“In most cases it’s true, as Tip O’Neill once said, that all politics is local. But where affirmative action is concerned, it’s quite the opposite: all politics is national.” —Ward Connerly

When he launched his “Super Tuesday” in a March 2, 2007 speech at the Heritage Foundation, Connerly claimed that his idea was the product of a groundswell of opinion in the states to end affirmative action in contracting, education and government services.

The network that stands behind Connerly has developed a significant capacity to drive wedge issues—such as eliminating affirmative action, threatening a woman’s ability to choose, fighting the right to organize in the workplace, banning same sex marriage and fomenting taxpayer grievances—through state ballot initiatives.

 At the behest of his wealthy supporters, Connerly has relentlessly promoted state referendum campaigns to overturn a generation’s worth of laws, regulations and institutional policies designed to promote racial and gender diversity and fairness in university admissions, government contracting and access to public services and decision-making.

But two facts stand out in his campaign: that it has been funded from outside of these states by Connerly’s 501(c)4, the American Civil Rights Coalition; and supported by American Civil Rights Institute, which receives a vast amount of funding from the major foundations of the right, particularly the Bradley Foundation, to support his advocacy of these ballot initiatives.

Connerly is paid an extravagant salary by ACRI to wage war on affirmative action programs, many put together decades ago as a sensible, bipartisan solution to the racial and gender disparities in education, contracting and government services. The citizens of these states have every right to ask questions about this. Why they should vote to change their constitutions or laws because a wealthy businessman from distant California parachutes into their states with vast amounts of money and peddles initiatives cooked up to serve the interests of wealthy contractors, Wall Street investors and ideologically-driven foundation ideologues who stand to gain from the ending of affirmative action?

Although all of the campaign finance reporting is not in yet, and if any of Connerly’s initiatives qualify there will likely be an expensive media blitz toward November, the available information indicates that the “Super Tuesday” campaign is driven by money, and, of course, a failure to understand basic issues of history, fairness and racial justice.