Dole Can Win on the Coattails of CCRI

Even though Bob Dole is far behind in the polls, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how he can still win California and therefore the presidential election itself. Here’s how:

Currently, Dole is favored by about 35% of California voters, while Clinton has the support of 55%--a landslide in the making. But look again. Even more California voters, 60%, favor Proposition 209, the anti-discrimination measure known as the “California civil rights initiative.” And Bill Clinton opposes it.

Dole supports Proposition 209. If he would make this a central issue of his California campaign, logic argues that he could shift 5% to 10% of Clinton’s support in the polls, creating a winning margin for himself in November. California’s 54 electoral votes probably will decide the national election.

Yet, not a single Dole ad airing in California markets has addressed Proposition 209 or the Democrats’ opposition to it. Dole has been in the state numerous times, but has never made it the lead theme of his speeches, if he has mentioned it at all. Most California voters are unaware that there is a stark division between the two candidates on an issue so crucial to the American future.

The antidiscrimination measure is not peripheral to the difference between Republicans and Democrats, Dole and Clinton. The campaign against CCRI and to preserve racial and gender preferences is being run under the banner “Save the Dream”--a perversely false recollection of Martin Luther King’s vision of an America free from those same preferences. But this transformation of King’s message into its opposite is just what the political conflict is about.

Jesse Jackson denounced the Supreme Court decision that struck down racial gerrymandering as “ethnic cleansing,” giving a new meaning to Orwell’s doublespeak. The delegates at the Democratic convention in Chicago were selected by racial and gender quotas, which now are the litmus of a liberal point of view. Dole should be drawing attention to this fact, but he is not. The liberal philosophy that still governs the Democratic Party, despite Clinton’s campaign to present himself as a conservative, demands government “solutions” like preferential hiring, especially for its own constituencies.

The largest employer of African Americans, for example, is the U.S. Postal Service. Sixty-three percent of postal workers in the city of Los Angeles are black, although blacks constitute only 13% of the city’s population. That’s government discrimination on a massive scale. Are Asians or Latinos or whites unable to sort or deliver the U.S. mail? It is a situation reminiscent of the segregated past, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when the government preferentially hired whites. Ninety percent of the post office beneficiaries of government discrimination will vote Democratic. But Dole has not made this a campaign issue.

The racial spoils system that Democrats have created is tearing America apart and hurting minorities in the process. Racial consciousness and the social tensions that go with it are higher today than they have been in a generation. There were 1.5 million interracial crimes of violence last year; racial hate groups like the Nation of Islam enjoy a public following greater than any seen since the 1920s and the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan. A series of highly publicized trials have featured juries that are no longer able to decide on the merits of a case, but vote the race card instead.

The implications are ominous for America and for minorities in particular. When racial consciousness is sanctioned, as it is by government-mandated racial preferences, the potential explosion of anti-minority prejudice is an ever-present danger. The time has come, and the American public feels it, to end affirmative action.

CCRI does just that. It outlaws government discrimination by gender or race. It restores the very American principle that citizens should be judged on their merits and not on their racial or ethnic background: “The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting.”

Dole believes this. He should have the courage of his convictions by publicly supporting it. If he does, he can win California and become America’s next president.