■ Mr. Clinton’s performance last week was merely mediocre. But can he keep it up?
■ Lani Guinier’s defenestration will soon be forgotten. But the reason the President gave for abandoning his nominee for assistant attorney general will reverberate for many years. The Senate debate, he said, “would be carried on a ground that I could not defend.” That ground: Miss Guinier’s explicit advocacy of quotas. Thus an extraordinary political reality has now emerged: liberals have decisively failed to defend quotas overtly, although wholly committed to them covertly. As Professor Lino Graglia puts it acidly in his masterly cover story (page 26), “ ‘Affirmative action’ [a/k/a quotas] is a fungus that can survive only underground in the dark.” This means that conservatives have been presented, providentially, with a devastating weapon. The word “quotas” has the same magic properties as the word “racism”—use it and everyone runs away. It must therefore be used as often as possible, particularly since, unlike the typical liberal accusation of “racism,” it is accurate. Liberals will scream. But they will also flee. All that is required is nerve. Of course, if elected officials had nerve, the U.S. wouldn’t be in the quota quagmire in the first place.
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