How Will Obama Come Down on Affirmative Action?
   He May Favor a System Based on Socioeconomic Basis

By Victor Merina
IJJ Senior Fellow

Affirmative action – that political hot potato – is on the back burner now. But once Barack Obama decides to weigh in on the subject, the opinion of our nation’s first African American president will prove pivotal in the debate over the divisive issue.

One person who will be most eager to see how Obama will come down on the issue is Ward Connerly, the former University of California regent. To his detractors, Connerly is the villainous enemy who has helped decrease minority admissions to public universities and undermined public contracting programs in states where he has taken his anti-affirmative action campaigns to the electorate.  To his followers, he is the champion of equality who wants to do away with racial preferences and is determined to dismantle affirmative action programs piece by piece, state by state.

During the election campaign last year, Obama criticized John McCain for backing the Connerly proposals.  But at the same time, Obama signaled that he may be open to a socioeconomically based system for any favored treatment.  That view was gleaned partly from an ABC television interview in which Obama said his daughters did not deserve any preference in college admissions because their family has the means and they “have had a pretty good deal.”  Instead, he said, special consideration should be given to low-income students of all races.

While Obama’s stance is not yet definitive, he is positioned to influence its implementation and could change the course of debate. Obama likely will have the opportunity to select a Supreme Court justice who could change the makeup of a conservative-majority court that may see affirmative action in college admissions come before it.  He also could use his bully pulpit and sway in the civil rights community to support an economically based  system. 

Or Obama could issue an executive order that would reinstitute and strengthen affirmative action programs in federal contracting and other programs, said Shanta Driver, national chairperson for the group By Any Means Necessary or BAMN.

“That kind of statement would go a long ways in defeating the efforts of Ward Connerly,” said Driver whose organization has been in the forefront of some state battles over affirmative action.

Last November, while Obama was sweeping to victory, Connerly’s forces had mixed results. In Nebraska, voters handily approved an anti-affirmative action initiative, 58 to 42 percent. Colorado voters, meanwhile, spurned the Connerly-backed measure by 33,000 votes.

Connerly attributes his Colorado loss to a slew of other initiatives – 14 in all – that he says weighed down the ballot and confused voters.  He also says the heavy turnout of Obama supporters not only enabled the Democrat to turn that red state blue but helped reject what was formally dubbed Amendment 46. 

Affirmative action advocates, such as Ellen Buchman of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, view the Colorado result as the climax of a years-long effort to educate the public as well as elected officials and the media on the benefits of affirmative action.  She says her side was also able to warn voters about the stealth tactics of Connerly and his supporters, who portray an anti-affirmative action initiative as a pro-civil rights measure.

Connerly had triumphed with three similar measures in the past -- Proposition 209 in California, Initiative 200 in Washington state and Proposal 2 in Michigan. In 2003, California Proposition 54, another Connerly-supported initiative, which would have banned the collection of racial data to assist the state in carrying out health programs and other programs, failed.

In the most recent round, Connerly’s forces also failed to place similar measures on the ballots in three other states – Arizona, Missouri and Oklahoma – amid challenges over the validity of signatures needed to qualify the measures.

“We see that as four out of five states where he was defeated,” said Buchman, the vice president of field operations for the Leadership Conference.

Connerly says he intends to go back into Colorado with yet another anti-affirmative action initiative in 2010, and his supporters are poised to begin preparing language for prospective ballot measures in Arizona and Missouri.

In the meantime, Obama could preempt Connerly by putting forth the idea of a preference program based on socioeconomic class. “He may not want to go there as fast as I do,” Connerly says of Obama, “but he’s given every indication that’s the direction he wants to go.”

If Obama doesn’t go there, Connerly’s army is waiting in the wings to bring affirmative action before voters once more.

And waiting to rush to its defense are people like the Leadership Conference’s Buchman.
“At the end of the day, like us, our opponents don’t give up,” she says.  “My sense is that this is far from over.”

Victor Merina is a Senior Fellow at USC Annenberg’s Institute for Justice and Journalism