Ward Connerly's anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives -- deceptively called "civil rights initiatives" -- are likely to be on the ballot in Arizona and Nebraska this November. And as Jonathan Martin writes at Politico, John McCain is now saying he supports the Arizona initiative, despite opposing the conservative Arizona state legislature's attempt to rollback affirmative action ten years ago.
Martin chalks this flip-flop up to McCain's characteristic distaste for "penny ante cultural stuff." The Republican candidate, after all, prefers to focus on "big boy" issues. But there's actually some real meat behind McCain's former support for affirmative action -- it's not like he accidentally took that position. McCain is a veteran who is enamored of the military's way of doing things. And the U.S. military is one of the country's most prominent supporters and practitioners of affirmative action, filing many amicus briefs in support of the practice and joining the state-level grassroots coalitions that have fought Connerly in many states. Just three months ago, McCain made a statement supporting affirmative action as it is used by the military and as it has been conceived of by the Supreme Court:
If you’re talking about assuring equal and fair opportunity for all Americans and making sure that the practices of the US military are emulated, the greatest equal opportunity employer in America, then I am all for it. ... If you are talking about quotas, I am not for it. So all of us are for affirmative action to try to give assistance to those who need it, whether it be African-American or other groups of Americans that need it.
In other words, this is a very recent change of opinion for McCain, and one that leaves some unanswered questions about how exactly he believes affirmative action can be applied, and by what institutions. The armed services believe they can't successfully implement affirmative action under laws like Connerly's. Is McCain really siding with Connerly over the U.S. military?
--Dana Goldstein
