Former UC regent Ward Connerly takes campaign to other states

By Kevin Simpson Medianews staff
Article Launched: 06/07/2008 09:54:13 PM PDT

DENVER — Ward Connerly's critics often blame the success of the millionaire businessman's anti-affirmative-action campaign on some dubious political sleight of hand.
Now they'd like to make the former UC regent's controversial initiative disappear before it reaches the ballot in five states.
Connerly's measure won handily in his home state of California and in Washington and Michigan, affecting race- or gender-based programs in public employment, education and contracting.
Connerly spearheaded California's Proposition 209 in 1996, which amended the state constitution to outlaw race and gender-based preferences in state hiring and state university admissions. His twelve-year tenure on the Board of Regents ended March 1, 2005.
He has subsequently exported his initiative — and the financing behind it — to Colorado, Nebraska, Arizona, Missouri and Oklahoma.
His opponents have embraced a pre-emptive strategy.
By challenging the petition process on sidewalks, where they claim circulators mislead people into signing, and in court, they've managed to thwart his early momentum and hope to deal a major blow to his national campaign.
"The concern is that the entire Connerly operation is deceptive and I'd say fraudulent — how they gather signatures, how they wrote ballot language and how they say what it could and could not do," said Craig Hughes, whose Denver-based political-consulting firm has aided a court challenge to the petitions.
Although initiative supporters submitted more than enough signatures to put it on Colorado's ballot, opponents are trying to invalidate at least 53,000 of them to knock it off.
Efforts in four other states also have focused on the petition process and have opponents claiming some early victories.
Connerly withdrew from Oklahoma and Missouri once it appeared signature collection would fall short. Organizers in Nebraska say they're behind schedule to meet a July 4 deadline to submit signatures. Arizona proponents remain optimistic they'll make a July 3 deadline, but say it will be close.
"They don't want to have a discussion about the merits, because when they do, they lose," said Jessica Peck Corry, executive director of the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative. "We can have policy debates. But to allege that our argument is fraud is an outright lie."
Corry remains confident the measure will survive the legal challenge and remain on the ballot in Colorado.
Connerly's detractors suggest that the wheels are falling off his bandwagon and that what he projected as "Super Tuesday for Equal Rights" in November won't live up to its billing.
He maintains all that has changed is the timetable.
"Our staff said at the outset that doing five states in a year and a half is overly ambitious," said Connerly, a former University of California regent and architect of the anti-affirmative-action campaign. "But I said go ahead — and if we don't make it, we'll go in 2010. Everything is on track, as far as I'm concerned." [To read the entire story, go to: http://www.contracostatimes.com/nationandworld/ci_9518027 ]