From the Frontrunner

The Washington Post (3/26, A2,) reports, "Sixteen months after voters in Michigan voted to kill affirmative action in the public sphere, opponents of preferences based on race and gender are pushing five more states to ban the practice. Foes of affirmative action...delivered 128,744 signatures to Colorado authorities earlier this month. Similar organizations in Arizona, Missouri, Oklahoma and Nebraska are circulating petitions as civil rights groups and educators are mobilizing to defeat the measures." According to the Post, "The initiatives are spearheaded by Ward Connerly...who said he has raised about $1.5 million for the campaigns."

Connerly the nation's most prominent opponent of affirmative action, who said he has raised about $1.5 million for the campaigns. He sees the November ballot initiatives as the next step in his drive to end preferences in public education, hiring and contracting.

The Post notes that in the states where Connerly's "civil rights initiative" appears on the ballot, "voters are likely to see it alongside the name of the first black or female major-party presidential candidate" and Connerly "contends that the success of Obama and Clinton shows that preferences are no longer necessary 'to compensate for, quote, institutional racism and institutional sexism.'"

Connerly, a prosperous and conservative black Republican, said he contributed $500 to Obama's campaign to honor him "for trying to take race out of the body politic." Obama opposes Connerly's approach to affirmative action and lent his voice to a 2006 radio ad opposing the Connerly-sponsored Proposition 2 in Michigan. (The Obama campaign would not comment on whether it is keeping the money.)

Obama is not alone. Opponents of Connerly's effort are using legal challenges and grass-roots organizing techniques to keep the measures off the ballot, or to defeat them.

"As we feared, Connerly's attack on equal opportunity in Michigan has metastasized," said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. "We know that most Americans support equal opportunity. They know that diversity is good for business, good for the classroom and ultimately good for the country."

Henderson dismissed Connerly's reference to Obama as a willingness to "seize on any factoid to justify his assault on equal opportunity" and added: "I am not surprised he would lift up the performance of Barack to say that race no longer matters in American life. That's a gross overstatement of the lives of most Americans." [MORE]