A few things happened. He said some really stupid things about Florida when he first came down (something about how FL is too unenlightened and stupid for national media attention--no, it was something about how he had never seen such a high concentration of such stupid people holding positions of power) and I don't think he was allowed to forget it. I think folks in FL jumped on the anti-Ward bandwagon much earlier in FL than they did in CA and I think, this is just from being in the St. Pete area, that the African-American community (Cuban-Americans were pretty silent on the issue) is really politicized, and got active early. NOW also got really involved early, and there was some good coalition building. I went to some of the meetings, and the affirmative action people were much more photogenic, articulate, and charmismatic than the antis.
At the same time all this was going on, Jeb! was hatching his own plan for ending affrimative action in the school system. He wanted to do something along the lines of what was implemented in TX and CA. of course, since so many of the state politicians went to UF and FSU, those two schools were not required to accept students from the top 10% (might be wrong on the percentage) of their HS classes.
Connerly had no state support. Jeb! said he was divisive, the state supreme court said it was going to look very, very closely at the signatures, and I guess the anti people thought Jeb!'s plan was good enough.
Frances
-----Original Message----- From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> To: lbo-talk <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Tuesday, May 09, 2000 3:20 PM Subject: Connerly gives up on Florida
>[From today's Wall Street Journal. What happened?]
>
>Ward Connerly called off a petition drive to put an
>antiaffirmative-action measure on the Florida ballot. He said there
>wasn't enough time to collect the required 500,000 signatures by the
>deadline in August.