WASHINGTON, D.C. - While Latrell Sprewell's strangling of his NBA coach may not seem newsworthy, the San Francisco Mayor's response to the event certainly is. Said Willie Brown: "Maybe the [white] coach deserved choking." When in doubt, make it racial.

His Williness made a gaffe, but his comments and all the ensuing racialized excuses for Sprewell's attack illustrate an alarming, and I suggest orchestrated, trend.

All over the country, Jesse Jackson and his worker bees are taking every opportunity to throw up roadblocks against the slow dismantling of preference programs. In the process, they have managed to insert a poison pill into the national dialogue – when in doubt, "Sprewell" (formerly known as "OJ-ing") the evidence with racial psychobabble and identity politics. While those of us who opposed race and sex based preference programs expected a bitter entrenchment from the identity politics hawks, we could not have imagined the breadth and venom of their response.

First there was the failure of the Houston initiative to ban the city's use of race and sex in awarding contracts, crippled as it was by the exploitative editing of the popular outgoing mayor and his polarizing rhetoric about the racism of repealing preference programs which discriminate between Houstonians on the basis of race and sex. Then there was the ban on criticism of preferential policies from the President's advisory commission on race, in the form of an edict from Chairman John Hope Franklin that anyone who opposed his version of affirmative action could not possibly have anything to contribute to a discussion of diversity at the university. (The irony of policing thoughts on diversity is simply too rich.) And then last Wednesday, the President put on his Oprah hat for a town meeting on race in Akron, Ohio – a meeting which quickly turned into a spectacle of testimonials and hallelujahs, punctuated only by the President's nasty attack on the one person brave enough to disagree with him.

This week the news is even grimmer. On Monday, The White House floated its plan to make an end run around the Senate Judiciary Committee's block of Bill Lann Lee's nomination to be assistant attorney general for civil rights with a recess appointment of the controversial preference promoter. The White House continues to spin that the Senate's block was more about politics than his admitted refusal to follow the letter of the law as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court. Lee was the featured guest Monday at a swanky Justice Department ceremony to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the civil rights division that Lee would have headed had his nomination succeeded. Attorney General Reno was there with Lee on her arm, touting Lee as "more than qualified for the job."

Nothing too out of the ordinary in this circus, except there's more to this story than the usual political posturing. Sources inside the White House actually admitted to U.S. News & World Report this week that Lee's recess appointment and the ensuing hullabaloo could have a spectacular political payoff. White House staffers hope that by grousing over the Lee appointment, Republicans will alienate Asian Americans and push them into the Democrats camp for next year's congressional races. In other words, the White House is willing to appoint Lee to a job in which he will be the focal point for controversy and congressional investigations, a job in which he cannot expect a moment's peace, not for any noble vision of civil rights but because the Democrats want the House back.

The White House press secretary is busy trying to quash the U.S. News story but as they say in Washington, "Said off record is many a truth." Meanwhile, the Sprewelling of civil rights continues apace. Don't forget: last month, Jesse Jackson called a vote against Bill Lann Lee a hate crime. Now the White House will use the very impression Jackson created to move Asian American votes into their camp. Coincidence?

—Katherine Post

Director of the Center for

Enterprise and Opportunity