. “Most Democratic officeholders and consultants are uncertain at this point and simply do not know how they are going to handle the initiative.”

Although Pete Wilson’s presidential campaign is stumbling, as governor, his influence in California will remain considerable. His highly publicized political instincts will be the key here. If Wilson believes affirmative action will help galvanize Republican votes at the state level in 1996 and thereby ensure that he has a friendlier state legislature to wdrk with in the final two years of his term, he will push CCRI. In the past, when the polls have spoken, Democrats have not shied away from forging a strategic alliance with Wilson. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, staunch liberals both, raced to prove themselves tough on illegals. “Pete Wilson has a long hlstory of identifying hot buttons and exploiting them,” says Sragow, who has been in three losing campaigns against him.

If all else fails, the initiative can count on Democratic Disarray, which has achieved the itatus of a proper noun. Democrats have no coherent or persuasive counter message, and are bickering over whether to back an alternative ballot measure.

The public is making up its mind right now about affirmative action and opponents ae offering only a vacuum, says a highly-placed state Democratic aide. “There’s this blank wall, and the anti-affirmative action people and Republicans in particular are giving people the language to be against affirmative action.” Only what this operative calls “really liberal die-hard activists” are staunchly defending affrmative action, “and that language does not resonate outside the community. They may have the power to get their own community stirred up, but they dont have the power to reach the electorate.”

Defending affirmative action as reparations for past discrimination, or attacking opponents as racist, won’t work, the aide argues. “I can’t use it. And if I don’t have the tools — the language — to go out and talk to my friends and debate my relatives at dinner on why this is a bad initiative, and why affrmative action is good, we will lose.”

The one politically viable response that the Democrats could muster — ignori ng race and focusing on women — parallels the civil rights initiative in this respect: It is a wedge issue capable of dividing Republicans and pulling modera te Democrats back into the fol d. The Democratic aide contends, “If you gave me $ 2 million, I’d do a long, slow media campaign in radio, newspapers, and cable TV in California, and make it a women’s issue, and drive a wedge right back into the Republican party. You’d see moderate Republicans afraid to touch this issue.” A counter- initiative would be distracting at best, in her view. “By the time they negotiate the language of that initiative with Maxine Waters,” she says, ” they’re going to have two initiatives they can’t support.” If the past is a predictor, however, Democrats will probably wait until three months before the election and throw $ 2 million of ads on television — after people have already decided. “Democrats need to be out there right now, changing people’s minds and giving them a reason to be for affirmative action,” this operative says. “Do you know how much money the Democrats have spent on polling and focus groups on this issue? I could use it for a bonfire. They’re still holding meetings at the White House trying to come up with strategy.” Most important, the highly regarded Field Poll in California shows no gender gap, says pollster Merv Field — and the idea that women will rise en masse to oppose CCRI is really the last hope for the initiative’s opponents. “The only way I could see it defeated is if white women got behind the “no” side, but we haven’t seen that,” he says.

On the contrary, Field argues that “what we have seen is that white women and successful minority women feel that they have gotten where they are — as lawyers, journalists, professional people — not so much by affirmative action but on their own merit.”

Unless those numbers change, CCRI is a winner. But funny things can happen on the way to passage of popular ballot measures in the Golden State. Democrats thought they had a sure winner with Big Green, remember. And whatever happened to Governor Wilson’s welfare reforms and school vouchers?

Carolyn Lochhead is a Washington reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle.