Clinton Continues Attack on Prop. 209 With TV Interview

Advancing his criticism of California’s Proposition 209 in the wake of his call for a national dialogue on race, President Clinton warned Sunday that the repeal of affirmative action could have a “devastating” impact on educational opportunities for minorities.

In an interview broadcast on CNN’s “Late Edition,” Clinton predicted that recent declines in minority admissions at public law schools in California and Texas--which has had its own affirmative action program scaled back by a court decision--will prompt Americans to “begin to take a different look” at efforts to eliminate racial preferences in hiring or admissions.

“If you look at the dramatic drops in enrollment in the professional schools--and most experts predict you’ll see the same thing in a lot of the undergraduate schools--I think that’s a mistake,” Clinton said.

California voters last November approved Proposition 209, which banned the use of racial or gender preferences in state programs. But the measure has been entangled in court challenges; in April, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the initiative, but the measure is likely to be tested all the way to the Supreme Court. Separately, though, University of California regents voted to bar the use of affirmative action in admissions--the action that critics say precipitated the sharp decline in minority admissions at UC law schools.

The dialogue on race that Clinton announced in a Saturday commencement speech at UC San Diego prompted a race to the microphones Sunday as supporters and critics fanned out across the network TV talk shows. Reaction to Clinton’s address divided in predictable fashion, with liberal commentators saying it offered too few specifics and conservatives criticizing the president for defending affirmative-action programs that they believe promote racial division.

That polarized pattern of response suggests the distance Clinton must bridge in his effort to build a new consensus around race--and perhaps how little progress his initial effort Saturday made in changing the terms of debate on an issue encrusted with historic divisions.

In fact, little was said Sunday that suggested anything other than a continued hardening of the political lines on affirmative action and the racially tinged issues swirling around it.

From the left, critics such as civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and law professor C. Lani Guinier accused Clinton of lacking a strong commitment to civil rights issues. “I don’t think the president has exercised forceful leadership,” said Guinier, a University of Pennsylvania professor and longtime Clinton friend who was his first choice to serve as the Justice Department’s chief civil rights enforcement official. (Amid a firestorm of controversy, Clinton abandoned the 1993 nomination after concluding that he did not support Guinier’s writings on race and affirmative action.)

Speaking on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press,” Jackson--who has sparred with Clinton over race-related issues for years--praised the president for setting “the right moral tone” in his speech Saturday. But he argued that Clinton’s effort to encourage a “race discussion” could “divert attention away from our ability to, in fact, close the gap [between whites and minorities] with real structure and investment.”

Underscoring that point, Jackson criticized the budget deal Clinton reached with congressional Republicans last month, charging that it “takes away the resources to close real gaps, to build real bridges and to heal the breach.” He urged Clinton to convene corporate and academic leaders to discuss options for increasing minority opportunity and suggested that the Justice Department should investigate whether the ban on affirmative action in California violates anti-discrimination laws and should result in a loss of federal funds to state institutions.

That suggestion drew an angry response from Ward Connerly, the UC regent who led the drive to pass Proposition 209 last year. Appearing on the same program with Jackson, Connerly said the idea “that the president should . . . harass and take money away from the University of California because we’ve said we don’t want to use [racial and gender] preferences” was “nonsense.”

“We have been bending over backwards giving the preferences,” Connerly said. “How can you say we’re discriminating?”

Connerly conceded that he is bothered by the decline in minority admissions at California and Texas law schools. But he argued that the numbers do not provide justification for admissions policies that provide preferences to minorities.

“The drop in the [admissions] numbers is a function of the magnitude of the preference that we were giving, and I submit to you that what we need to be doing is preparing students to compete naturally,” he said.

Both Connerly and William J. Bennett, a former top-level official in the Reagan and Bush administrations, criticized Clinton for not appointing a recognized conservative to his new advisory committee on race. Speaking on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation,” Bennett predicted that Clinton’s initiative is unlikely to produce new thinking.

“Look, this president isn’t tough enough to do the strong thing or the hard thing on this issue,” Bennett said. “He appoints a commission, and everybody on the commission has essentially the same view. . . .”

In his CNN interview, taped Saturday, Clinton was asked about legislation introduced last week by a bipartisan group of white members of the House, calling for a formal apology to African Americans over slavery. Clinton said he needed “more time to think about it.”

But the president, who recently apologized to a group of black men whose syphilis was secretly untreated as part of a government experiment, added: “An apology, under the right circumstances . . . can be quite important.”