On the Road to Latino Votes

President Bush threw a coming-out party last week for Hector V. Barreto Jr., the Los Angeles businessman named to head the Small Business Administration. He also gave Barreto a gift that should make his job easier, even while it angers the Republican Party’s right wing.

The party was in Albuquerque, N.M., where the president interrupted a Texas vacation to join his new SBA head at the dedication of a job-training center operated by that city’s Hispano Chamber of Commerce. But the gift was delivered in Washington, where the Justice Department filed a brief defending affirmative action in a Supreme Court case involving a Latino-owned business.

The complex case, Adarand vs. Mineta, grew out of a lawsuit filed a decade ago in Colorado. White-owned Adarand Constructors Inc. sued after losing a federal highway contract to Gonzales Construction Co. Adarand bid lower, but Gonzales got the job because it was a “disadvantaged business enterprise” under a Department of Transportation contract set-aside for minority-owned businesses.

In 1995, the Supreme Court court ruled 5-4 that the DOT’s definition of a disadvantaged business was too broad and ordered lower courts to rule on the program’s legality after it was revised. The Clinton administration modified the program, and a Denver court approved the changes. But amid all this legal to-and-fro, Adarand has become a cause celebre to legal thinkers on the political right, who see it as a possible landmark in their campaign to dismantle affirmative action. So Adarand has appealed to the Supreme Court again. And the fact the high court agreed to hear the case has legal experts speculating that some justices may be ready to outlaw the use of race and gender in awarding government contracts.

But many of those experts also assumed that the right-wing legal groups representing Adarand would have new and potent allies in Bush’s Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and U.S. Solicitor Gen. Theodore Olson, who argues the Bush administration’s position in cases before the Supreme Court. The brief Olson filed with the high court on Aug. 10 defending the DOT contract program was a surprise. But it shouldn’t have been: Once more, Bush and his top political advisor, Karl Rove, have found a way to reach out to Latino voters, much to the chagrin of the Republican right.

Bush has done the same thing on immigration, ignoring nativists in the GOP to try to negotiate a guest-worker program with Mexico and floating the idea of a new amnesty for illegal immigrants with roots in the United States. Conservatives are still in a tizzy over these proposals, warning that an amnesty will just create pro-Democrat voters.

This latest gesture on behalf of Latino-owned businesses makes more sense. According to Hispanic Business magazine, there are 20,000 minority-owned businesses classified as disadvantaged under the DOT program at issue in Adarand. It’s a safe bet most are owned by Latinos, blacks or women who tend to vote for the GOP.

And here’s another number worth remembering: Bush lost New Mexico to Al Gore by a mere 366 votes. So it is no surprise that Bush and Barreto chose Albuquerque to kick off the public relations campaign to make SBA better known to minority business owners. That city’s new Barelas Job Opportunity Center will offer the kind of programs that Democrats usually fund but will also include an SBA program to provide training and technical support for small business owners and would-be entrepreneurs. In a speech dedicating the center, Bush praised small business people as “the backbone of our economic system” and defended “affirmative access” programs that give minority businesses a better shot at government contracts. Which sounds a lot like the controversial DOT program at issue in the Adarand case.

In fact, Bush is using a Republican strategy that dates back to Richard Nixon, who pushed “black capitalism” as the GOP alternative to the Democrats’ War on Poverty. And even if the Supreme Court throws out affirmative action for minority business people in the Adarand case, Bush can say he defended the concept. Meantime, Barreto will be helping to create more Latino-owned businesses.

The Adarand case, which started as a fight over highway money, has become a tool for Bush to smooth his own road to reelection in 2004.