For the California Civil Rights Initiative, failure may turn out to be the price of success.
The success is in the form of deep and solid public support for the measure, which would ban the state of California from using racial and gender preferences in hiring, contracting or admission to higher education. Even its most devout opponents seem to agree that if it comes to a vote it will win in a walk.
But with passage seemingly so assured, the campaign is encountering difficulties raising the funds it needs to qualify the initiative for the November 1996 ballot.
"People are under the impression it's a done deal." said CCRI's campaign manager, Joe Gelman. "They have to recognize that this is just not going to happen by itself."
No indeed. Volunteers are a big part of the effort, but to get 694,000 valid signatures takes professional help as well. Earlier this month, with the count standing at about 150,000, the Sacramento firm that is handling the petition drive suspended its signature-gathering activities because it was out of money. If those petitions aren't circulating in large numbers very soon, the campaign may fail simply because it runs out of time. The deadline is Feb. 21.
That would be wrong. The kinds of discriminatory policies CCRI seeks to ban have been imposed on Americans by executive orders, by bureaucrats drawing up regulations, by judges signing consent decrees and in many other ways, but they have not been presented to the voters for their approval.
And preferential policies are discriminatory, no matter who is preferred, Gelman said.
"That's why I hate the term 'reverse discrimination,' because it suggests there's a moral distinction to be made, and there isn't," he said. "We're talking about a fundamental principle; it's the opposition that is arguing a narrower selfish issue."
He's right, but it's not the way the issue is usually framed. It's very much in opponents' interest to set themselves up as the champions of justice, while labeling CCRI supporters as "angry white men" whose only concern is the potential loss of their own privileges.
It's easy, Gelman says, "to stand up and declare sanctimoniously how concerned you are, and to appoint yourself to the elite ranks of those who 'care' more than the rest of us."
Strictly speaking, why someone supports or opposes an idea is beside the point. The notion that motive is relevant to the merits of an argument is the classical "ad hominem" fallacy. But if motive is once allowed into the discussion everybody's motives are fair game. Those who argue in favor of preferences from which they benefit are at least as vulnerable as those who oppose preferences that hurt them.
And from that point on, the discussion can turn very ugly, as Gelman has already found out. When I first met him a couple of years ago, he was a member of the Los Angeles Civil Service Commission. As people used to say, the experience radicalized him.
"I was able to witness one atrocity after another" as the result of the city's policies, he said.
But his time on the commission was cut short when his views became known.
"The forces of tolerance and pluralism weren't very tolerant," he said. "It extended no further than skin pigmentation and chromosome count." Gelman resigned from the commission in September.
That was "one down, one to go," according to Nate Holden, a member of the Los Angeles City Council who had demanded that L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan fire Gelman and Michelle Eun Joo Park-Steel, an Airport Commissioner. Park-Steel resigned a few days later.
The authors of the initiative, Thomas Wood and Glynn Custred, have also come under fire. Former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, now a candidate for mayor of San Francisco, said in a speech at Cal State, Hayward, that students should "terrorize" Custred, who is a professor of anthropology there.
The attacks on Gelman and Park-Steel suggest that there may be more to the campaign's fund-raising difficulties than just a misplaced overconfidence. Most fund-raising drives depend on a few big lead gifts to get the money flowing, and the virulence of the opposition may be discouraging some of the likely sources of funding. Naturally nobody is going to admit to being intimidated so direct evidence is hard to find. And if Gelman knows of any examples he isn't talking.
Gelman maintains he's still optimistic, and I hope he is right. After almost 30 years of preferential policies, Americans deserve the opportunity to vote on them.