Taking the initiative.

BETTER late than never? Not if you're Bob Dole, hoisting the banner of Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative, at the eleventh hour in your doomed quest for the White House.

CCRI, of course, is the initiative to end race and sex preferences by state and local government in California. It won solidly on November 5: 54 per cent to 46. But key backers still have the sensation of being mugged by the erratic Dole campaign, which capped months of aggressive aloofness toward CCRI with a gushing embrace on election eve. Some believe the sudden smooch from the graveyard-bound campaign nearly proved a kiss of death.

Bob Dole first endorsed CCRI when the starting gun was sounding on the GOP primary season and he was casting concerned glances over his right shoulder at Phil Gramm and Pat Buchanan. At that point, the measure was widely seen as a victory elixir for the Republican presidential nominee, whoever he might be -- a tonic to energize GOP constituencies and fuel Reagan-like raids on Democratic turf.

It never lost that potential. But it did lose the active interest of Bob Dole, once he had the nomination in hand. Maybe it was the wind-borne whisperings of Richard Nixon urging: Run right for the nomination, then shift hard center. Maybe it was the media's chin stroking about the gender gap. In any case, something spooked Dole into a Zen-like silence on CCRI.

When reporters asked him about the issue, his responses were cryptic as only Dole's can be. "I've been for affirmative action," he told one inquirer. "I think that there are some changes that could be made." Colin Powell's Bowie State University address denouncing CCRI? A "fine speech," pronounced Dole.

Indeed, Dole's yearning to get Powell on his ticket is the most widely offered rationale for his backing off Prop. 209. One wonders whether he realized that Powell might be actively consorting with the enemy on the quota issue. Ward Connerly, the steel-spined black businessman who headed the CCRI campaign, tells of blunt letters between himself and Powell following the Bowie State speech. He thought the general was keeping their correspondence confidential --until an attorney who advises the Clinton Administration approached Connerly at a New York reception and started talking, in a detailed way, about the letters.

Maybe pillow talk also influenced Dole. Robert Novak reports that Elizabeth Dole voiced worries to Connerly about his initiative. How would it affect outreach programs? she asked. No effect at all, came the reply, as long as they're race- and gender-neutral. But what about the "compensatory outreach" she favored as Secretary of Labor?

Connerly was talking to someone who didn't get it.

Considering that exchange, maybe it shouldn't have been a surprise that Connerly was denied the opportunity to address the GOP Convention in San Diego on racial preferences. But despite such snubs, some outside observers still didn't grasp how forcefully the Dole campaign had distanced itself from CCRI. In the middle of the summer, Ben Wattenberg sounded an alarm in his column, apparently expecting that someone might take heed: "Hey Republicans! Your candidate is down 20 points! This [CCRI] is a plus-40-point issue, that Americans are properly concerned about, that can differentiate Dole from Clinton as Clinton swipes most of the GOP's other social issues."

Almost exactly two months later, at the end of September, leftist-turned-conservative David Horowitz issued a similar plea on the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times. He pointed out that Prop. 209, then at 60 per cent in the polls, was running ahead of Clinton in California. Dole, by embracing it energetically, "could shift 5 per cent to 10 per cent of Clinton's support in the polls, creating a winning margin for himself in November."

The day after this article ran, I was in Century City, interviewing the No. 2 man on the GOP ticket. "David Horowitz is wrong," Jack Kemp declared: Prop. 209 was not the route to victory.

He was even more emphatic at a meeting of political reporters in Los Angeles the same weekend. "We are not going to campaign on a wedge issue," Kemp said. "We have endorsed CCRI, but as a transition to a new era. . . . We are not going to let this issue tear up California."

Kemp's comments, appearing in the newspapers, set phone lines humming and teeth grinding. Principled CCRI supporters believe that what is tearing up California are the race classifications and favoritism that Prop. 209 would end -- and that to demean their cause as nothing more than a polarizing "wedge issue" displays a tone-deafness on large and serious questions.

Nevertheless, when Bob Dole, several weeks later, finally decided he was a Prop. 209 man after all, there were few hallelujahs in the CCRI camp. Dole's move looked less like conversion to the cause than a last desperate tactical switch in a campaign that adopted new tactics every seven days or so.

The campaign's prospects in the Northeast and Midwest were dim, House Republican leaders feared big losses in the California delegation, and a California field poll surprisingly showed Dole down "only" 10 points. So the Dole people announced they would be planting their battle flag in the Golden State. And they would be using CCRI as forward artillery.

But by now it was late October -- "too late," as David Horowitz notes, "to do anything but look like opportunists in joining the Prop. 209 crusade." The suggestion of cynical political calculation gave a second wind to CCRI foes, who had all along argued that the measure was, indeed, simply a wedge issue, part of a callous strategy for seizing power by dividing the electorate against itself.

Some top CCRI supporters worried that Republican TV ads attacking Clinton for opposing the initiative would drive away Democratic supporters while overshadowing the upbeat ads of the Prop. 209 campaign itself, with its motto, "Bring us together."

Certainly if the GOP was going to impale Clinton on the issue, it would have had to gin up the effort much earlier. "With a months-long, sustained drive to educate on the evils of quotas and preferences -- and to identify the incumbent as the quota defender he is -- Dole could have won California and the nation," argues pollster Arnie Steinberg, a founding strategist of CCRI. "But you can't start a week out from the election. That's when you're supposed to be reiterating major themes, not introducing new ones."

IF Dole's gambit wasn't credible enough to breathe new vigor into his own campaign, it apparently did give increased energy to the other side, triggering a flow of money into the anti-209 effort from allies of the Clinton Administration, various liberal interest groups, and some go-along-to-get-along CEOs. Monday Night Football the evening before the election carried a hailstorm of ads linking the measure to David Duke and the Klan (and Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich for good measure).

This late assault probably drove down the measure's numbers, and may have energized some Democratic voters, contributing to the GOP's loss of control of the state Assembly, and to the loss of at least a couple of House seats.

Despite those dispiriting results, the tally of yes votes on CCRI --at least 4,737,277 -- was still nearly 100,000 more than Clinton's showing (and 1.3 million ahead of Dole), suggesting the initiative could have been a powerful engine for a presidential candidacy that had taken it seriously.

So once again: Why would the nominee -- and the national GOP establishment he represented -- have shown such indifference, for so many months, toward such a politically potent measure?

"A lot of top Republicans were embarrassed by it," Horowitz theorizes. "They don't really believe in it. It doesn't rouse much passion at the country club."

Steinberg sounds a similar note: "Many senior officials in the GOP don't accept the notion that their candidates can win by espousing powerful issues. This is because they're essentially technicians, lacking in moral grounding, moral fiber."

One service the CCRI campaign performed was to bring into the political arena some young potential stars who have the grounding Steinberg is talking about.

There is Errol Smith, the black entrepreneur from Los Angeles who did a TV ad challenging the opposition's fixation with David Duke and friends. "Do I look like a Klansman?" Smith asked viewers.

There is Gail Heriot, the University of Chicago-trained law professor who coolly demolished claims that the initiative would imperil women's rights.

Jennifer Nelson, the campaign's press spokesman, is a crackerjack PR professional who, unlike so many political publicists, is not a mercenary -- there is conviction behind what she's saying.

This team may stick together, at least informally, to advise anti-quota drives in other states. The prospect that Prop. 209 could spur emulation also offers the national GOP a second chance to get right on this issue. Republicans don't have to be politically brilliant to seize the opportunity: it would be fine if they acted out of principle, because it's the right thing to do.