ATLANTA'S SET-ASIDE PROGRAM IS HARD TO DEFEND

At City Hall in Atlanta, the rash and combative African-American mayor, Bill Campbell, is unintentionally conducting a case study in how to destroy support for an affirmative action program.

Denouncing critics of the city's set-aside program as racists and comparing them to the Ku Klux Klan, using battlefield rhetoric and employing in-your-face tactics, Campobell is likely to assure the demise of the program he is trying to save.

Going down to defeat after defeat in referenda and courtrooms around the country, affirmative action hardly needs friends like Campbell and his compatriots. Imagine what would have happened if the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had spoken enthusiastically of hating his opponents, as a Campbell ally did at a recent rally. Would the nation have moved so quickly to redress the wrongs of its racist past?

Indeed, if Campbell had kept the city's set-aside program free of the taint of corruption and cronyism, he might be better prepared to face a threatened court challenge. But Atlanta's set-aside program -- before and during Campbell's tenure -- has been plagued by mismanagement and corruption, including contracts awarded to sham minority owners, who then turn any actual work over to established white businesses; bids awarded to politically connected but incompetent bidders who cannot perform the work; and bids awarded to wealthy black business owners who should no longer need affirmative action.

That carelessness and cronyism have left Atlanta's set-aside program, which requires that a percentage of all city contracts go to minority- or female-owned businesses, ripe for a challenge from the Atlanta-based Southeastern Legal Foundation, a conservative public-interest law firm. The foundation promises to file suit against the program unless Campbell voluntarily dismantles it; similar suits around the country have a formidable, if disturbing, success rate.

The principle of affirmative action remains important: Americans of color have suffered generations of blatant racism, the legacy of which has been less-than-equal economic and educational opportunities. That discrimination, while perhaps more subtle now, remains healthy and vigorous. (If you don't believe it, I'll show you my mail.) If America is ever to live up to its ideals of fairness and equality, minority citizens need boosts in corporate hiring and promotions, in entrepreneurship and in college admissions.

If Campbell wanted to win support for that idea, he might have pledged to reform the way he runs Atlanta's set-aside program. He has sometimes used it to benefit his political allies rather than the start-up business owners the program is supposed to help. He has also employed a staff without the credentials to sort out sham business owners and incompetents.

The mayor and his allies could have laid out a rational, logical defense of affirmative action programs. For example, they could have cited statistics showing that black and brown business owners still face discrimination in lending. A decade ago, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution won a Pulitzer Prize for a series demonstrating that black Atlantans with high incomes and good credit ratings had difficulty getting mortgages. The same undoubtedly applies to business loans.

Campbell might have pointed out that local government set-asides exist, in part, to make up for history and traditions that exclude most entrepreneurs of color, as well as women, from the country-club and golf-course contacts that grease the wheels of American business. He might also have promised that from now on, established entrepreneurs of color would be graduated from affirmative action programs to make room for newcomers.

Instead, Campbell has settled on the dumbest political PR strategy since Birmingham, Ala., sheriff Bull Connor set dogs and fire hoses on civil rights demonstrators. If Atlanta's set-aside program is demolished, it will be with the assistance of its supporters.