5-28-08, 9:25 am

Missourians accomplished something this month no other state has when faced with a similar challenge. The people of the 'show me' state scored a major victory May 4th when a campaign led by California millionaire Ward Connerly failed to deliver the required number of signatures to get an initiative on the November ballot that would have banned affirmative action.

Earlier in the year in Oklahoma, a successful legal challenge by the ACLU had forced Connerly's organization to withdraw its petition because too many of the signatures had been found to have been fraudulently or otherwise improperly gathered.

The campaign to defend affirmative action in Missouri differed from the legal challenges in Oklahoma in that it directly confronted the misleading anti-affirmative action campaign in the streets. A broad coalition of business, labor, civil rights, and economic justice groups organized and mobilized the first ever successful 'decline to sign' campaign. Teamsters, service employees, communications workers, community activists, civil rights workers, and others lined up to make the decline to sign campaign a big success.

Since 1998, states like California, Washington, Georgia, and Michigan have failed to block similar anti-affirmative action referenda deceitfully disguised as 'civil rights initiatives.' In each state, the campaigns to ban affirmative action were financed and organized by Connerly's so-called Civil Rights Initiative.

According to Glenn Burleigh, who headed the statewide decline to sign campaign for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, the signature gatherers deceived many voters into signing. 'They had folks saying this is going to lower the price of gas or end discrimination in the workplace,' Burleigh said. 'They said all kinds of random stuff.'

Julie Terbrock who worked as an organizer with Missouri Jobs with Justice for the decline to sign campaign described a number of other ways paid signature gatherers for Connerly's group tricked voters into adding their names. 'Their messaging was along the lines of this is all about civil rights, ending racism, as well as a few instances where they were working with another petition here in the city, and they would just say it was a three-part petition on eminent domain, while the third page was really the anti-affirmative action petition,' she said.

Both Terbrock and Burleigh worked with volunteers to teach them how to educate voters on what the petition was really all about. They then sent volunteers out to scout different areas of St. Louis, Kansas City, the suburbs, 'exurbs,' and other places to locate signature gatherers.

When one was found, other volunteers would be quickly dispatched to that location to hand out fliers near the signature gatherer, alerting potential signers about what they were being asked to sign as well as to document deceptive tactics on the part of the signature gatherer.

One of the volunteers for this task was Tony Pecinovsky, who writes frequently for Political Affairs and who is based in St. Louis. He described his encounters with signature gatherers. 'I physically ran into petition signature gatherers who would say sign this, it is to end discrimination in the workplace and other really bold lies,' Pecinovsky said. 'In the last week of the campaign they were paying signature gatherers ten bucks a signature, and for anyone who could get 100 signatures, they'd give them $1,000.'

The anti-affirmative action campaign, funded by Connerly's group and backed mainly by the Republican Party in Missouri, also sought out reprehensible alliances with out of state ultra right groups and local neo-nazi organizations. Both Pecinovsky and Burleigh mentioned encountering some of these individuals. 'I actually ran into people who were from the Minutemen organization and other fascist-like organizations from here in Missouri,' Pecinovsky stated.

Burleigh attributed the willingness on the part of the anti-affirmative action campaign to align with extremists to the fact that the coalition that generally supports the Republican Party in Missouri has collapsed. It was a sign of desperation, he said.

'All these extreme elements that make up the right-wing coalition were here,' Burleigh said. 'The right wing is very careful about not mobilizing those folks publicly because they don't want to be known as being part of that. We all know they are, but they don't want that to be the headline.'

'They got desperate enough, however, that they mobilized them,' he added. 'We had crazy racists from across the country who were flown in on the (Connerly) campaign's dime to work here in Missouri. The Minutemen were out there gathering signatures in military fatigues. We saw skinheads out there. We had dudes out there in front of Wal-Mart preaching about how minorities were stealing the white man's jobs.'

By contrast, the efforts of the progressive coalition may have changed Missouri politics for some time to come, Burleigh added. 'For a long time the progressive movement has been able to work effectively in this legislative race or that legislative race, but being able to mobilize across the entire state had not been a reality. But now it is,' he said.

One key difference, Burleigh emphasized, is the independent character of the most active elements in the decline to sign campaign: labor and the economic justice organizations.

The main forces around the Democratic Party sought to focus resources and tactics on challenging the ballot initiative in court and with an ad campaign in the fall. Many leading figures in the Democratic Party felt a decline to sign campaign wouldn't work and had accepted that the petition would inevitably succeed.

The independent forces on the progressive side, however, weren't ready to give up, Burleigh recalled. 'The independent actors that make up the progressive coalition were bound and determined to try and stop this and not give it a free pass,' he stated. 'Nobody thought that we would actually be able to stop it from even getting on the ballot.'

Terbrock pointed to the long-term significance of the victory. 'It kept a wedge issue off the ballot. And it is giving a lot of the people who spent time trying to defeat the initiative the opportunity to work more proactively as opposed to working against the initiative in November,' she said.

At least three other states will have anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives in November, including John McCain's home state of Arizona. But the Republican failure in Missouri is a huge blow to their well-funded, right-wing campaign against civil rights. It is a major victory for the people's coalition that will be needed to defeat John McCain and the Republicans this fall.

If the Democratic presidential candidate carries the swing state of Missouri in November, observers suggest, he or she should be at least in part grateful to this improbable grassroots victory by a coalition of labor and community organizations that took on the right-wing campaign against affirmative action this spring and forced the Republicans to re-calculate their electoral math for 2008.

--Reach Joel Wendland at