National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice took a rare central role in a domestic debate within the White House and helped persuade President Bush to publicly condemn race-conscious admissions policies at the University of Michigan, administration officials said Thursday.
The officials said Rice, in a series of lengthy one-on-one meetings with Bush, drew on her experience as provost at Stanford University to help convince him that favoring minorities was not an effective way to improve diversity on college campuses.
Rice, the first female national security adviser, told Bush that she worked to increase the number of African-American faculty members at Stanford but that she was “absolutely opposed to quotas,” a senior administration official said.
A Stanford official said that under Rice, who served from 1993 to 1999 and was the university’s first non-white provost, the number of black faculty members increased from 36 to 44.
Officials described Rice as one of the prime movers behind Bush’s announcement Wednesday that he would urge the Supreme Court to strike down Michigan’s affirmative-action program.
Striking moderate balance
As Justice Department officials put finishing touches on the administration’s brief to meet a midnight deadline Thursday night, White House aides described Bush’s conversations with Rice and other advisers. It was an effort to portray the president’s position as striking a moderate balance, encouraging racial diversity but arguing against the use of direct mechanisms for enforcing it.
Aides said Justice Department officials–and specifically Solicitor General Theodore Olson, the administration’s lawyer in the Supreme Court–proposed that Bush file a brief arguing that use of race in college admissions to achieve diversity is unconstitutional.
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“Several conservatives, including many in the administration, urged the president to file a broader brief,” a senior official said. “The president made the determination that it was his role to issue the narrowly tailored brief to make it clear that the Michigan program was wrong, but not seek to define how to achieve diversity because he believes the best way to accomplish that is to let it evolve.”
A White House official said Bush talked about the case only in general terms with Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft. Several black conservative lawyers in the administration, including those at the Department of Education, lobbied for a broader argument against affirmative action.
An official said Bush’s counsel, Alberto Gonzales, presented the options in neutral terms, describing how each position could be argued. Officials said Bush only fleetingly considered his option to remain silent on the case, deciding that it was of sufficient national importance that he should describe his views. Aides researched past affirmative action and civil rights cases and found that the White House typically weighed in.
Effectively siding with critics
In the absence of the text Thursday night, it was impossible to know exactly what legal course the administration settled on. But the effect of Bush’s stand was to side with critics of Michigan’s policy.
Winning over Hispanic and moderate suburban voters is one of the White House’s chief political aims, and some Republicans feared that the decision could hurt Bush, especially with the controversy after the racially charged remarks by Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) that caused him to step down as party leader.
However, the position could bolster the president with his base of conservative voters, and aides said Bush’s moderate rhetoric put him in the middle ground with most of the American public.
Bush’s aides said the decision emerged from more than two dozen meetings over the past month, almost all of them with a small group of advisers consisting of Rice, Gonzales, Vice President Dick Cheney, Chief of Staff Andrew Card, senior adviser Karl Rove, and Jay Lefkowitz, director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council.
“In these meetings, the president would pepper the group with questions: `When can race be used? How do you achieve diversity?”‘ a senior official said. “He wanted to get at reality.”
Bush’s remarks, drafted by his speechwriting office, were heavily edited by a close aide, Karen Hughes. Hughes and Lefkowitz were architects of Bush’s decision last year to allow federal funding for a limited amount of research on stem cells from human embryos.
Similar to stem cell decision
The affirmative-action decision had much in common with Bush’s stem cell announcement. Both followed heavy lobbying from powerful conservatives. And both policies sound palatable to moderates but largely achieve the aim of conservatives without directly taking their side.
Though some conservatives said they had been pleasantly surprised by the president’s strong rhetoric, particularly his denunciation of Michigan’s plans as “quotas,” others reserved judgment until they saw the legal reasoning. Many on the right view the White House as handling the issue as a political, rather than legal, one.
“They wanted to send the message that the president opposes quotas, being anathema in every opinion poll you can name,” a conservative legal activist said. “At the same time, the president couched this in terms of `affirmative access.’ As an intellectual matter, I don’t think the president came to grips with the issues.”