Nomination of Thomas Seen as Deft Political Stroke : Judiciary: Black rights leaders seem unlikely to strongly attack black high court choice. If they don’t, Senate liberals may be reluctant to oppose him.

Ever since he ran for President in 1988, George Bush has been engaged in an emotional debate with liberal Democrats over civil rights issues--a debate that appears to have escalated with his choice of Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court.

For Bush, Thomas, 43, a conservative black man who overcame poverty to become a federal jurist, serves as a potent symbol of self-made success, challenging the strongly held belief of many liberals that, without some special preference, minority members cannot succeed.

As such, the nomination is being viewed by Democrats as well as Republicans as a deft political stroke on Bush’s part. “It’s brilliant, if not a bit cynical,” said William Schneider, political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute.

Even though Thomas himself may have benefited from some racial preferences during his lifetime--perhaps including his nomination Monday to succeed Thurgood Marshall, the lone black on the Supreme Court--the President’s nominee strongly opposes affirmative action on grounds that it stigmatizes minorities.

As a result, his nomination puts liberal Democrats and black leaders in a difficult political position in which they must attack a black man to defend their own view of civil rights. If they oppose Thomas, analysts say, liberals may open themselves to the charge that they are discriminating against a minority nominee simply because his views are not in line with their own.

For that reason, according to sources, leaders of the NAACP and some other civil rights groups already have decided quietly that they will not mount an all-out campaign to defeat Thomas, even though they strongly oppose him.

Publicly, the NAACP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and other prominent civil rights groups so far have taken no position on the Thomas’ nomination. “We will review his record just as closely as if he were not an African-American,” Benjamin L. Hooks, NAACP executive director, said Tuesday.

Without strong opposition from civil rights groups, it is not clear how hard liberal Democrats in the Senate will oppose the nomination, unless they can find something in Thomas’ background that would disqualify him.

“If civil rights groups soft-pedal their opposition,” said DeWayne Wickham, a black columnist, “there will be an inclination on the part of Senate Democrats to support him because he’s black. Everyone is going to be uncomfortable voting against Clarence Thomas unless there is a tidal wave of opposition.”

Wickham said that many black leaders see no point in waging a divisive battle over the Thomas nomination because they believe the Supreme Court “already has been lost” for civil libertarians as a result of earlier conservative appointments by Bush and former President Ronald Reagan.

On the other hand, political consultant Ann Lewis asserted that liberal Democrats in the Senate may feel compelled to fight the Thomas nomination because several of their members who will stand for reelection next year were elected with the support of traditional black liberals.

If liberals are to succeed in defeating him, however, they must find something that would cause people to question his ability to serve on the court, analysts said. Among other things, Thomas’ opponents are expected to argue that he failed to uphold anti-discrimination statutes when he served as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under Reagan.

Thomas prosecuted individual cases instead of class-action suits while he headed the EEOC, a policy that led to disagreement with several members of Congress. Thomas’ supporters on the EEOC point to his record of prosecuting more cases instead of settling them, as had been done previously.

Of course, Thomas’ views on civil rights will not be the only issue before the Democratic-controlled Senate when it decides whether to confirm the President’s nominee.

Abortion rights advocates already have announced their opposition to Thomas, and Sens. Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) and Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) have vowed that they will not let him escape the confirmation process--as Justice David H. Souter did--without expressing his views on the issue of abortion.

On Tuesday, abortion rights activists distributed copies of a 1987 speech made by Thomas in which he praised an essay by a conservative scholar denouncing the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion. It is the only known public statement he has ever made on the subject.

Yet civil rights is expected to be the focus of Thomas’ confirmation hearings, not only because the nominee has an extensive record on the issue of affirmation action but because it comes at a time when Bush and Senate Democrats are embroiled in a hard-fought dispute over legislation that would reverse a previous Supreme Court decision eroding racial preferences in employment.