QUOTAS

Meanwhile, the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), whose fate on the coming November ballot will significantly influence the political future of ” affirmative action quotas” in America, struggles to defend itself against a well-funded interest-group smear campaign. CCRI is a proposed amendment to the California constitution that would ban racial, gender, and ethnic discrimination, for or against, in state employment, education, and contracting. So where are Bob Dole and Company in the contest over this proposition, consistent as it is with long-established Republican principle — and with federal legislation that Mr. Dole introduced in the Senate last year? Nowhere: silent and immobile.

The GOP is obviously still eager to exploit popular support for race- and gender-neutral government policy in the nation’s largest state — and translate that support into cash for the party’s Washington, D.C., bank accounts. But with the honorable exceptions of Bill Bennett and Gov. Pete Wilson, leading Republicans have been unwilling to lift a finger of help for that cause this year. Instead, the GOP’s highest councils have clearly indicated these past few weeks that they would prefer to take a powder on CCRI. Forget disappointing. This is sleazy.

It’s quite hard to get a “yes” vote on citizen-sponsored ballot initiatives in California. When in doubt, skeptical Californians tend to vote “no,” as they have on 21 of 33 such initiatives since 1990. And unless previously closed wallets suddenly snap open — calling Steve Forbes! — CCRI is likely to be outspent by its critics. Most California businessmen, who might otherwise be expected to back a “conservative” issue, are withholding their support from this one. And preening about it. They stand four-square for ” equal opportunity,” they brag. And also, presumably, for the hiring quotas that help insure any given company against employment-discrimination lawsuits.

CCRI’s opponents do not have such worries. Barbra Streisand is in for $ 1, 000. The Ford Foundation is in for $ 1.4 million, money to be spent by people like the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights — not against CCRI directly, you understand, but only for “research” and “advocacy” of affrmative action generally. Feminist organizations are helping out, spreading the laughable falsehood that under CCRI, “women could get fired if they had children or if they got pregnant.” And right-thinking newsmen are helping out, too. The June 16 Sunday Examiner and Chronicle in San Francisco featured an editorial cartoon depicting two laughing figures labeled “Ca. Civil Rights Initiative.” They are carrying a can of gasoline and running away from a church, labeled ” affirmative action,” that they have just set on fire.

Is this repulsive cartoon an anomaly in the CCRI debate? Hardly. Initiative chairman Ward Connerly, a businessman and member of the University of California board of regents, has repeatedly been called an Uncle Tom by his critics. Here’s state senator Diane Watson of Los Angeles, speaking about Connerly’s role in last year’s regents debate over affirmative action in university admissions: “He probably feels this makes him more white than black, and that’s what he really wanted to be. He married a white woman.”

For his trouble, Mr. Connerly has now been rewarded with an additional — if slightly more elevated — rebuke from the most admired Republican in the United States. Colin Powell, in a May address to graduating seniors at Bowie State, offers an extended defense of affrmative action as it is currently practiced. Affirmative action only “provides access for the qualified,” he announces, as if the argument could ever be resolved so crudely. And “we must resist misguided government efforts that seek to shut it all down, efforts such as the California Civil Rights Initiative, which poses as an equal opportunity initiative, but which . . . puts the brakes on expanding opportunities for people who are in need.”

In response, on June 7, Ward Connerly sent Powell a powerfully eloquent (and remarkably even-tempered) seven-page letter. Among other things, Connerly respectfully asked the general how it is, if affirmative action only “provides access for the qualified,” that black, American Indian, and Chicano students are automatically admitted to Berkeley when they score at least 6, 500 points on an 8,000-point academic index. “California residents,” Berkeley’s euphemism for white and Asian students, are automatically denied admission whenever they score below 7,000. Powell has not responded to Connerly. He is on vacation with former president Bush, catching fish off the coast of Greece.

Worse, Powell’s most important co-Republicans have also gone fishing on CCRI. Bob Dole has just completed yet another campaign trip to California without once volunteering a favorable word about the initiative. Pressed by a television interviewer on the subject June 10, Dole practically whispered his support, adding meekly that “I’ve been for affirmative action. I think there are some changes that should be made.” Asked recently by the Los Angeles Times to identify issues that might help Dole’s presidential effort in California, GOP chairman Haley Barbour did not include CCRI. Californians ” don’t have to have somebody from outside to make a big issue about it,” he said. You hear that same idea over and over again these days. His California state campaign manager, Marty Wilson, says “Dole is a national candidate and this is a state initiative.” Former governor George Deukmejian, Dole’s honorary state chairman, says, “I don’t think he should get much involved in affirmative action. It’s not very helpful for presidential candidates to get involved in state initiatives.”

Of course, these gentlemen were happy to have a whistlestopping Dole break with his own party in Congress and support something called the Auburn Dam, a local billion-dollar public-works project unheard of outside California. So it isn’t states-rights delicacy that deters the GOP from engaging on CCRI. Nor does public opinion explain the party’s behavior. The initiative remains overwhelmingly popular in California. A March Los Angeles Times poll indicated 66 percent statewide approval of CCRI, including 80 percent of registered Republicans, 55 percent of Democrats, and majorities among women and minority groups. A more recent Times poll showed 69 percent support for CCRI in the City of Los Angeles — including 56 percent of black respondents and 68 percent of Latinos.

What’s going on with Dole and his advisers, then? The answer is simple, and ugly: CCRI’s opponents are playing dirty. And Republicans, embarrassingly unsure of their ability to mount a serious argument about this matter of principle, and concerned over how the whole thing will “look,” are flinching from the fight. On behalf of the Clinton White House, George Stephanopoulos accuses Republicans of “making political calculations, not moral and legal calculations” about CCRI. Look who’s talking. And how terrible it is that he’s telling the truth.

— David Tell, for the Editors