Democrats See Quotas as Potentially Explosive : Politics: Strategists are seeking a way to keep divisive issue of affirmative action from hurting ’92 campaign.

More than a year before the 1992 presidential campaign officially gets under way, Democratic strategists are struggling to find a way to keep the divisive issue of affirmative action from hurting their drive to regain the White House.

“The controversy over affirmative action and quotas could become the GOP’s point issue, the Willie Horton of 1992,” warns Mark Siegel, a veteran of Democratic presidential campaigns since 1972. “Democrats should make a preemptive strike, or we will find ourselves painted into a left wing corner by October of 1992.”

Among the ideas being advanced to help Democrats defend affirmative action without alienating key groups of white voters: underscoring the benefits that other groups besides blacks gain from affirmative action measures and stressing proposals for economic growth that would provide more and better jobs for all workers.

Ahead looms a bitter partisan battle not just over civil rights policy but, more important in practical political terms, over public perceptions of that policy. As Democrats see it, President Bush fired the first shot in that struggle last October, when he vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990.

The legislation’s main purpose was to restore rights to sue for allegations of employment discrimination--rights which had been restricted by recent Supreme Court decisions. Supporters point out that the act contained language specifically stating that none of its provisions “shall be construed to require or encourage quotas.”

Nevertheless, in his veto message, Bush brought up the controversial “Q-word.” The President contended that, to avoid lawsuits under the act’s “very technical rules of litigation,” employers would feel pressured to resort to “the destructive force of quotas.”

The political impact of that argument was soon demonstrated, many analysts concluded, in the closing days of the hotly contested U.S. Senate campaign in North Carolina.

Hard-pressed Republican incumbent Jesse Helms ran a television ad that showed a white man’s hands crumpling a job rejection letter. The commercial stated that Helms’ Democratic opponent, Harvey Gantt, supported what it described as the “racial quota law that makes the color of your skin more important than your qualifications.”

This televised onslaught was widely credited with contributing to Helms’ victory after polls showed him to be trailing Gantt.

Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte, is black. But Lawrence Davis, North Carolina Democratic chairman, said: “That crumpled piece of paper could have been used against a white candidate, too.”

Indeed, the anti-quota argument was used effectively against a white candidate in this fall’s California gubernatorial campaign by Republican Sen. Pete Wilson. He attacked Democrat Dianne Feinstein for promising to appoint women and minorities to state jobs based on their proportion in the population. He called her pledge “insulting” to women and minorities.

These campaign models are now causing concern about the future among Democratic politicians and civil rights advocates--particularly about the 1992 campaign. They fear that Bush and his surrogates will use the threat of quotas to sour ethnic and blue-collar voters on the Democratic standard-bearer.

Affirmative action is only the latest manifestation of the racially charged controversies that have plagued Democratic candidates’ efforts to win the White House since they became identified as the champions of the civil rights cause.

Since the 1968 presidential election, no Democratic candidate, except Jimmy Carter of Georgia, has won more than 41% of the white vote. Carter won in 1976 with 46%, and most analysts say that future Democratic candidates need to at least come close to Carter’s level to have a realistic chance of success.

“Our dilemma is how to appeal to white voters while maintaining our commitment to civil rights,” Democratic pollster Mark Mellman said.

That conundrum is likely to be complicated in 1992 by several factors that are pushing the issue of affirmative action to the forefront.

For one thing, civil rights advocates plan next year to revive equal employment opportunity legislation similar to the act that Bush vetoed last month. That will give Bush and other foes of the legislation a chance to revive their accusation that the bill would lead to quotas.

And even before Congress returned, the Bush Administration added fuel to the affirmative action fire two weeks ago when the Department of Education banned colleges that receive federal funds from awarding scholarships based on race. Such scholarships have been used to promote racial diversity on campus. But the edict stirred up such a storm of controversy that the department revised the ban, allowing colleges to give such scholarships from private contributions and federal grants, but not from their general operating funds.

The slumping economy is another factor in the affirmative action equation with tensions expected to heighten between blacks and whites over a shrinking pool of jobs. Ordinarily, hard times help bolster the appeal of the Democrats to blue collar workers. But in 1992, the issue of affirmative action could undercut their appeal to that very group.

Civil rights advocates also thought it significant that William J. Bennett, who was Bush’s first choice to replace ailing Lee Atwater as chairman of the Republican National Committee, is a committed opponent of affirmative action and appeared eager to do battle over the issue.

Even Bennett’s recent decision not to take the post because of potential conflict-of-interest problems did not alter many people’s expectations of the GOP strategy.

“I don’t think it makes any difference,” said Charles Morgan Jr., a Democratic loyalist and a veteran of the early civil rights battles in the South, of Bennett’s withdrawal. “I think the Republicans are still planning to run a national referendum on race.”

A campaign debate over affirmative action would be “the kiss of death” for Democrats, says Southern pollster Claibourne Darden, because it would cripple their chances of getting the “Bubba vote”--white workers who would view affirmative action as a threat to their jobs.

But Democrats and civil rights advocates contend that the debate does not have to turn out that way.

Ralph G. Neas, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the nonpartisan lobbying organization that played a key role in pushing the 1990 act through Congress, claimed that, in contrast to Gantt, most supporters of the bill “did very well” in the November election.

Nevertheless, Neas conceded: “Civil rights advocates have to learn a lesson from the Helms-Gantt campaign.” The main lesson, according to Neas and most Democratic strategists, is to get the jump on the opposition.

“Unless we define the issue our way in 1991, Bush will define it his way in 1992,” Virginia Democratic Chairman Paul Goldman said.

Here are some of the themes Democrats can be expected to stress in their effort to cast affirmative action in more positive terms for their side:

--Broader benefits. The point Democrats will try to make is that the fight for affirmative action is not for blacks alone.

“There are workers of all kinds who get treated unfairly in the workplace, including women and Hispanics,” said Democratic Party Political Director Paul Tully. He pointed out that in some ways the 1990 civil rights act would have had more impact on women than on blacks because it would have made it possible to sue for monetary damages on grounds of sexual discrimination--a right already available to victims of racial bias.

But the difficulty in mustering female support for affirmative action, said UCLA’s John Petrocik, a specialist in political parties, is that “the cleavages are much sharper in race discrimination than in sex discrimination.”

Many women believe, Petrocik said, “that they have more informal ways than affirmative action to get around sex discrimination.”

--Expanding opportunity. Democrats likely will try to show that affirmative action for victims of discrimination is only part of a broad effort to improve employment prospects for all classes of Americans.

“We have to be very clear in articulating that we are the party that is for economic growth,” said Al From, executive director of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of moderate to conservative elected officials. He offered as examples schemes for tax relief for the middle class and increased tax exemptions for minor children.

But the problem is that schemes to promote economic growth that are both feasible and equitable are hard to devise and hard to sell politically--as the experience of both parties in recent years shows.

--The evils of racism. If Bush or other Republicans become too strident in attacking affirmative action, Democrats are ready to strike back by accusing them of racism.

Democratic Gov. L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia, the nation’s first elected black governor, has already come close to doing that in a post election speech by accusing Bush and Helms of forming an “axis” to exploit “the phony issue of racial quotas for the sake of political expediency.”

Such attacks could hurt the GOP among its upper middle class white adherents, who admire the principles of civil rights and view racism as ugly. “The Republican Party suffers with its core constituencies to the extent that it is portrayed as anti-black,” Petrocik said.

On the other hand, Republicans can offset such charges by citing black intellectuals, such as San Jose State University English professor Shelby Steele, who are themselves critical of affirmative action. Such voices contend that it serves mainly to foster feelings of inadequacy among blacks while stirring resentment among whites.

In the long run, Democrats must try to convince a majority of voters that rather than giving minorities an advantage over whites, the real purpose of affirmative action is to even the playing field.

“We need to stand for equality of opportunity, not equality of results,” From said.

That sounds simple. But Democrats concede that the underlying complexities of the affirmative action approach make it a hard proposition to advocate and defend.

For example, affirmative action proponents make a point of emphasizing their opposition to quotas, which Neas of the Leadership Conference calls “fixed, absolute numbers without regard to qualification,” which the courts have held to be illegal, as contrasted to “goals and timetables,” which are flexible and standard remedies for discrimination.

But Terry Eastland, a former official of the Justice Department in the Ronald Reagan Administration and co-author with Bennett of “Counting by Race,” a book on affirmative action, says: “The way I have seen goals and timetables used, they are not much different from quotas. In both cases, there’s a number that people are shooting for.”

Another problem in defending affirmative action is that its justification is rooted, in part, in racist laws and practices, some of which were abandoned long ago even though their impact is still felt.

“If you’re attacking quotas, you can do it in a 30-second commercial,” Democratic strategist Siegel said. “But to explain the reasons for affirmative action I have to go back 300 years to the slave ships.”