telling how G.W. Bush and the Republicans dropped any opposition to racial preferences and joined the preferences bandwagon. Among other things, Stein shows, this betrayal has had the effect of politically isolating those who still stand for the principles that the Republicans themselves once supposedly stood for.
By the way, it’s not only Republican politicians who committed a betrayal; I have written about how the neoconservatives, who once described race preferences as a violation of the very essence of America and made opposition to preferences the center of their domestic politics, lapsed into almost complete silence after the disastrous Grutter decision, barely raising a peep of protest against this outrage, which, by the way, was endorsed by their hero President Bush. Apparently the neocons didn’t regard opposition to preferences as so fundamental after all, if it at all interfered with their support for Bush’s campaign to democratize the Muslim world. The fact that Stein’s article, with its blistering criticisms of the Bush administration, is published in the largely neocon City Journal may be reflective of how some neocons are detaching themselves from Bush in light of the failure of his Iraq policy.
In the last part of Stein’s article, quoted in its entirety below, he tells of the circumstances under which the activists for the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, deprived of any mainstream support including any Republican party support, functioned during their ultimately triumphant campaign. Stein writes:
What the party’s revised stance on race has done—aside from bolstering a civil rights establishment whose prestige had sharply declined and that remains unremittingly hostile to all that the Republican Party stands for—is leave longtime allies more vulnerable than ever to the toxic charge of “racism.”
Take the telltale case of William Bennett, the former education secretary and drug czar, who found himself under assault last October for comments he made on his popular radio talk show. Discussing the controversial claim, set forth in Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s best-selling book Freakonomics, that the national crime drop in recent years results in part from the prevalence of abortion among blacks, who commit crimes at a higher rate than the national average, Bennett, an abortion foe, acknowledged that “if you wanted to reduce crime, you could; if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” But—he continued—“that would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do.”
Bennett’s meaning was clear as could be, though that didn’t stop the likes of Howard Dean (“Bill Bennett’s hateful, inflammatory remarks regarding African-Americans are simply inexcusable”) and Harry Reid (he should “issue an immediate apology not only to African-Americans but to the nation”) from predictably, and no doubt deliberately, misreading it. What was startling, though, was the White House’s implicit endorsement of Democratic demagoguery, with presidential press secretary Scott McClellan gravely intoning, “The President believes the comments were not appropriate.”
In Michigan, those waging the campaign for colorblind admissions and hiring find themselves similarly isolated. The anti-MCRI coalition lists more than 180 sponsoring organizations, from the NAACP, the ACLU, and the League of Women Voters to the Michigan Catholic Conference, the Arab American Institute, and the YWCA. Bankrolling the pro-affirmative-action forces are, among other corporate giants, the Big Three automakers. The state’s Democratic governor, Jennifer Granholm, up for reelection, voices strong support for preferences, and Detroit’s Sharpton-like mayor Kwame Kilpatrick backs them even more vociferously.
Kilpatrick got so carried away a few months back that he unwittingly echoed George Wallace at the schoolhouse door, declaiming: “There will be affirmative action here today, there will be affirmative action here tomorrow, there will be affirmative action in our state forever!”
But none of that opposition is likely to carry as much weight on election day as the stance struck by Granholm’s Republican rival, Amway heir Dick De Vos. Though not formally listed as part of the pro-affirmative-action coalition—and he surely wishes that the issue would just go away, so he could run mainly on Michigan’s disastrous economy—De Vos’s tepid comments in opposition to the MCRI wind up trumpeted at every opportunity by its foes.
Bereft of institutional support, the MCRI runs on a shoestring, operating out of executive director Gratz’s apartment outside Lansing, where the campaign’s three young full-time workers sleep on the floor. Campaign manager Doug Tietz is only semi-facetious when he points to a state map and remarks, “This section here represents 6 million people—Clark’s in charge of that—and John handles this area, 4 million people.”
The lopsided disparity in resources has taken its toll, with the pro-MCRI forces having to counter not only a sustained ad campaign misrepresenting the measure’s intent but also a series of legal assaults aimed at keeping it off the ballot. As in the earlier campaigns in California and Washington, the pro-preferences side has sought to put the focus on sex instead of race, aggressively targeting women in commercials that enumerate the alleged ways that the MCRI will hurt them. “What they say is so unbelievably false, it makes your jaw drop,” complains Gratz. “MCRI would close breast cancer screening centers? Eliminate girls’ sports teams? It’s just ludicrous. What it would do is make sure girls applying to college aren’t penalized if their skin’s the wrong color.”
Spearheading the effort to deny the MCRI ballot access has been a group called By Any Means Necessary, led by radical white activists but overwhelmingly manned by young blacks. Fitting its name, BAMN hasn’t hesitated to use threats and outright intimidation to achieve its ends. On several occasions, members have set upon Gratz, cursing and spitting in her face; not long ago, she discovered that someone had tampered with her car’s brakes. At the state Board of Canvassers meeting where MCRI’s petitions were to be certified as valid, BAMN members caused such mayhem—screaming invective and overturning a table—that the cowed commissioners actually refused to do their job. The courts subsequently had to certify the measure for the ballot.
BAMN’s main legal argument claimed that MCRI signature gatherers fooled innumerable black voters into signing the group’s petitions by misrepresenting the initiative as pro-affirmative-action—an implausible contention, given the clear description of the measure’s intent at the top of every petition. In any case, the anti-preferences campaign collected a record 508,000-plus signatures. Since certification required only 317,517 signatures, the measure would have qualified even if officials had disallowed every conceivable disputed signature.
Even after state courts had repeatedly shot down its challenges, though, BAMN, joined by Mayor Kilpatrick, went to federal court, charging the MCRI with violating the Voting Rights Act. In a courtroom packed with BAMN’s young and obstreperous rank and file this August, the judge hearing the case, Arthur Tarnow—an NAACP member, former legal aid lawyer, and Clinton appointee—made little effort to hide his hostility toward the MCRI. Even as he severely limited the MCRI attorneys’ ability to question BAMN witnesses who claimed that signature gatherers had hoodwinked them, he gave BAMN’s attorneys free rein to rip into Gratz and the MCRI.
While finally even Tarnow could not find any Voting Rights Act grounds on which to strike the MCRI from the ballot—a move that almost surely would have been overturned on appeal—his ruling gave its foes a massive cudgel with which to beat it down, not only agreeing with BAMN’s inflammatory charges but expanding on them. The MCRI, he wrote, had sought to deceive not just blacks but “appears to have targeted all Michigan voters for deception without regard to race.”
A year ago, polls showed the MCRI winning easily with upward of 60 percent. Now the numbers have tightened, with one of the most recent polls showing it in a dead heat, and the other showing it ahead by four points.
But whatever the result—and voters notoriously lie to pollsters on issues involving race—the party’s role in the contest is something many thoughtful Republicans will regard with sorrow. If the MCRI loses, it will demonstrate yet again the damage done by the party’s flight from principle; if it wins, it will stand as even more evidence that the GOP is on the wrong side not only of its base, but of history.
“It truly makes you yearn for a return of leaders like Ronald Reagan or Pete Wilson,” says Connerly of recent events in Michigan. “People who knew what they believed and weren’t afraid to act on their beliefs. You really have to wonder where people like that have gone.”