CHECCHI CAMPAIGN INSULTS SUPPORTERS OF PROP. 209.

Byline: Glynn Custred Politics

AN ugly trend which was set in motion on the California State University, Northridge, campus during the past election has now surfaced in the Al Checchi and Jane Harman campaigns for governor. With the twisting of factually correct examples, the Checchi campaign is trying to induce guilt-by-association responses in voters.

In the past election, it started with a stunt cooked up by students (and apparently abetted by the CSUN administration) designed to counter Proposition 209. The plan was to use $4,000 from a student fund to hire former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke to come to the campus to speak in favor of Prop. 209. The purpose was to discredit the proposition by association.

This stunt, which made national television, was quickly picked by the anti-209 campaign. Connie Rice from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People later said of the antic that ``it took a freak show to get national attention on this.'' The 209 opponents then hired Democratic Party media consultant Bob Shrum to stitch together a collage consisting of David Duke, burning churches, robed Klansmen and prominent Republicans whose faces were specially lighted to emphasize their ``whiteness.'' These images were then used in a television spot urging a no vote on 209.

Enter Al Checchi, who is running for governor on the Democratic ticket. Checchi is a multimillionaire with no constituency and no record of previous public service who is trying to buy his way to the Governor's Office with his millions. So far he has spent $20 million on name-recognition television ads with the help of Shrum, the same media consultant responsible for the exploitative, race-baiting David Duke ad.

Checchi is running ads with the same kind of low-life strategy. He is attacking rival Harman by misrepresenting votes on the budget and her association with Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.

And Checchi has come out strongly against Proposition 209, calling it a ``mistake'' and an ``embarrassment to California.'' He also has proclaimed that the reason he is a Democrat is because he rejects ``the ugliness and injustice of Prop. 209.'' He also promises that he will roll back Proposition 209 if elected.

Proposition 209 reasserts the principles of individual rights and equality before the law which for the vast majority of Americans constitute the very definition of fairness and justice. In fact, those core principles are embodied in the 1964 Civil Rights Act from which Proposition 209 is derived.

What Checchi is saying is that individual rights and equality before the law are ``ugly and unjust''; that Democrats like Hubert Humphrey, responsible for the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, were ``mistaken''; and that the 5.4 million people who voted for these principles in the form of Proposition 209 (at least half of whom are Democrats) are ``an embarrassment to California.''

Checchi's belated opposition to Proposition 209 (he was nowhere to be found during the campaign when his millions might have made a difference) reveals his arrogance and elitism, since he obviously holds nothing but contempt for the majority of the people he wished to govern, and for the principles of fairness and justice they asserted at the ballot box.

It is not the people of California, however, who Checchi is trying to win over at this stage of the game. Instead it is one of the most powerful interest groups which dominate the Democratic Party, the $2 billion-plus grievance industry which consists of bureaucratic preference enforcers, ``diversity consultants'' and a number of groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP, the National Organization for Women, etc., which make their fortunes by exploiting the tensions inherent in any diverse and complex society.

Checchi is not alone in his subservience to this industry. Harman, a Democratic congresswoman from Torrance, his opponent for governor and fellow millionaire, also has promised to reverse Proposition 209 if elected.

What started on the Northridge campus as a sophomoric and mean-spirited political prank, and later used as an exploitative device for frightening people to the polls, is now developing into a Democratic Party strategy of divisiveness which not only betrays the best in the party and all those good people who support it, but which also threatens to exacerbate the racial and ethnic tensions in our increasingly diverse society.