CALIFORNIA HERE WE COME...?

By NICHOLAS LEMANN

California this fall is embroiled in the biggest, bitterest, most potentially significant ballot-initiative campaign since Proposition 13, the 1978 property-tax rollback that transformed American politics. The initiative is called Proposition 209, and it would abolish affirmative action in state contracting, education and employment. It has been running consistently ahead in the polls.

The battle over the initiative is a grand donnybrook, sometimes messy, sometimes elevated; it seems as if everybody in California, from the Governor and the two Senators on down, is personally involved, and hardly a week goes by that there isn't a demonstration, a wild debate--last week's involved former Klansman David Duke--or a lawsuit between the two sides. There is a palpable sense that historic events are unfolding.

The initiative itself came out of nowhere, but given the subject matter--one that involves just about every hot-button issue of race, class, gender and opportunity in America--there's no wonder it has become such a big deal in America's most populous state. If the initiative passes, it would make it illegal for any state institution to take race or gender into account in distributing its benefits. This would wipe out a host of programs in California, from magnet schools to science tutoring for girls to road-paving set-asides, and would significantly decrease the minority presence at the University of California's two flagship schools, Berkeley and ucla. Other states, or even Congress, may be inspired to copy the initiative. Its passage could influence future Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action, if the longstanding suspicion is true that the Court takes note of election returns. Affirmative action might also become a "wedge issue" in national politics, something so highly charged that it could move voters' fundamental loyalty from one party to another.

The surprise this fall in California, in fact, is what isn't happening: Bob Dole and Bill Clinton aren't talking about the initiative. It is not as if they are not interested in the subject of affirmative action. Clinton is the only American President ever to have devoted a major public address to affirmative-action policy--his "mend it, don't end it" speech of July 1995. Dole is the author of federal legislation to abolish affirmative action, explicitly modeled on the California initiative. Polling shows that the initiative has the clear potential to affect voter behavior in other races, including the presidential race. So why the deafening silence from Clinton and Dole?

Last year it looked as if the initiative might rise from obscurity to supreme importance in the 1996 presidential election. The calculation went like this: the initiative appeared to be quite popular. President Clinton, on the other hand, was looking pretty tenuous for re-election. In a close race, the one state he absolutely had to win was California. If the initiative was on the ballot the same day as the presidential election, and if Clinton opposed it, and if the Republican presidential candidate endorsed it so strongly as to turn the race in California into a referendum on affirmative action--then the initiative could cost Clinton the presidency.

People were thinking along those lines inside the White House in 1995, and also in Bob Dole's presidential campaign. Having supported affirmative action for years, Dole reversed his position and endorsed the California initiative, and then proposed similarly worded federal legislation. The issue seemed to be perfectly teed up for his use in the fall of 1996.

In retrospect, however, the fit between Bob Dole and the anti-affirmative-action cause was not a natural one. Prop. 209 came from outside the normal political channels--and those are the channels where Dole has spent his whole career. Prop. 209 is really a by-product of the political-correctness wars in universities. These spawned an anti-p.c. organization called the National Association of Scholars, through which two academics, Glynn Custred and Thomas Wood, met. Custred and Wood had separately got the idea of an abolish-affirmative-action ballot initiative, and in 1991 they joined forces and began actively pushing it, without much success.

A couple of favorable mentions in the conservative press and, mostly, the Republican landslide in 1994 changed their luck. During the early months of 1995, their cause transfixed the country. The national press and academe, two subcultures where the level of interest in affirmative action is high, undertook the debate on the subject that had never occurred when affirmative action was quietly instituted by Executive Order back in 1965. Republican politicians--Dole, Newt Gingrich and California Governor Pete Wilson, who had just been re-elected on the strength of his support for the anti-illegal-alien Proposition 187 and was now launching a presidential campaign--became champions of abolishing affirmative action. Finally, President Clinton responded to the storm rising in California by ordering up a full-scale review of the policy, something that Presidents Reagan and Bush had refused to do.

Meanwhile, however, the initiative's backers were having trouble gathering enough petitions to get it on the ballot; California initiatives have become a business, and no initiative since Prop. 13 has succeeded without the help of an expensive signature-gathering firm. Republican powers in Sacramento and Washington came in at the last minute with the money to hire professionals and save the initiative. Their motive was practical: the initiative looked as if it might be popular enough to pull Republican candidates (including the presidential one) to victory.

Then, with everything in place, the initiative began to recede as a presence in national politics. President Clinton drew no primary opposition, which gave him the strategic opportunity to move as far to the center as possible. Since the "mend it, don't end it" speech, he has said nothing audible about affirmative action, and the Democratic Party financial apparatus has not directed funds to the anti-Prop. 209 forces who, by the way, are quietly furious at the Siberian treatment they are getting.

Meanwhile, Pete Wilson's presidential campaign, in which affirmative action was a central issue, fizzled. And Dole's campaign, as it moved toward the nomination, moved away from the initiative. There seem to be three reasons:

1) Colin Powell, at a stage when Dole not only wanted his active support but dreamed of having him on the ticket, strongly opposed the initiative and defended affirmative action.

2) Prominent moderate Republicans, including former California Governor George Deukmejian, told Dole they thought the initiative was too divisive and too local to be a good presidential-campaign issue.

3) The main opposition to the initiative has come from women's groups. The Dole campaign, increasingly preoccupied with its "gender gap," didn't want to do anything to worsen it.

So in 1996 it looks as if Prop. 209 will be a stand-alone issue. Although its lead in the polls appeared to be softening slightly over the summer, the opposition to it has been plagued by financial troubles and internal divisions (it recently split into two organizations, Stop Prop. 209 and Campaign to Defeat 209). Pro-209 radio ads have been running for a month, with TV ads probably to follow this month; the anti-proposition campaign hasn't broadcast any ads yet, though it plans to start a radio campaign this week. If Prop. 209 passes, the question remains: Will it have a major impact on national politics, only delayed rather than immediate?

The original name for Prop. 209 was the California Civil Rights Initiative--a moniker that expresses Custred and Wood's central strategic insight, which was to present the initiative as a direct descendent of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The wording of the proposition is adapted from the 1964 Civil Rights Act. None of the advocates of the proposition who appears regularly before the public is a white male. Its advertising slogan is "Bring us together." The idea the pro-proposition forces are selling is that affirmative action has introduced obsessive color consciousness into what otherwise would be a color-blind society, and thus hurts black people as much as white.

The overall message being merchandised by the backers of Prop. 209 clearly has the potential to be attractive to a national audience. How, then, could the anti-affirmative-action cause fail to catch on?

When President Lyndon Johnson created affirmative action, he surely wasn't thinking, "Now I believe I'll profoundly subvert the spirit of the Civil Rights Act, the crowning achievement of my life, which became law only a year ago." Instead, the idea was that custom, ethnocentrism, poverty, bad schools, old-boy networking and a host of other factors would conspire against the new civil rights of African Americans and any real socioeconomic advancement. So L.B.J. compelled government and its contractors to look a little harder for blacks to fill job openings. Thousands of private organizations instituted affirmative-action plans of their own, voluntarily, because they accepted the logic.

Prop. 209 has engendered a small industry of polling on affirmative action. What the polls reveal is that the phrase is reasonably popular, but the word preferences is extremely unpopular. In real life, alas, there is no affirmative-action plan that doesn't involve preferences--that is, taking minority race or female gender into account as a plus factor. That's why affirmative action is another one of those issues on which it's more difficult than is immediately apparent to give the public what it wants. The debate around it really leads into a much larger and more profound question: Does America now provide genuinely equal opportunity for all its citizens? If the answer to that were a resounding yes, then affirmative action would be finished. But in most people's minds, the answer is no, and that makes the future of affirmative action complicated.

A true, grand solution to the problem of opportunity in America would be laborious and expensive. Affirmative action is a patch solution, not perfectly efficient, but it's cheap and already in place. Politically, the key question about it is how numerous its enemies are. Probably most whites casually resent affirmative action; a committed group burns with outrage about it; and some whites (it's hard to say how many) have actually lost a job or a place in school to an African American because of affirmative action. On the other side is an equally varied group: those who aren't affected by affirmative action, or who have benefited from it, or who want there to be some corrective mechanism built into the system, or who don't want to open a racial Pandora's box. Which group is bigger? The answer will determine whether abolishing affirmative action will be a perennial conservative-movement cause or one of the issues that moves American politics.