Washington, D.C. -- Government programs are easy to start but difficult if not impossible to dissolve. That makes California’s overturning of state-enforced race and gender preferences all the more remarkable. But for those who missed it, a full-length version is now available, bursting with lessons for the national debate.

The Color Bind: California’s Battle to End Affirmative Action (University of California Press), by Berkeley
professor Lydia Chavez, is a David and Goliath story, full of plot twists and jostling with fools, villains,
and heroes.

The victory over race quotas begins with two unknown and politically inexperienced academics, Tom Wood and Glynn Custred. What really sets them off is an absurd case of proportionality -- the dogma that every field of human endeavor must represent the ethnic proportions of the populace.

In 1991, the California Assembly actually passes a bill mandating “enhanced success at all educational levels so
that there are similar achievement patterns among all groups regardless of ethnic origin, race gender, age
disability or economic circumstance.” Translation: college graduation according to ethnicity, regardless of
personal differences, effort and choice.

Wood and Custred know that voters have never been given a shot at eliminating such buffoonery. They paraphrase the 1964 Civil Rights Act into a simple initiative stating that California would not assign preferences based on race and gender. But the plot thickens when they try to get it on the ballot.

Chavez shows how some Republicans at the national level closed their eyes to the issue, chief among them Jack
Kemp. With GOP pols foundering, black UC Regent Ward Connerly, an opponent of preferences, takes the helm.
Here is a true profile in courage. Connerly fends off the slings and arrows of racist criticism while trying to
manage Republican flip-flops and incompetence.

The opposition, meanwhile, is divided, with feminists and other factions playing “Who’s the Boss?” while attempting to out-victim each other. Ellen DeGeneres, Candice Bergen, and Bruce Springsteen marshal star power against Connerly and Company. The opposition even tries a trick play, bringing in Ku Klucker David Duke. But the voters are not fooled.

They vote for Proposition 209, as the California Civil Rights Initiative comes to be called. Judge Thelton
Henderson attempts to trump the voters, but an appeals court sends him packing, and the Supreme Court makes the victory official.

The Color Bind confirms that even in a balkanized nation there still exists something called “the people,”
a solid core crossing all race and class lines, and which can be expected to display the good sense and fairness so lacking in our political class.

Democrat Al Checchi, candidate for California governor, disagrees. He calls the initiative process “legislative
vigilantism.” Similarly, Chavez, an apologist for race preferences, says it is “nonsense” to let voters have a
say on important social questions and concludes that the “209” campaign was “like witnessing democracy in free
fall.”

Ward Connerly, who read the book in one sitting, drew a different lesson. “This shows democracy at its best,” he
says. “It shows that the people can exercise the right to effect change. This was a people’s initiative.”

According to Mr. Connerly’s group, the American Civil Rights Institute, sequels are now under way in 14 states.

-- Steven Hayward and K. Lloyd Billingsley