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ORIGINAL RESEARCHBill Berkowitz Ward Connerly's anti-affirmative action jihadFounder and Chair of the American Civil Rights Institute scouting five to nine states for new anti-affirmative action initiativesFresh from his most recent victory -- in Michigan this past November -- Ward Connerly, the Black California-based maven of anti-affirmative action initiatives, appears to be preparing to take his jihad on the road. According to a mid-December report in the San Francisco Chronicle, Connerly said that he was "exploring moves into nine other states." Between 1997 and 2005, ACRI received 47 foundation grants totaling more than $5 million. In 2006 the Bradley Foundation gave ACRI $450,000 "To support general operations and a public education project in Michigan." During a mid-December conference call Connerly allowed that he had scheduled visits to Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Wyoming and Utah during the upcoming months to get a handle on how many campaigns he might launch. "Twenty-three states have systems for putting laws directly before voters in the form of ballot initiatives," the Chronicle pointed out. "Three down and 20 to go," Connerly boasted. "We don't need to do them all, but if we do a significant number, we will have demonstrated that race preferences are antithetical to the popular will of the American people." "The people of California, Washington and Michigan have shown that institutions that implement these [affirmative action] programs are living on borrowed time," Connerly said. According to the Chronicle, "Connerly said he is likely to choose three to five states but could campaign in all nine. He said that in addition to local interest in banning affirmative action, he will look at how strongly the political and business establishment would support a ban, what kind of opposition he would have and how much money he could get for his campaign." "'You want to go someplace where you don't have to spend every waking moment getting them up to speed,'" he said. 'There is no one matrix of issues that makes for an ideal state, we are just trying to find out as we look at the different states what are our possibilities for success.'" Despite being opposed by many of Michigan's academic, business, and political leaders -- including both the re-elected Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm and Dick DeVos, her Republican opponent -- Proposition 2, a measure outlawing affirmative action in public education, employment and state contracts, received the support of 58 percent of the state's voters. According to the Feminist Daily News Wire, Connerly "created an anti-affirmative action organization with the same name as the bill on Michigan's ballot - 'the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative' -- with Jennifer Gratz. Gratz had filed suit against the University of Michigan Law School in 2003 when she was reportedly denied admission." "David Waymire, a spokesman for a coalition that fought Connerly's Michigan campaign, said Connerly has been effective because he convinces people that his initiative will remove discrimination," the Chronicle reported. "Waymire said Connerly -- who is paid an undisclosed salary by the American Civil Rights Institute, the Sacramento group he founded to lead state initiative campaigns -- moves on before seeing the consequences of the measures he promotes. "'He will seek to divide each state and will generally be successful,' said Waymire, who called Connerly 'a brilliant political strategist.' He added, 'There is no good to come out of this, and nobody benefits except for Ward Connerly and his association.'" The Michigan initiative was spearheaded by Connerly, who is the founder and chairman of the Sacramento, California-based American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI - website) which calls itself "a national civil rights organization created to educate the public about racial and gender preferences." Well funded, between 1997 and 2005, Connerly's ACRI received 47 foundation grants totaling more than $5 million. Major donors included the Sarah Scaife Foundation, The Carthage Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which itself has given more than $2.5 million. In 2006 the Bradley Foundation gave ACRI $450,000 "To support general operations and a public-education project in Michigan." In October of last year -- the 10th anniversary of Proposition 209 -- when the Pacific Legal Foundation (also funded by the conservative philanthropies) sued the Berkeley, California, school district, "alleging its school assignment policy violates" the proposition, Connerly's name was invoked by Paul Beard, PLF's lead lawyer in the case, who called him a "spokesperson for racial equality, in our viewpoint." In 1998, Connerly helped get another anti-affirmative action ballot measure in Washington state approved by 58 percent of that state's voters. Connerly, the author of the autobiography, "Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences," is already an old story. In July 1995, Connerly, then a relatively unknown California businessman -- President and Chief Executive Officer of Connerly & Associates, Inc., a Sacramento-based association management and land development consulting firm founded in 1973 -- who had been appointed to a seat on the University of California Board of Regents, convinced a majority of the Board to vote to end the University's "use of race as a means for admissions," ACRI's website notes. That same year, he became the chairman of the California Civil Rights Initiative (Proposition 209) campaign which gathered enough signatures to appear on the November 1996 ballot. He became a widely celebrated hero to conservatives when Proposition 209 -- the nation's first ban on affirmative action -- passed, which led to his emergence onto the national political scene. In a profile of Connerly titled "Know Your Right-Wing Speakers: Ward Connerly," the website Campus Progress pointed out that 50 years ago, "he was an ambitious college student, one of only 50 African-American students on a campus of 2000. He was the first to pledge the all-white Delta Phi Omega fraternity at Sacramento State. He was elected student body president...[and] was the outspoken leader of the student committee against housing discrimination." After becoming a Goldwater Republican, Connerly fell in with Pete Wilson, who was later to become the Governor of California. According to Campus Progress, Wilson helped Connerly get into the real estate business: "In 1968, when Wilson was just a young legislator from San Diego and the newly appointed chairman of the Assembly Committee on Urban Affairs and Housing, he made Connerly his chief consultant...As one respected African-American journalist has said of Connerly, 'If [he] attacks a program or institution, you can be assured that it is serving a valuable purpose for African Americans.' In this case, the institution Connerly attacked was public housing -- Connerly worked with Wilson on a plan to give low-income tenants ownership of their blighted public housing developments, and in so doing, turned them into their own slumlords. The plan allowed the city to increase its tax base and renounce its obligation to provide low-income housing, and the tenants, without adequate support, were saddled with maintenance, insurance, and upkeep of the tear-downs." By 1973, Connerly left government and launched his own real estate and land development company. Twenty years later, his two-plus-decade long relationship with Wilson paid off as the then-Gov. Wilson appointed Connerly to the University of California Board of Regents. Hoping to piggyback off of the success of Proposition 209, increased name recognition, more funding from conservative foundations, and several years in the anti-affirmative action trenches, in 2003 Connerly came back with Proposition 54, the so-called "Racial Privacy Initiative." According to the Campus Progress profile, Proposition 54 "was hyped with deceptive promises of 'eliminating racial discrimination.'" In reality, it would have "banned the state from collecting racial data, effectively making it impossible to prosecute racial discrimination claims in California. It also would have made it impossible for the state to collect racial data for determining health treatment, which caused three former U.S. surgeons general to oppose the bill." The initiative was defeated and Connerly was "recently fined $95,000 for violating campaign finance laws and was forced to reveal the names of Prop 54's key financial backers," which included Joseph Coors, the beer magnate and founding partner of the Heritage Foundation, and Rupert Murdoch, the mega-media titan whose holdings include the Fox News Channel. Over the years, Connerly has become an expert in delivering hyperbolic, and often ridiculous, sound bites. During a recent interview on PRI's "To the Point" radio program, Connerly cavalierly pointed out that schools don't need to be integrated because people can find other venues to "get along with others." "I love horseracing, and I-- whenever I can find the time I will frequent the racetrack, and I find myself thrown in with people from all around the globe -- low income people, people who own large chains of restaurants, all sitting next to each other," Connerly said. "People are very adaptive," Connerly went on. "We find a way to get along with others. Even when there are barriers of language, and whatever, we somehow find a way to get along and I just think it's really nonsense. I've been a part of that nonsense as well as anyone, as well as others, coming out of the sixties and being an integrationist and believing that because the government had imposed segregation that somehow there were all these benefits for the government to go the other way. I now really sort of recant that view." "People are adaptive. They will find ways to get along, and this goofiness that somehow the government has to use race to pull us around here and there in order for us to learn to get along in this global society -- I think it's baloney." "Connerly is missing the point," Think Progress noted. "The effects of diversity in schools can't be replicated in casual settings such as the racetrack." Think Progress cited a recent study by the Center for American Progress that concluded:
In the long run, Connerly's major achievement may actually be his own self-inflation. He has received numerous awards from conservative institutions and organizations, ranging from the "Patrick Henry Award" from David Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture in 1995 to the $250,000 "Bradley Prize" for his "defense of freedom and democracy" from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in 2005. When he finally wraps up his anti-affirmative action crusade -- several years down the line no doubt -- he will have left his mark on post-civil rights movement America. And judging from the next round of anti-affirmative action initiatives in the planning stages, Connerly is betting that he will be more than merely a historical footnote. sign in, or register to email stories or comment on them.
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MORE ORIGINAL RESEARCHBill Berkowitz PERC receives Templeton Freedom Award for promoting 'enviropreneurs'Right Wing foundation-funded anti-environmental think tank grabbing a wider audience for 'free market environmentalism' On the 15th anniversary of Terry Anderson and Donald Leal's book "Free Market Environmentalism" -- the seminal book on the subject -- Anderson, the Executive Director of the Bozeman, Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center (PERC - formerly known as the Political Economy Research Center) spoke in late-January at an event sponsored by Squaw Valley Institute at the Resort at Squaw Creek in California. While it may have been just another opportunity to speak on "free market environmentalism" and not the kickoff of a "victory tour," nevertheless it comes at a time when PERC's ideas are taking root.
Bill Berkowitz Neil Bush of Saudi ArabiaDuring recent visit, President’s brother describes the country as a 'kind of tribal democracy' In late February, only a few days after Saudi Arabia beheaded four Sri Lankan robbers and then left their headless bodies on public display in the capital of Riyadh, Neil Bush, for the fourth time in the past six years, showed up for the country's Jeddah Economic Forum. The Guardian reported that Human Rights Watch "said the four men had no lawyers during their trial and sentencing, and were denied other basic legal rights." In an interview with Arab News, the Saudi English language paper, Bush described the country as "a kind of tribal democracy."
Bill Berkowitz Newt Gingrich's back door to the White HouseAmerican Enterprise Institute "Scholar" and former House Speaker blames media for poll showing 64 percent of the American people wouldn't vote for him under any circumstances Whatever it is that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has come to represent in American politics, the guy is nothing less than fascinating. One day he's espousing populist rhetoric about the need to cut the costs of college tuition and the next day he's talking World War III. One day he's claiming that the "war on terror" may force the abridgement of fundamental first amendment rights and the next he's advancing a twenty-first century version of his Contract with America. At the same time he's publicly proclaiming how "stupid" it is that the race for the presidency has already started you know that he's trying to figure out how to out finesse Rudy, McCain and Romney for the nomination. And last week, when Fox News' Chris Wallace cited a poll showing that 64 percent of the public would never vote for him, he was quick to blame those results on how unfairly he was treated by the mainstream media back in the day.
Bill Berkowitz American Enterprise Institute takes lead in agitating against IranDespite wrongheaded predictions about the war on Iraq, neocons are on the frontlines advocating military conflict with Iran After doing such a bang up job with their advice and predictions about the outcome of the war on Iraq, would it surprise you to learn that America's neoconservatives are still in business? While at this time we are not yet seeing the same intense neocon invasion of our living rooms -- via cable television's news networks -- that we saw during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, nevertheless, a host of policy analysts at conservative think tanks -- most notably the American Enterprise Institute -- are being heeded on Iran by those who count - folks inside the Bush Administration.
Bill Berkowitz After six years, opposition gaining on George W. Bush's Faith Based InitiativeUnmentioned in the president's State of the Union speech, the program nevertheless continues to recruit religious participants and hand out taxpayer money to religious groups With several domestic policy proposals unceremoniously folded into President Bush's recent State of the Union address, two pretty significant items failed to make the cut. Despite the president's egregiously tardy response to the event itself, it was nevertheless surprising that he didn't even mention Hurricane Katrina: He didn't offer up a progress report, words of hope to the victims, or come up with a proposal for moving the sluggish rebuilding effort forward. There were no "armies of compassion" ready to be unleashed, although it should be said that many in the religious community responded to the disaster much quicker than the Bush Administration. In the State of the Union address, however, there was no "compassionate conservatism" for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
Bill Berkowitz Frank Luntz calls Republican leadership in Washington 'One giant whining windbag'On the outs with the GOP, legendary degrader of discourse is moving to California He doesn't make great art; nothing he does elevates the human spirit; he doesn't illuminate, he bamboozles. He has become expert in subterfuge, hidden meanings, word play and manipulation. Frank Luntz has been so good at what he does that those paying close attention gave it its own name: "Luntzspeak."
Bill Berkowitz Spooked by MoveOn.org, conservative movement seeks to emulate liberal powerhouseFueled with Silicon Valley money, TheVanguard.org will have Richard Poe, former editor of David Horowitz's FrontPage magazine as its editorial and creative director As Paul Weyrich, a founding father of the modern conservative movement and still a prominent actor in it, likes to say, he learned a great deal about movement building by closely observing what liberals were up to in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Bill Berkowitz Tom Tancredo's missionThe Republican congressman from Colorado will try to woo GOP voters with anti-immigration rhetoric and a boatload of Christian right politics These days, probably the most recognizable name in anti-immigration politics is Colorado Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo. Over the past year, Tancredo has gone from a little known congressman to a highly visible anti-immigration spokesperson. "Tancredo has thoroughly enmeshed himself in the anti-immigration movement and with the help of CNN talk show host Lou Dobbs, he has been given a national megaphone," Devin Burghart, the program director of the Building Democracy Initiative at the Center for New Community, a Chicago-based civil rights group, told Media Transparency.
Bill Berkowitz Institute on Religion and Democracy slams 'Leftist' National Council of ChurchesNew report from conservative foundation-funded IRD charges the NCC with being a political surrogate for MoveOn.org, People for the American Way and other liberal organizations If you prefer your religious battles sprinkled with demagoguery, sanctimoniousness, and simplistic attacks, the Institute on Religion and Democracy's (IRD) latest broadside against the National Council of Churches (NCC) certainly fits the bill.
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Pacific Legal Foundation is on the wrong side of history
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