This was supposed to be a banner year for Ward Connerly, the former University of California regent and the Right’s most visible anti-affirmative-action activist. His 2000 biography, Creating Equal: My Fight Against Racial Preferences, was re-released in February. His latest book, Lessons From My Uncle James, was set to hit shelves this summer. More significantly, he was to be the driving force behind a series of ballot initiatives that would have forbidden state governments from “grant[ing] preferential treatment to any group or individual on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in areas of public contracting, public education, or public employment.” He marketed this effort as Super Tuesday for Equal Rights.

George Will gave his imprimatur to Connerly and his mission in a Washington Post column: “Will the superstitions surrounding race ever fade away? Not before governance is cleansed of the sort of race-based policies opposed by Connerly, who intimately knows the increasing absurdity of racial classifications and the folly of government preferences based on them.”

But Connerly’s plans are unraveling. His biography is absent from most stores and barely registered in conservative book clubs. His second book is mysteriously delayed. His ballot ambitions were scaled back, first from 10 states to five. Then legal challenges and organized opposition winnowed the tally down to just two.

This is unfortunate because anti-affirmative-action ballot measures usually pass when put to a vote. Connerly would know. He and the nonprofit organizations he founded helped three such measures pass—in California in 1996, Washington in 1998, and Michigan in 2006.

But don’t spend too much sympathy on Ward Connerly. The Right’s point man on affirmative action doesn’t need political successes to be a success. While his plans sputter and his former achievements are overturned, Connerly is still being handsomely rewarded. Once he received favored status from the conservative movement, his future was guaranteed. As an activist, Connerly has made millions opposing affirmative action. As a businessman and consultant, he has also made hundreds of thousands in large part because of it.

Between 1999 and 2005, Connerly’s nonprofits, the American Civil Rights Institute and the American Civil Rights Coalition, didn’t challenge a single affirmative-action law. Yet donations climbed to almost $2 million per year. The share that Connerly paid to himself, or to his private for-profit consulting firm, Connerly and Associates, also dramatically increased. In 1998, 22 percent of his nonprofits’ revenue was paid to Connerly in salary or to his firm. By 2001, Connerly’s salary and the fees charged by Connerly and Associates ate up 49 percent of the nonprofits’ combined revenue. Most of the money paid to the firm was listed on tax forms as “speaking fees.” In 2006, when Connerly took up a concrete goal in political activism—ending Michigan’s affirmative-action policies—the cut of nonprofit revenue paid to him and his firm rose to 66 percent of total receipts, nearly $1.6 million.

Connerly’s nonprofits employ him for 30 hours a week and two others full time. The nonprofits then hire him from Connerly and Associates to make speeches. In 2003, ACRI and ACRC paid him $314,079 while he managed two people. By comparison, that year the National Action Network, which receives about $1 million in public funds, only paid Al Sharpton about $4,000. The Claremont Institute, a neoconservative think tank in California, paid its top executive $132,000, and its staff is 9 times the size of Connerly’s. The Heritage Foundation paid its president $292,000 to manage a staff of over 180. The primary financial responsibility that Ward Connerly had at his nonprofits that year was paying his firm over $400,000 for Ward Connerly the consultant, Ward Connerly the speaker, Ward Connerly the political maven—and occasionally a security detail to guard him.

Is this illegal? The IRS makes clear in its statute that nonprofit organizations cannot be used to enrich one individual or company, but few of these cases are prosecuted. In 2006, during the heat of Connerly’s Michigan push, Congressmen John Conyers and Charles Rangel asked the IRS to look into his dealings. An IRS spokesman said that he could not comment on a case under investigation. Connerly defended himself by saying that he avoids any trickery on his IRS forms and dutifully pays taxes on all the money he receives.

Not long after the Sacramento Bee and the House members began inquiring about his compensation, Connerly changed procedures at his nonprofits. They now have a board that reviews his salary. He says, “It’s based on a formula that is devised by our auditors and accountants—a base salary of $300,000 and then compensation for speeches and things.” Connerly no longer has his private company invoice his nonprofits: “I pay Connerly and Associates for those services out of funds I receive for ACRI, so they [Connerly and Associates] in fact became a sub-contractor to me.” If this explanation seems convoluted, that’s fine by Connerly.

Whose money is he using? It’s difficult to say. During Connerly’s push for Proposition 54, which would have banned California from collecting racial data on its employees or students, ACRC was sued by political opponents for breaking campaign-finance laws. The settlement revealed that Connerly’s donors included a handful of deep-pocketed conservatives, including grocery magnate John Uhlmann and media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Connerly was an odd candidate to become a favorite son of the conservative movement. Born in the ethnic melting pot of Louisiana at the start of World War II, he describes his ancestry as one-quarter black mixed with Irish, French, and Choctaw. His father left the family when Connerly was two, and his mother died when he was four. He was young enough to have experienced Jim Crow laws. After graduating with honors in political science from Sacramento State College, Connerly embarked on a low-level career in California politics, working in the Department of Housing and Urban Development and serving on various assembly committees. It was during this time that he befriended Pete Wilson, a legislator who later became governor.

In 1973, using the experience and connections he gained in California state politics, Connerly opened Connerly and Associates with his wife Ilene. His work earned him a spot in the California Building Industry Hall of Fame, and he became well known among California’s business and political elite. Soon everyone would know him.

Connerly was appointed to the University of California’s Board of Regents in 1993, just as California politics took a dramatic turn. The Los Angeles riots had exposed new racial fault lines, and Republicans were taking advantage. In 1994, the California GOP achieved its first statewide majority in over three decades by supporting Proposition 187, which prohibited public services for illegal aliens. The initiative was quickly thrown out by the courts as unconstitutional. But Republicans and the media went searching for the next big thing in white backlash, which turned out to be opposition to affirmative action. Governor Wilson, a supporter of affirmative action as recently as 1994, began to champion “equality of opportunity” while eyeing the 1996 Republican presidential primaries.

If Wilson’s embrace of anti-affirmative-action politics seemed poll-driven, Connerly’s was also opportunistic. In the same year that Connerly discovered his opposition to affirmative action, he was very much a beneficiary of it. In 1994, his consulting firm was registered with the state as a minority- and woman-owned business. While telling media outlets that affirmative action was the equivalent of the “colored only” water fountains he encountered in Louisiana as a child, his firm was receiving a $35,000 contract from the state of California to carry out energy conservation training. Under the same noncompetitive bidding status, his firm had secured a state contract worth $100,000 in 1992 and another for $1.1 million in 1989.

Despite this history, Connerly took up the anti-affirmative-action cause with vigor. In 1995, he became chairman of the California Civil Rights Initiative campaign promoting Proposition 209, which would end state-sponsored affirmative action. The effort received generous funding from conservative donors. Murdoch, for instance, gave $1 million to Republicans in support of Prop 209. The measure passed with 54 percent of the vote in 1996. A year later, Connerly formed his two nonprofits. He became the public face of anti-affirmative-action activism and, despite his long record as a moderate Republican with generally libertarian views on cultural questions, a fixture of the conservative movement.

His activism is not entirely cynical. Political convictions can evolve, even if the change is initially motivated by ambition. Connerly’s work has exposed him to hysterical opposition from the old civil-rights establishment and every conceivable formulation of the “Uncle Tom” slur has been applied to him. He speaks movingly against racial discrimination. But even though successful political movements welcome true defectors, they don’t usually crown them with wealth and fame for accomplishing nothing.

Not that this troubles the Right. David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, says that Connerly “is not only well-regarded, but he’s earned it.” Longtime conservative activist David Horowitz, who also runs a California-based nonprofit, justifies Connerly’s take by citing the opportunity costs that come with doing political work—time away from business and lost clients. Further, says Horowitz, “His donors can look up his salary, and they’re obviously happy with what he’s doing.” Keene cautions against “a superficial reading [of IRS filings], which don’t tell the whole story. … It becomes a question of judgment on what was that work worth.”

What was Connerly’s Super Tuesday for Equal Rights worth? The potentially election-changing project has fallen apart. The contactors Connerly hired to obtain signatures are now battling over fees. Meanwhile, the pro-affirmative action cause seems to be getting a better bang for its buck.

Connerly’s past successes are also disappearing. Ending affirmative action in California’s schools dramatically reduced minority enrollment for one year, but it didn’t take long for administrators to find ways to get around Prop 209. According to statistician Richard Berk, new “comprehensive reviews” in UCLA admissions meant that between 1998 and 2001, Hispanics were still 1.8 times as likely as whites to be admitted and blacks 3.6 times as likely.

Yet Connerly’s accolades continue to pile up. In 2005, he was awarded the Bradley Prize, a $250,000 grant with no strings attached, usually given to a successful totem of the conservative movement. Writing in the Weekly Standard Andrew Ferguson observed, “the prize amounts to a parody of what liberals say conservatives always want to do anyway —in tax cuts, for example: boost the circumstances of people whose circumstances don’t need boosting, pass lots of money to people who already have lots of money.” The cofounder of Connerly’s nonprofits, National Review president Thomas Rhodes, happens to sit on the board of the Bradley Foundation.

The political fight against affirmative action is supposed to be a battle for meritocracy, for a color-blind society rather than a color-obsessed one, for standards and accomplishment over the prerogatives of racial privilege. But with all the favor and blandishments of the conservative movement at his disposal, Ward Connerly has little to show for his efforts. He has paid himself a handsome salary to manage payments to his own firm. He receives every reward and honor conservatives can bestow, yet there is just as much affirmative action as when he started his political career.

Why is he the Right’s man for the job? 

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