A losing proposition

USA Today
September 23, 2008

Republicans since Reagan have lined up to oppose affirmative action but have found little political gain in doing so. After a summer fling with the issue, McCain appears to have concluded that he need not go there.
By Peter Schmidt

When Sen. John McCain voiced support over the summer for a proposed Arizona ballot measure curtailing the use of affirmative-action preferences, some critics said he was latching onto a wedge issue long used by the GOP to split Democrats along racial lines.
In the two months since McCain's remarks to ABC's George Stephanopoulos, the senator of Arizona has been conspicuously silent on the issue. Given the politics of affirmative action, that may well be a wise decision.
(Keith Simmons, USA TODAY)
After all, it's a mistake to assume McCain stands only to gain politically by supporting such measures, which appear likely to be on the ballot in Colorado and Nebraska this November.
Affirmative action is indeed a wedge issue. But this wedge has not just divided Democrats. It has also has badly split the GOP.
Social conservatives may have cheered McCain's opposition to affirmative-action preferences by public colleges and other government entities, but his stand could cost him support among other key Republican constituencies.
Many leaders of big business, for example, have long embraced affirmative action as a cost-effective tool for staving off discrimination complaints and diversifying their workforces. When the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on affirmative action in college admissions in 2003 — in two cases involving the University of Michigan — nearly 70 Fortune 500 companies signed on to friend-of-the-court briefs urging the justices to leave the university's race-conscious admissions policies intact.
Meanwhile, Republican political pragmatists have long worried that opposition to affirmative action will alienate the nation's growing Hispanic electorate and limit the GOP's appeal among women. If McCain's critics are able to use his affirmative action stand — or his increasingly tough stand on immigration — to paint him as racially insensitive, he could lose support from moderate voters.
Avoiding the affirmative-action issue probably was not an option for any presidential candidate this election year, even if the state ballot measures had not come up. The political rise of Democratic nominee Barack Obama — who opposes such ballot initiative as threatening the progress of minorities and women and "all too often designed to drive a wedge between people" — almost naturally evokes discussions of how much the nation has moved beyond its past racial divisions, and whether blacks and other minorities still need the leg up that affirmative action offers.
But in allying himself with those who seek to abolish such preferences, McCain is charging off in a direction where no recent GOP president has gotten far.
Ronald Reagan harshly criticized affirmative action, but in two terms in office, he failed to issue a single executive order ending or even restricting its use by the federal government. His administration was left gun-shy as a result of the uproar over its attempt in 1982 to restore the tax-exempt status of South Carolina's private Bob Jones University, which prohibited interracial dating. (It took just days for his administration to reverse itself.) [To read the entire story, go to: http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/09/a-losing-propos.html ]