After 209, What’s Next for Connerly?

The hate calls, angry letters and nasty looks have eased off since the election. Now, people are walking up to Ward Connerly and saying he should run for political office.

They--mainly Republican Party people--are urging him especially to take on Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer in 1998. He has high statewide name ID after having led Proposition 209 to victory. He is exceptionally articulate and also has the advantage of being a successful businessman rather than a career politician.

“There’ll never be a better opportunity to go to Washington,” Connerly acknowledges. “The public mood is not one that fits Boxer’s style and positions. But you couldn’t drag me to Washington, D.C., to live. If I won, that would be the bad news.”

Another office perhaps? “The only one I would even remotely consider is governor. Some have suggested it. But I would never run against [Atty. Gen.] Dan Lungren, not in a lifetime. I’ll be supporting Dan as hard as I can.”

So, he says, “I’m closing the door to it at this point.”

Ah, the dangling qualifier. At some future point he conceivably could open the door. But right now, the 57-year-old black Republican is pretty much disgusted with politics.

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“It’s a friggin’ lousy process,” Connerly asserts. “It’s brutal. People can lie and there’s no forum for disproving them.”

Last week, after being introduced as “the greatest hero of the 1996 elections,” Connerly told a Republican fund-raising group in Washington:

“We want warriors in our democracy. We want people who are willing to go into the arena and fight. I think I’m a warrior. But I’m not sure I would go into the arena again the way it is structured. Our democracy is on the line. If decent people don’t come forward and say ‘Enough,’ I fear the outcome.”

He thinks the anti-209 TV ads were “despicable.” One showed a robed klansman--David Duke presumably--and a flaming cross as symbolic of people who want to end racial and gender preferences in government affirmative action. Another ad portrayed a woman being stripped to black lingerie and implied that under 209, her only career option would be prostitution.

He’s also bitter about how the Republican Party politicized 209 with a TV ad that slammed President Clinton for opposing the initiative.

Democratic voters shifted dramatically to the “no” side after learning that’s where Clinton stood, Connerly says. They concluded that 209 was “less about moral principle than Republican political opportunity.”

The ad also provoked the president into actively opposing 209, Connerly believes. “We had a source high inside the Clinton camp who was informing us that they were [saying], ‘We don’t want to get involved.’ And the president was not going to get involved until he had no choice because of that stupid ad.”

Without the ad, he contends, 209 would have passed by 20 points instead of nine. “The Republican Party put us at risk.”

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You’ve got to wonder what drives a Connerly.

During the campaign, people would call him and hang up. Sometimes they’d curse him first. He finally took down the sign at his Sacramento land consulting office after two bullet-size holes were found in the front windows.

Strangers would pass him on the street or at airports and say they hoped he rots in hell. SOB. Sellout. Lackey. Traitor. Uncle Tom. Shame.

That’s the printable stuff.

“It really works on you,” admits Connerly, a man of mixed race whose wife of 34 years is white. “Most of the anger comes from blacks. They’re trying to demean you, trying to make you feel bad. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t.”

Blacks take 209 personally, he says, because they “have become addicted” to government and affirmative action. “They have to let go. . . . There’s a lack of confidence. A few years ago it was for a good reason. But right now, I sense this yearning among white people just to really become color blind. They want black people to assimilate. And black people are fighting it with every fiber of their being.”

The vote for 209, he says, “was not a rejection of diversity. It was a rejection of using diversity as an excuse to discriminate.”

Rather than telling black kids “that racism is their problem and making all these excuses,” he says, the message should be “their problem is being able to compete in a world that has a shrinking supply of jobs. We should be saying, ‘It’s a tough world, get out there and compete.’ ”

Connerly says he may create a foundation to monitor 209 and promote its cause. What’s driving him clearly is a strong conviction. For now, however, the tough world of politics is not a place where this weary warrior wants to get out there and compete.