BOOK REVIEW Beyond Affirmative Action After Proposition 209, California campuses maintain diversity without racial set-asides.

Mr. Price contends that such a shift is needed both to respond to court rulings that have limited racial set-asides and to build political support.

"The Republican Party cannot be the enemy of affirmative action, racial set-asides and racial quotas and yet look the other way on racial gerrymandering," Mr. Blum said.

In the letting of state contracts, an aspect of the proposal that has not generated the same emotional response, Mr. Bush's plan eliminates racial set-asides.

Here's a suggestion: Keep the standards for admissions high and remove all racial set-asides.

Under last year's ruling against racial set-asides for construction in Richmond, Va., cities and states would have a hard time justifying such special treatment.

With their infernal racial set-asides, racial quotas, and race norming, liberals share many of the Klan's premises.

"The most diverse in history," Mr. Bush said of the incoming freshmen, who are the first students to be admitted without affirmative action mandates since racial set-asides were put in place in Florida in 1978.

Bennett suggests focusing on such "targets of opportunity" as missile defense and opposition to racial set-asides and partial-birth abortion.

Laws, he said, "that assign voters to particular districts on the basis of their race, unlike racial set-asides, do not appear to subject members of any racial group to unequal treatment vis-a-vis any other."