From today’s Wall Street Journal Political Diary E-mail:
Ward Connerly is on a roll. Less than six months after leading a successful effort to abolish race and gender preferences in government contracting and college admissions in Michigan, the former University of California regent is taking his cause on the road again. This week he announced he will promote anti-quota ballot measures in Colorado, Missouri, Arizona and Oklahoma in the November 2008 elections.
"We’re calling it the Super Tuesday of Equality," says Valery Pech Orr, who is spearheading the fight in Colorado. The measures are patterned after Mr. Connerly’s Proposition 209 in California, which 55% of voters approved in 1996. Indeed, Prop 209 won significant support even from minority groups, despite vociferous opposition from traditional civil rights leaders.
Colorado is likely to prove fertile territory for Mr. Connerly’s idea. University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill whipped up a firestorm of protest after he compared victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to Nazis. It was later learned he had been given a full professorship despite a poor academic record due to his purported Cherokee Indian ancestry, the validity of which is a point in hot dispute.
Linda Chavez, a former executive director of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, told the Washington Times that she was a tutor in the University of Colorado’s first preference program, which was aimed at poor, rural Hispanic students. "I saw it transformed from giving someone a leg up to ‘We’re going to hold you to completely different standards,’" she said. "I tried to teach grammar and writing, but other leaders wanted to radicalize it, tell them, ‘It’s racism that’s kept you down.’"
So far, Mr. Connerly has been successful in California, Washington state and Michigan — all liberal states that haven’t voted for a Republican for president since 1988. Now he is moving on to four states that haven’t backed a Democrat for president since 1996. Odds are that he will keep chalking up victories in his efforts to restore the original meaning of the 1964 Civil Rights Act — that racial discrimination of any kind is illegal.