Friday, June 5, 2009

Racial Preferences Debate Makes A Comeback

From National Journal's June 6 issue:

President Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is compelling both parties to grapple with combustible issues of affirmative action and racial preference that have been submerged for most of the past two decades.

During the 1970s and '80s, programs to increase representation of minorities in public- and private-sector hiring, college admissions and government contracting ignited many of the most searing arguments in American politics and helped remake the Republican and Democratic electoral coalitions. But since then these issues have provoked only rare skirmishes, as a combination of political, economic and cultural changes have reduced their visibility and immediacy to all but a handful of activists on each side. "You had an environment where it wasn't on the top of the radar screen for anybody," veteran Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio said.

Now Sotomayor's nomination is forcing these issues back into the spotlight. And they have quickly proved as polarizing as ever.

The resurfacing of this debate creates something of a minefield for each party. Some Republicans worry that challenging Sotomayor too forcefully, particularly on issues inextricably intertwined with her ethnicity, could further accelerate the party's rapid decline among Hispanic voters -- two-thirds of whom supported Obama in the 2008 election. For that reason, even some conservatives believe that Republican senators will prove cautious about pressing Sotomayor on these issues when she appears before the Judiciary Committee. "I regret to say that it is probably going to be one or two short questions, that they have no appetite for this," said Linda Chavez, a senior civil-rights official under President Ronald Reagan who now chairs the Center for Equal Opportunity, a group opposed to racial preferences.

Conversely, some Democrats worry that identifying too closely with programs perceived as favoring minorities risks deepening their party's decline among white working-class voters, nearly three-fifths of whom rejected Obama in November. "To the extent these issues remain of low salience, then the risks to Democrats are limited," says William Galston, a Brookings Institution senior fellow, who has grappled with these questions since serving as Walter Mondale's issues director in the 1984 presidential campaign. "To the extent that the debate over this nominee pushes this issue back higher up the radar screen than it is right now... then there is an element of risk."

Subscribers to National Journal can continue reading the story here.