McCain hit by civil rights groups

John McCain's decision to support a proposed ballot initiative in Arizona that would ban affirmative action in local and state governments might prove his conservative bona fides in some quarters.

But it is not winning him any friends in the civil rights community, which notes that he opposed a similar resolution in 1998 as "divisive."

"His reversal must surely be seen as pandering 'flip-flop' to the extreme right wing of his base," Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said in a statement issued today. "Quotas are already illegal under federal law, and the initiative that Senator McCain now supports is far more destructive than his false assertion implies.

"We liked Senator McCain better when he used to allow the facts to determine his positions rather than playing on distortions and fears achieve a desired political outcome,” Henderson continued.

McCain mended fences with civil rights groups on another issue in 2000, when he acknowledged he had been wrong to oppose a federal holiday for Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday.

This April, he went to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where King was assassinated 40 years earlier, and told the assembled crowd: "I was wrong. I was wrong. We can all be a little late sometimes in doing the right thing, and Dr. King understood this about his fellow Americans."