“LET’S GO to a new question for you, Senator Kerry,” said Bob Schieffer of CBS in the final debate. It was indeed a new question, for the trio of debates as well as for the long campaign. And because you might have missed the answer–the fact-checkers, analysts, and pundits sped right past it–let’s repeat the question: “Affirmative action: Do you see a need for affirmative action programs or have we moved far enough along that we no longer need to use race and gender as a factor in school admissions and federal and state contracts and so on?”
“No, Bob, regrettably, we have not moved far enough along,” said Kerry, who proceeded to blame the Bush administration for impeding progress. Citing his experience on the Senate’s Small Business Committee, Kerry said, “We have a goal there for minority set-aside programs,” but the administration hasn’t reached “those goals” and has even tried to “undo” them.
Kerry was referring to programs in which the government awards contracts after taking race and sex, as the euphemism goes, into account. In fact, the administration has continued without important change the various preferential programs built up since the 1970s that govern federal contracting and–far from working to undo those programs–has vigorously defended them in the courts. Moreover, in 2003, the government exceeded the statutory goal for the percentage of all federal contracts to be awarded to “small disadvantaged businesses.” The 2003 goal was 5 percent, and, according to a spokesman for the Small Business Administration, 7 percent of the contracts went to small disadvantaged enterprises.
But no matter: Kerry’s aim was to make George W. Bush the enemy of affirmative action while touting himself as its true champion. Kerry described affirmative action as a policy that “applies” not only to “people of color” but also to women (and thus well more than half the population). He made no distinction between affirmative action of the preferential variety and mere outreach efforts. His answer assumed the preferential kind. And he spoke of it as a means of overcoming discrimination and also of achieving “inclusion.” He offered no indication of when such affirmative action might be ended and instead observed that “we have a distance to travel,” vowing that “as president, I will make certain we travel it.”
The Kerry who answered Schieffer’s question was the liberal Kerry. There was a brief–very brief–moment in his career when he offered heterodox views on preferential affirmative action. In the spring of 1992, when New Democrats were seizing the day, with one of their own, Bill Clinton, headed to the party’s nomination and, not incidentally, in need of a running mate, Kerry decided to get with the reform agenda. In a 50-minute speech at Yale University titled “Race, Politics, and the Urban Agenda,” Kerry said that affirmative action was “an inherently limited and divisive program,” that it “has kept America thinking in racial terms,” that it promotes “cultural dependency,” and that it causes “reverse discrimination.” Liberals immediately denounced the speech, and Kerry, who said he should have let friends and supporters vet it beforehand (a sort of global test, even then), quickly ditched his plan to give a series of talks on race and urban America. And if his speech was to have been a prelude to proposing specific changes to affirmative action, he never uttered them, swearing to all comers his steadfast support for the policy. The episode was like others in his career, in which, as David Brooks shrewdly observed in January, Kerry momentarily embraced daring ideas only to abandon them if they threatened core constituencies, whereupon he returned “meekly to the Democratic choir.”
Because Nexis has a long memory, Kerry found himself during the primaries having to fight off attacks based on his 1992 remarks. Kerry again vowed his commitment to affirmative action, while claiming that in his 1992 speech he had merely represented what critics of the policy were saying. Kerry’s campaign meanwhile issued a press release stating: “In a 1992 speech John Kerry had the courage to stand up for affirmative action and support President Clinton’s ‘mend it, don’t end it'” approach. But “standing up for affirmative action” hardly describes the speech’s critical thrust. Nor is it accurate to say that in 1992 Kerry supported “President Clinton” since, to begin with, Clinton was not president in 1992, only a candidate for president.
Kerry did nominally support the “mend it, don’t end it” approach once President Clinton announced it–three years later–but even here he dissembled. In his answer to Schieffer, Kerry said, “There were many people, like myself, who opposed quotas, who felt there were places where it was overreaching. So we had a policy called ‘mend it, don’t end it.’ We fixed it.” Kerry seems to have projected the Kerry of his 1992 speech onto the fight over affirmative action that occurred in 1995, when the newly Republican Congress considered a bill, opposed by Clinton, that was designed to end preferences in all federal programs.
In fact, Kerry didn’t take part in the 1995 fight, at least not in the way he described it in his answer to Schieffer, by which a listener might think he objected to quotas or pointed to “places where it was overreaching.” Neither did Kerry propose ways to “mend” affirmative action. Nor, of course, had he “fixed it,” given that the fixing, what very little of it got done, was done by the executive branch. Indeed, the truth about Clinton’s “mend it, don’t end it” approach was that, over the objections of a disappointed Democratic Leadership Council which had recommended that preferences in all federal programs be phased out, it preserved the status quo.
Looking at John Kerry on affirmative action, you can spot a flip-flopper, an equivocator, a vain boaster, a fiddler with history, all. But the essential truth is that he has never voted against race-based affirmative action, but always for it. On this issue (as on many others)he is a liberal. Offered a chance to affirm that the policy should not continue indefinitely but at some point be ended, that indeed our country will be better off once all Americans are treated without regard to race and ethnicity, he declined.
Here is where Kerry differs significantly on this issue with Bush, for in the important area of higher education his administration has encouraged colleges and universities to reduce their reliance on race and ethnicity in admissions and other programs, and, indeed, to adopt race-neutral approaches wherever possible. Already the effort has met with success, as witness the elimination of race-exclusive scholarships by a growing number of schools. A Kerry presidency would likely discontinue this effort, even as such a presidency would provoke this question: Where are those New Democrats of yesteryear, those Democrats who once condemned race-conscious preferences and group entitlements, who so eloquently reminded their party of its need to recover core civil rights principles?
Terry Eastland is publisher of The Weekly Standard.
