EDITORIAL: The Assault on CCRI
The Assault on CCRI 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...
...Where federally administered preferences are concerned, President Clinton performs a particularly seedy cup-and-ball routine...
...Dole has taken up the CCRI cudgel because he's decided California is his last chance at the White House...
...Women might be fired by their employers when they become pregnant, they suggest...
...There's reason to doubt the gambit can work...
...Proponents have been struggling—so far unsuccessfully—to finance a televised ad campaign on behalf of 209...
...His pronouncements on preferences will be decried as so much raw-meat desperation...
...Jack Kemp has been the worst offender...
...I shouldn't have a preference...
...Offenbacher now insists the suit is totally legit...
...The West Coast race may not have moved quite so far in the Republican direction as Dole would wish, in other words...
...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...
...All indications now are that the Republican presidential campaign plans an all-out, high-dollar grab for California's 54 electoral votes...
...Incorrectamundo, Jack...
...As would comparable federal law...
...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...
...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...
...And that CCRI will be a more than minor part of the effort...
...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...
...Speaking in the affirmative, over the vehement but fruitless objections of CCRI chairman Ward Connerly: former Klan kleagle David Duke...
...Six months later, his government-wide review of affirmative action concluded that the very same tax break had been a good idea...
...In fact, she speculates, Connerly "may have put himself in the spotlight on 209 to avoid this thing...
...This "idea," if that's the word, deserves to die...
...It comes late...
...But that September poll reflected a Democratic post-convention bounce, and a pre-con-vention August poll had Clinton's California advantage over Dole at . . . 10 points, just where it is now...
...And is affirmative action in California now simply a matter of "those extra-effort programs" the president sweetly invokes...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...It is plainly intended to preserve such women-friendly things as secondary-school field-hockey programs...
...In March 1995, he signed congressional legislation that killed a widely derided tax break for broadcasting corporations that sell properties to minority investors...
...Down south, Cal State University-Northridge has hosted a widely publicized September 25 "debate" on 209...
...The state constitution's overarching strictures against gender discrimination would otherwise remain fully in force...
...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...
...In any case, suspicions about the timing of the disclosure, according to Offenbacher, are flat-out "incorrectamundo...
...Will Bob Dole's sudden intervention on behalf of CCRI help the initiative...
...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...
...Should men of good will who long for the race-and gender-neutral polity that 209 portends be pleased by this development...
...Northridge spokesmen offer pro forma denials of partisan trickery in the affair, which involved taxpayer dollars...
...An even worse lie...
...The language is lifted almost directly from the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964...
...His aides elsewhere warn, echoing California opponents of 209, that the initiative would cripple gender-discrimination protections for women...
...In any forthcoming controversy about affirmative action, Dole will certainly have the better and more honorable arguments at his disposal...
...A few weeks after that, the White House grandly abolished a lone contracting set-aside for "disadvantaged small businesses" at the Pentagon...
...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...
...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...
...In short, he could take 209 down with him...
...In fact, so perverted has California's affirmative-action system become that there are now more white goals than black ones...
...Still, supporting CCRI is the right thing to do...
...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...
...But he and his campaign should take the trouble to do it well—as Dole has begun to do during these past few weeks...
...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...
...Almost a sixth of black students who entered the school in 1994 were "admitted by exception," meaning they failed to meet minimum eligibility requirements...
...The average SAT scores of newly enrolled black students at Berkeley are hundreds of points lower than those of Asians and whites...
...But the president of the school's student association did say, "I don't care if it's fair," and campus president Blenda 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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...And no presidential candidate has ever come from 10 points down, this close to Election Day, to carry California...
...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...
...That depends...
...But it would be a start...
...The Clinton administration has simply ignored the court...
...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...
...A forged letter from Duke to Connerly, who is black, expresses gratitude for private "words of encouragement" and a "very generous" financial contribution...
...The Assault on CCRI 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...
...And three months after that, the Defense Department quietly restored the program...
...State agencies now employ 54 separate hiring goals for whites and men...
...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...
...Having complained that Dole didn't do it sooner, we're not prepared to suggest that he not do it now...
...Are Californians never advanced over their fellow citizens purely by dint of race or gender or ethnicity...
...He hadn't wanted to do it...
...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...
...Interesting theory...
...I'm disabled," Dole pointed out...
...That's the Clinton affirmative-action record in its entirety...
...Bob Dole is "getting tough...
...The president has proactively eliminated nothing...
...Which would be awful...
...Once more—is anyone still counting?—a lie...
...The passage of CCRI might not redeem this miserable election...
Vol. 2 • October 1996 • No. 7
