Political Stakes Are High as Rights Bill Vote Is Due : Congress: The showdown may affect ’92 elections. Bush says the Democrats’ measure could lead to quotas.

On the screen, a pair of white hands crumple a job rejection letter. “You needed that job and you were the best qualified,” says the voice of a narrator, “but they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair?”

That controversial television ad, credited with helping Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) win reelection in a tight race last November, is casting a long shadow as the House prepares to vote today on a civil rights bill that has turned into a political showdown between President Bush and the Democrats.

The bill deals with indirect racial and gender discrimination in the workplace--which everyone involved agrees is an important and complex issue that deserves attention. Experts in civil rights law say that the two sides are now so close together that, in purely legal terms, they could swiftly reach a satisfactory compromise if the substance of the bill had top priority.

But for Democrats and Republicans alike the bill has become a heavily symbolic measure with potentially significant implications for next year’s elections. As a result, both sides may prefer conflict to compromise--at least in the early rounds of what could be a long legislative struggle.

“Despite the hyperbolic rhetoric surrounding the issue, the actual points in dispute are mainly technical and can easily be resolved--provided that ideologues on both sides are willing to forsake the politics of racial polarization,” says Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank associated with moderate Democrats.

On the eve of the House vote, however, there were few signs of that happening.

Bush continued to denounce the legislation, which is supported mainly by the House Democratic leadership, as a quota bill that by implication would favor minorities over whites, even though the text now explicitly bans quotas. Democrats denounced Bush’s attack as a deliberate distortion and smear, accusing him of trying to make race an issue in 1992 even though the President has offered a bill of his own to address the job discrimination problem.

While the civil rights bill is expected to pass the House with ease, attention will focus on the margin of victory to see how close proponents can come to the two-thirds majority needed to override a threatened Bush veto. A large majority also is regarded as necessary to spur the Senate to action but many observers do not expect the bill to get a veto-proof 290-vote margin, since the House mustered only 273 votes for a similar measure last year.

Beneath the surface rhetoric, the battle over the civil rights bill reflects the growing tension between two politically explosive realities in present-day America:

--The continuing conviction among blacks, other minorities and women that strong but subtle forms of discrimination still exist in the workplace. New legal tools are needed to breach these barriers, they say.

--The rising concern among white workers, especially men, that the government and employers are going too far in granting job preferences to minorities and women. Affirmative action programs, hiring quotas and preferential promotion plans have become reverse discrimination, in this view.

What this means for Democrats in terms of electoral politics is that the civil rights bill is a way not only to advance their party’s basic principles but to strengthen their support among the minority voters and women who have become an increasingly vital element in the party’s base of support.

The battle could also help them revive the “fairness” issue by portraying Bush as insensitive to the problems of workers.

Republicans, on the other hand, are well aware that “quotas” have become an emotion-charged issue for many white voters and that defections from the Democratic column by white workers have become a key element for the GOP in winning presidential elections.

Helms’ success with his TV ad, along with the surprisingly strong showing by David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader who got 44% of the vote in Louisiana after he attacked affirmative action in his race for a U.S. Senate seat, have not gone unnoticed among professional politicians.

Outside the South, then-Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.) voted to sustain Bush’s veto of the 1990 civil rights bill--which dealt with some of the same issues--and effectively used the quota issue against his opponent, Dianne Feinstein, to win the California governorship.

“For whatever reason, perception of discrimination against white Americans is very real among a growing segment of the white population,” wrote Leslie Kaufman in a recent edition of the Mainstream Democrat, a publication of the Democratic Leadership Council. “Republican strategists are acutely aware that growing resistance to quotas and minority preference is a political tidal wave in the making.”

Nor do these concerns cut cleanly along party lines. Some Democrats fear that they could be targets of a Helms-type ad in their own 1992 reelection campaigns. And some Republicans who favor the legislation worry that the President’s hard-line stance on a major civil rights bill may destroy GOP hopes of attracting more black support.

Sponsors of the bill have been making a series of concessions designed to reassure wavering Democrats. This eleventh-hour addition of language to outlaw quotas and to allow challenges to reverse discrimination--while gaining only a handful of votes for the bill--has done nothing to soften Bush’s denunciations of the measure.

Spokesmen for the Black Leadership Forum, an association of civil rights organizations, on Monday blasted the Bush Administration’s weekend condemnation of the House bill but their statements lacked the fire and passion employed in previous campaigns.

“I wouldn’t want to say Bush is anti-civil rights,” said Benjamin L. Hooks, executive director of the NAACP. “But he’s using spurious and phony issues to try to defeat a reasonable bill.”

Addressing the National Federation of Independent Business, which supports his own proposal, Bush accused the House Democrats of playing politics with the issue.

“My opponents won’t even consider my civil rights bill,” he said. “Their obvious move to convert the bill into a women’s issue is just plain, pure politics, a politics of selective inclusion and exclusion. Our bill would properly protect women’s rights, everyone’s rights.”

Considered purely in legal terms, the Democratic leadership’s legislation is a much-compromised attempt to make it easier for victims of job discrimination to get relief in the courts. Bush’s plan parallels the Democratic measure on some points but would do less to modify past Supreme Court decisions that have made it more difficult to press discrimination cases.

Both sides acknowledge that there is no national groundswell for the bill, partly because the issue of job discrimination has become more complicated than it was in the days when many firms and government agencies simply refused to hire blacks or women.

Newer questions deal with difficult issues of fairness in promotion and pay as well as sexual harassment in the workplace. Lawyers use such jargon as “disparate impact” and “burden of proof” or “validation” of hiring tests as they discuss complaints of job bias.

One of the intricate problems, for example, is how to deal with indirect discrimination that may result from a job practice that is neutral on its face, such as a height requirement for police officers. While all applicants would have to meet the same standards, such a rule could limit the job prospects for women and Latinos, who tend to be shorter than white males.

Under the 1989 Supreme Court ruling that applies to such “disparate impact” cases, the women and Latinos probably would not be able to challenge the height requirement. The civil rights bill favored by the Democratic leadership would require the employer to justify the standard and show that height is important to a police officer’s job performance.

Similarly, the bill likely to be approved by the House would expand the opportunity for challenging other job practices--such as written examinations for entry-level jobs or word-of-mouth recruiting techniques--that may have a disparate impact on minorities.

Discussions of the legislation, therefore, have centered on such abstractions as shifting the burden of proof from employers to employees, or vice versa, at various stages of litigation.

Indeed, most of the preliminary debate has focused on the financial burdens that employers might have to bear if they are confronted with a lawsuit charging job bias.