Guess who's - not - coming to dinner - George Lucas loses endorsement as assistant attorney general for civil rights

National Review, Sept 1, 1989 by William McGurn

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Say you're a black politician; successful, intelligent, and tired of a

Democratic civil-rights orthodoxy that has gone from promoting a "colorblind" society to one full of racial quotas and preferences. After considerable soul-searching you become a Republican, have a well-publicized meeting with President Ronald Reagan, and even run for governor in your home state. You are defeated. But you don't worry all that much, because the Republican Party is out to "broaden the base" of its appeal. You think you might have a future with these new Republicans.

You would be wrong.

William Lucas found this out the hard way, when the Senate Judiciary Committee refused to endorse him as assistant attorney general for civil rights. Early on, the Administration strategy was to line up as many black establishment figures as possible on Mr. Lucas's side in the hope of preempting any criticism over the nominee's conservative stand on issues such as racial quotas. But this backfired when the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Representative John Conyers (D., Mich.) reversed themselves. Mr. Lucas found himself on the defensive and, ultimately, defeated. Where the Bush Administration goes from here-some urge the President to give Mr. Lucas a recess appointment anyway-will soon tell us whether the Republican Party really is all that committed to an opportunity society-and whether it is up to the fight that this entails.

"It surprised me," says the chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil

Rights, William B. Allen, of the Judiciary Committee vote. "I thought they would wound him, allow him to squeak through, and then use that to kill the Thomas nomination later [Clarence Thomas, a conservative who is up for a judgeship on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals]. But they evidently think they're in the driver's seat and don't have to pay any price. They'll kill Thomas anyway."

But Mr. Lucas was as much a victim of the Bush Administration as he was of Conyers & Co. Instead of allowing him to campaign for himself on his considerable merits as a respected lawman and four-times-elected official-something Jesse Jackson has yet to achieve-he was touted as a black success story unencumbered by controversial opinions. What this suggests is that the Bush Administration

views civil rights as a parochial black issue rather than a national issue involving the nature of American society. This means certain defeat because it is fighting on its opponents' terms. It was concern about this that led Mr. Allen to send off a sharp letter to the White House director of personnel, in which he complained that civil rights "is too important a business for country-club Republicans to set aside for their caddies."

Conservatives like Mr. Allen argue that the problem is not appointments per se but policy: instead of taking on an out-of-touch and discredited black establishment, the White House is kowtowing to it. The courting of Jesse Jackson is the prime example. In the past few months he has met with President Bush at the White House and even convinced Attorney General Richard Thornburgh to address his PUSH convention in July. And how did Jackson repay these kind overtures? He allowed the Attorney General to be savaged at the PUSH meeting, he reversed his earlier position that he would not oppose Mr. Lucas, and on NBC's Meet the Nation the Sunday before the Judiciary Committee vote he charged the President with "a sin

ister play on race" for nominating Mr. Lucas.

"The Bush Administration is playing the old Republican game," says former Reagan official and 1988 Republican senatorial candidate Alan Keyes. "First they establish the moral credentials of their opponents. Then the opponents use that to crush them."

Today these oppoents have focused their attention on a cluster of Supreme Court decisions that were at the center of the Lucas hearings. Although hardly the rollback of affirmative action that critics say they are, the decisions did among other things argue that a disparity in numbers is not enough to prove discrimination, that whites penalized by affirmative-action agreements can challenge them, and that in the absence of proven past discrimination,

set-aside quotas for minority contracts are unjustifiable legal privileges. The President's failure to hail these decisions as triumphs (he calls them "technical corrections") translates into a typical Republican worst-of-both-worlds compromise, alienating the black establishment without advancing the conservative alternative. Forced to defend this position, Mr. Lucas ended up looking like an inarticulate boob when the real problem was the lack of an articulate Administration policy.

Indeed, if there is an exploited group of people today, it has to be black Republicans, who over the years have taken the heat for their principled stands on such issues as quotas, minimum wage, and welfare, only to see a Republican President undercut their efforts. In a recent article in Policy Review Mr. Keyes noted, for example, that when he accepted an invitation to give a speech to the party convention in New Orleans, he was sent guidelines that had him "speaking as though [he] were some kind of political shill to lure unsuspecting blacks into the Republican tent." To his credit he refused and instead spoke on Republican themes of unity and opportunity, a show of independence that probably cost him an appointment in the Administration.