Opponents Go Their Separate Ways

It was a classic movement rally. The crowd chanted on cue. Well-known political figures trooped to the podium. Pleas for money and volunteers rang through the hall.

The event Wednesday night in Los Angeles, staged by STOP Prop 209, epitomized the style of a group that has carved its own niche in the sprawling effort to defeat the November ballot initiative that would eliminate government affirmative action programs for women and minorities.

Formed early last month, the group was created by two leading women’s groups and several civil rights organizations that left the main anti-Proposition 209 campaign coalition in what is variously described as an amiable division of labor, a power struggle and a split over tactics.

The two camps continue to work together and both say the separation has only enhanced their efforts by allowing each to focus on what it does best.

But the split added yet another tentacle to the octopus-like alliance of groups fighting Proposition 209 and diffused fund-raising efforts at a time when Proposition 209 opponents are desperately trying to collect enough money to buy television and radio advertisements.

The division also underscores the ever-fragile nature of coalition politics, particularly when it involves factions that have historically eyed one another with suspicion--in this case minority and feminist groups.

The leaders of STOP and the main coalition--a massive array of groups now called the Campaign to Defeat 209--remain close-mouthed about the quietly executed split. But there was clearly a feeling on the part of STOP organizers that the campaign was spending too much time last summer waiting for major donations that didn’t materialize, while not pursuing activities that would gain public visibility and press attention.

“There wasn’t disagreement on message per se,” said Elizabeth Toledo, co-manager of STOP and the state president of the National Organization for Women, which, with the Feminist Majority, led the defection. “I think there was a lot of frustration in how are we going to do this. The polls have been about the same for two years. How are we going to move that?”

Similarly, Eddie Wong, western regional director of the Rainbow Coalition, Jesse Jackson’s organization, said: “There was a lot of waiting around for focus groups and polling. . . . After a certain point a lot of people had a certain amount of frustration with the endless meetings.

“A lot of it came down, for us, to when were we going to start doing voter contact work,” said Wong, whose group joined the STOP alliance.

In that vein, STOP’s first major effort was to send Jackson, feminist leaders and Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers on a statewide bus tour that evoked the spirit of 1960s activism, stopping at college campuses to recruit youthful volunteers to get out the vote next month.

Ending Wednesday night in Los Angeles with a fund-raising rally featuring Anita Hill and U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California, the tour did succeed in drawing media attention, as well as donations and thousands of youthful volunteers, organizers say.

While nodding to the bus tour as good theater that helped galvanize core supporters, leaders of the Campaign to Defeat 209 continue to view a television campaign as the crucial component of their effort.

“There was never going to be a campaign that could be all things to all people,” said Pat Ewing, manager of the Campaign to Defeat 209. “If you’re going to focus on massive movement politics and not on raising money to get on television, you’re missing the boat.”

Saying that donations and public interest are picking up, Ewing maintained that the formation of the STOP group has not affected the main campaign at all. She called the split “an incredibly effective division of labor.”

The division has some blurry lines, however. The STOP group is planning a paid media campaign, albeit on radio rather than television. And the Campaign to Defeat 209, which has hundreds of surrogate speakers addressing groups around the state, is about to launch three weeks of press conferences and neighborhood meetings to highlight the impact of the initiative.

Having won about $300,000 in commitments in the past month, the STOP group is aiming for a $500,000 pool to buy radio ads in the Los Angeles market.

“We really are reaching different people and I think the fund-raising has expanded because of it,” said Kathy Spillar of the Feminist Majority and STOP campaign, adding that her group will coordinate its media buys with the Campaign to Defeat 209.

Members of both camps concede that they were not free of the tensions that have historically flared between feminist and minority groups, which have often considered the women’s movement the province of middle-class white women.

“We’ve had some tough discussions, but in what coalitions don’t you,” said Connie Rice of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which stayed in the Campaign to Defeat 209 group. “Compared to other sets of groups I’ve had to work with, this was a cakewalk.”

Organizers also note that the split did not follow clear racial or gender lines.

Along with the Rainbow Coalition, civil rights groups from Northern California joined NOW and the Feminist Majority in forming STOP, while the YWCA, the defense fund and the San Francisco-based Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights remained in the main campaign, along with hundreds of other groups.

Rice dismissed the split as a “minor footnote” in a campaign in which the overarching problem has been the failure of the traditional big money machines of Hollywood, business and the Democratic Party to open its pockets.

“These little groups don’t do it,” she said.