Affirmative Action Poised to Become Political Divide : Civil rights: Controversy could devastate Democrats. Republicans cautious on issue, but stand to make gains.

Driven by a hardening of public attitudes and a more aggressive Republican leadership, affirmative action seems poised to re-emerge as a crucial dividing line in national politics, according to analysts from both parties.

For the battered Democratic Party, that prospect is deeply worrisome, for it could fatally split the already weak multiracial coalitions that its candidates depend upon.

At the White House, presidential aides have discussed the subject repeatedly but have failed to come up with any good ideas of how President Clinton might address the subject. Clinton studiously avoided affirmative action issues during his 1992 campaign, keeping the debate focused on the economy. But many expect that trick will be far more difficult next time.

Privately, an increasing number of influential Democrats have begun arguing that public opinion on the issue has shifted so far that the party soon will have no choice but to abandon its longstanding support for racial preference programs. Others, however, warn that doing so would court a disastrous rift with black voters, who have been among the party’s most reliable supporters for 30 years.

In the meantime, Democratic strategists outside Washington are urging their clients to seek cover. Affirmative action is poised “to become a defining issue” in national politics, says David Axelrod, a Chicago-based Democratic consultant. “It can do tremendous damage to Democrats.”

On the Republican side, party strategists remain concerned--at least in public--about appearing to “play politics” with a deeply emotional and potentially explosive issue.

“This is not a matter of picking up a vote or two,” insists pollster Frank Luntz, who has advised House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and other GOP leaders on how to sell their political program. “Republicans should not approach this as an electoral issue.”

Indeed, the potential for it to backfire led the Republicans to omit any mention of affirmative action in their “contract with America” during the last congressional election. And many Republicans suggest the party will go slow, at least for now, in part to see how the issue fares in California--where either the Legislature or a ballot initiative is expected to focus the issue this year--before elevating it nationally.

Nonetheless, most analysts agree that the question is really only when, not whether, the issue moves forward. And Republican analysts agree with the Democrats that affirmative action could help the GOP make major gains by addressing the sense of grievance that has stirred many white people.

“I think it is ultimately more important than the tax issue,” Republican strategist Bill Kristol said at a recent forum on affirmative action sponsored by a conservative organization. “You could have a citizens’ revolt against quotas and racial preferences.”

The surprise, many analysts say, is not that affirmative action seems headed once again toward the top of the national agenda but that the confrontation did not come earlier.

In part, the confrontation over affirmative action has been delayed because an older generation of Republican leaders, people like former President George Bush, were uncomfortable arguing about the issue. In part too, memories of the civil rights movement have made many conservatives hesitate about publicly advocating positions that opponents almost certainly would denounce as racist. But as memories of the 1960s fade, both the public and the political community now appear more willing to force the issue to a conclusion.

In the past, confrontations over affirmative action have often proved to be false starts.

In 1980, the issue played a role in energizing President Ronald Reagan’s support. But while Reagan appointed opponents of affirmative action to key positions in the Justice Department and elsewhere in his Administration, he backed off plans to dismantle the government’s main affirmative action program: the federal contract compliance effort aimed at the tens of thousands of companies nationwide that do business with the government. In the end, his Administration succeeded in reducing the intensity of federal enforcement efforts but did little to change the underlying policies.

A decade later, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), facing a challenge from Harvey Gantt, a black former mayor of Charlotte, N.C., provided dramatic evidence of the issue’s power with a television advertisement aimed squarely at white resentments. The advertisement showed a pair of white hands crumpling a job rejection letter as an announcer’s voice declared: “You needed that job, and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair?” Before the advertisement aired, Gantt was leading in several polls, but his support plummeted as Helms’ televised assault hit the airwaves. Helms won the election, 53% to 47%.

Despite widespread predictions at the time, however, the affirmative action issue then receded. Democrats, whose party has championed affirmative action, had no incentive to raise it. And Republicans, led nationally by people like Bush, hesitated.

Bush objected to affirmative action at times, going so far as to veto a civil rights bill in the fall of 1990 that he said would lead to “quotas.” But his heart was never in that fight.

A year after his veto, Congress passed a new version of the bill with relatively minor modifications. Bush signed it. And in his 1992 reelection campaign, while strategists for Bill Clinton braced for a Republican assault on affirmative action, Bush never raised the issue.

“The Bush group would have been much too concerned about a backlash,” says Bush pollster Fred Steeper.

Today, however, polls suggest that the potential for a backlash has declined, and a younger generation of GOP leaders is much less squeamish.

Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), for example, vowed in a recent interview that if he is elected President--he is actively seeking his party’s 1996 nomination--he would issue an executive order on his “first day” ending the federal contractors’ program that Reagan shied away from killing.

The assertiveness of people like Gramm has altered the stance even of older Republicans, including Gramm’s main rival so far for the nomination, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas. In a recent speech to a conservative group, Dole denounced the “liberal vision of an America in which individual rights are trampled by the newly discovered rights of groups, an America beset by sanctions and grievance groups competing for the special favors of government.” He also suggested that he would push legislation to change affirmative action policies.

Dole is not shy about the political implications of the issue. “Why did 62% of white males vote Republican in 1994?” he asked in a recent television interview. “I think it’s because of things like this, where sometimes the best-qualified person does not get the job because he or she may be one color. And I’m beginning to believe that may not be the way it should be in America.”

Like any issue involving race, debates involving affirmative action raise intense feelings that could be difficult for politicians to control. “If Republicans allow the issue to swing out of control emotionally, it could be very difficult,” pollster Luntz says.

But while that prospect discouraged many politicians in the past, its deterrent value has waned.

Conservatives who oppose affirmative action have been emboldened in part by the sense that the country has moved in their direction across the board. In addition, liberals who once supported affirmative action programs seem increasingly reluctant to defend them.

“There aren’t a lot of people who will speak up” in favor of affirmative action, Democratic consultant Carter Eskew says. The issue “is catching our party a little flat-footed.”

Finally, the passage of time appears to have eroded support for programs that were initially sold to Americans as a temporary, remedial measure. “It’s now two or three generations down the road,” Kristol says. “It is less credible to say this is a temporary expedient.”

Polls suggest that several changes in public opinion have undermined support for affirmative action programs: Public expression of racist views has become largely unacceptable among white Americans; in part because of that, whites have come to believe that racial discrimination is now a thing of the past; and the percentage of Americans believing that society has a continuing “special obligation” to its black citizens has declined.

The decline in overt expression of racist views has been striking. In 1963, 78% of whites told pollsters that if “great numbers” of blacks came to live in their neighborhood, they would move. By 1978, only 51% were willing to say that, and by 1990, the proportion had dropped to 26%.

That shift, in turn, has helped lead whites--although notably not blacks--to the view that the nation has moved close to the goal of equal opportunity for all.

That result could be seen clearly in a 1991 Los Angeles Times Poll that asked people to compare conditions for blacks 10 years earlier to contemporary conditions regarding housing, jobs and education. Only 22% of whites said that conditions for blacks had been excellent or good 10 years earlier, but 58% said they were excellent or good at the time the poll was taken. Blacks had a sharply different view--22% said conditions had been excellent or good 10 years earlier, 25% gave that rating to contemporary conditions.

With whites believing that discrimination has faded, public dislike of special programs benefiting minority groups has hardened.

In 1975, for example, the annual social survey by the National Opinion Research Center found that 26% of Americans expressed fairly strong agreement with the statement that because blacks had been discriminated against, “the government has a special obligation” to them. By 1983, only 18% of Americans expressed a similar level of agreement--a level that has held steady since.

The Times Poll indicates that hardening of attitudes has continued.

In 1991, 24% of Americans felt that “affirmative action programs designed to help minorities get better jobs and education go too far these days.” By last month, support for that view had increased to 39%. Among men, belief that affirmative action had gone too far had jumped from 27% in 1991 to 43% this year.

For many low- and middle-income white men, already alienated from the Democratic Party, the affirmative action issue has potential to become a catch-all for an entire set of resentments, party strategists warn.

“They are a group that is under tremendous pressure” economically and culturally, “and they see the Democratic Party as taking their money and giving it to anyone other than them,” Eskew says. “The real challenge for us is what, if anything, do we as a party have to say?”

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About This Series

In this series, The Times examines affirmative action, a policy that has left its imprint on the American workplace and college campuses over the past 30 years. With some now questioning whether the practice of giving preferences to minorities has been fair to all, this series, which will appear periodically throughout 1995, will measure the effect on America--its institutions, ideas and attitudes.

* Sunday: Affirmative action comes under fire in California in what activists on both sides say is the first battle in a looming national war over the legacy of the civil rights movement.

* Monday: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 said no employer should be required to grant preferential treatment to anyone. But within a decade, the prevailing view of the law changed, setting the stage for today’s controversy.

* Today: Affirmative action re-emerges as a crucial dividing line in national politics, with particular danger for the Democrats.

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The Racial Divide

The Los Angeles Times Poll found wide disparities between blacks and whites on the key question of whether affirmative action goes too far.

Do you think affirmative action programs designated to help minorities get better jobs and education go too far these days, or don’t they go far enough or are they just about adequate?

Whites Blacks Go too far 46% 8% Don’t go far enough 15% 58% Adequate now 33% 30% Don’t know 6% 4%

Source: Los Angeles Times Poll of 1,353 adults nationwide taken Jan. 19-22. Margin of sampling error plus or minus 3 percentage points.