The California Civil Rights Initiative, the anti-quota measure on the California ballot in November, continues to do well in the polls. It is even getting surprisingly friendly press coverage. A recent front-page article in the San Francisco Examiner, for example, profiled a 19-year-old southern Californian, Hayley Ulrich, who has just successfully finished her first year at West Point. She went to West Point only because she failed to be admitted to the school of her dreams, the University of California at Berkeley — despite a superb high-school record in every respect. Ms. Ulrich had better grades than about half of the entering class at Berkeley, the Examiner points out, but she was passed over in favor of students who would add ” diversity” to the campus. The Examiner draws the connection between this admissions policy at California’s public university and Proposition 209 (as CCRI is called on the ballot) and makes a compelling case against the current quota regime in California.
But despite the polls and the press, business leaders and Republican politicians are terrified of Proposition 209. Several large California corporations have hurried to express their opposition to it. Very few California political figures have made the initiative central to their campaigns; Bob Dole and Jack Kemp didn’t mention the issue when they spent a week in California during the Democratic convention. And so-called public interest groups like the League of Women Voters have predictably come out against CCRI.
Meanwhile, the latest dirty trick on the part of CCRI’s opponents is an invitation from California State University at Northridge to former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke — to argue the case against quotas in a debate. Ward Connerly, the chairman of the initiative, promptly disavowed Duke and denounced the university for presenting him as a proponent of CCRI. But look for opponents of the initiative to claim that David Duke is representative of those supporting the effort to make California’s public policy race-blind.
The good news is that despite all this, and despite a huge disadvantage in money, the initiative’s supporters soldier on in their effort to save California from racial balkanization. In this otherwise dispiriting election season, they stand out as principled figures deserving of the admiration and support of conservatives around the country.
