Why There Will Be No Vote on Affirmative Action
by Jack Cashill
Edee Baggett has seen a lot in the 15 years she been organizing petition drives, but nothing like she has seen these past four months.
Until recently, the peripatetic Baggett liked working in Kansas City. She had a particularly productive experience this past summer when Democratic power broker Jim Nutter hired her firm to force a new election on Clay Chastain’s light rail initiative.
So she was pleased to get the contract for the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI), a proposed ban on race and gender preferences in the public sphere. A little naïve at the time, Baggett had no idea of the no-man’s-land she had contracted to cross.
For the record, the Civil Rights Initiative is the brainchild of Ward Connerly, an African American businessman from Sacramento. Among other revelations, the initiative has exposed the gap—chasm, really—between what people say and how they vote on an issue so sensitive I even shy from offering an opinion.
Shyness is understandable. Here as elsewhere, race and gender preferences fuel the diversity movement. Since managers are routinely evaluated on how well they “promote diversity,” just about everyone is publicly OK with preferences and gung ho on diversity.
In the voting booth, however, even in states as liberal as Michigan or as diverse as California, these same citizens rejectrace and gender preferences by healthy margins—58 to 42 in Michigan in 2006.
Connerly’s foes had no intention of losing in Missouri. Given their track record, however, they knew their best shot was to keep the MCRI off the ballot.
By chance or design, Secretary of State Robin Carnahan aided their efforts with an original ballot that read, incredibly, like an ad for preferences. Connerly’s team was obliged to sue and did so successfully. For the first time in Missouri’s history, a judge threw out the ballot certified by a Secretary of State and imposed much more neutral language.
Carnahan’s verbal feint did, however, manage to delay the MCRI petition drive by at least six months. Baggett would have less than four months to gather 140,000 valid signatures, and her troubles were just starting.
As she discovered, the organizers of certain other petition drives ordered the circulators with whom they contracted not to carry multiple petitions as they routinely would. Evidence suggests they were targeting the MCRI petition. One organizer, for instance, sent a self-defeating letter “refusing to buy signa-tures” from circulators who carried the MCRI as well as its own.
The motives for disassociation, as far as I could tell, ranged from an active alliance with anti-MCRI forces to a more passive fear of backlash from the diversity establishment.
The anti-MCRI forces are many and aggressive. One such group calls itself WeCAN-MO, which, alas, is not a lawn service, but a feverish coalition of seeming do-gooders “organized to defend affirmative action in Missouri.”
WeCAN Director Brandon Davisopenly boasted of his intent “to make it difficult to gather signatures in Missouri.” His website urged vigilant Missourians to call the WeCAN hotline if they spotted anyone circulating “the socalled Missouri Civil Rights Initiative.”
Once alerted, WeCAN dispatched teams of “blockers” to discourage people from signing the MCRI petition. Some apparently get carried away. Whether dispatched by WeCAN or not I am uncertain, but while I was interviewing Baggett, she received a tearful call from a young black female circulator on the MU campus who had just had her signed petitions ripped to shreds by a team of white male blockers. This incident was not unique.
A second group that entered the Missouri fray goes by the less than reassuring acronym of BAMN, “By Any Means Necessary.” BAMN takes credit for preventing the Civil Rights Initiative from getting on the ballot in Oklahoma.
One of its cheesier bits of street theater is to get prominent people to go public and claim they were “defrauded” into signing the CRI petition. Among the presumed dupes in Oklahoma were a representative of the Jewish Federation of Tulsa and a president of the Tulsa NAACP.
And then, of course, there was the predictable anti-MCRI malarkey from our old friends at ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. These radical shock troops have earned an impressive rap sheet for their election mischief, particularly here in Missouri given their fraud indictments at either end of the state. Readers might refer to my article of a year ago, “Mommy,the ACORN guy is peeing in the street.”
For all their guerilla shenanigans, none of these groups unnerved Edee Baggett. That honor belongs to the Kansas City Election Board. “I am trying to monitor fraud,” Baggett told me before the drive ended, “and they are not letting me.”
As Baggett related, on her first visit to the Election Board to verify signatures, the staff was obliging and helpful. “Glad you are doing this,” one staffer told her. Baggett was able to verify the malfeasance of one of her circulators and report him to the police.
On a subsequent visit, however, when an Election Board staffer attempted to help Baggett, a supervisor ordered her not to. According to Baggett, she then met with Election Board director Shelley McThomasand two other officials to express herconcerns. But when she called McThomasto follow up as agreed, McThomas claimedshe “had found statutes showing they did not have to let me view the signatures.”
Almost in shock, Baggett replied, “Are you saying you sought out a way to preventme from monitoring fraud? Who gave you that information?”
In fact, the statute came from the office of the aforementioned Robin Carnahan. As Iread it, the statute in question seems fully silent on the issue of allowing petition gatherers to view signatures. Apparently, the silence was interpreted to mean that noone was compelled to help Edee Baggett.
I called the Secretary of State’s office to verify. “You understand how bad this looks,”I told Ryan Hobart, the official dispatched to handle my query. He may not have, but someone in his office obviously did. Hobart promptly sent me a clarifying email.
At this point Rashomon-like, the stories of the three parties diverge on the highly sensitive question of whether the denial was based on Baggett’s representation of the MCRI.
The Election Board insists that it refused Baggett exclusively due to routine concerns about privacy and process. “I did not know what ballot, quite frankly, she was talking about,” director McThomastold me of her meeting with Baggett.
Hobart meanwhile muddied the waters with his intended clarification. Upon checking, he discovered that the KC Election Board had contacted his officebut only about “wanting to check signatures for an eminent domain petition.” Hobart added, and the italics are his, “The Missouri Civil Rights Initiative was not mentionedin their inquiry.”
Baggett, however, insists that McThomas had to know. It was potential sabotage from anti-MCRI groups that had put her “on high alert” and sent her downtown to verify signatures, a fear that she had “stressed” in the meeting at the Election Board.
Baggett’s fears proved justified. Her team failed to gather enough signatures by the May 4 deadline. Said Ryan Hobartto the Associated Press, the MCRI petition gatherers “had as much opportunity as everyone else.” Please!
At the least, the undoing of the MCRI initiative drive deserves serious media inquiry. But don’t expect to see it. The same “shyness” that stifles debate in Kansas City offices all but paralyzes our newsrooms.
Now, how about those Royals! 
Jack Cashill is Ingram's Executive Editor and has been affiliated with the magazine for 28 years. He can be reached at jackcashill@yahoo.com. The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's Magazine.