Colorado hands English immersion backer his first loss

That's the skeleton of the strategy behind English Plus, the group formed to fight a ballot initiative requiring yearlong English immersion programs for students who speak little English.

As Election Day drew to a close, the strategy against Amendment 31 had scored a surprise victory across Colorado. It's a feat unheard of in states where similar ballot measures have gone before voters.

In California in 1998, voters approved an English immersion ballot measure by 61 percent. In Arizona in 2000, a similar initiative won with 63 percent of the vote.

And in Massachusetts, voters in this election approved a similar measure by a margin of 2-to-1.

But Colorado voters handed the first loss to Ron Unz, the Silicon Valley multimillionaire who has bankrolled the English immersion campaigns across the country.

"I would imagine he learned something here in Colorado," said John Britz of Welchert & Britz, political consultants based in LoDo.

"The opponents in Colorado did pretty much exactly what the opponents did in Massachusetts, and in California and in Arizona," he said. "The only difference was the massive amount of advertising on the 'No' side, 99 percent funded by a billionaire heiress named Pat Stryker."

In February, 68 percent of voters favored Amendment 31, according to a Rocky Mountain News/News4 poll.

When Unz visited Colorado in the spring and held news conferences on the Capitol steps, they still did nothing. They particularly did not, to the chagrin of local Hispanic activists, talk about the initiative in terms of ethnicity or culture.

"Our polling shows no sensitivity to the Latino culture in Colorado," Britz said simply.

Welchert said the two were hauled into a meeting of local activists who wanted to espouse Hispanic pride.

Their response? "If this is about being Mexican, for Mexicans, about Mexicans, it's gone," he told them. "It's got to be about Coloradans."

The two also opted not to talk about the major target of the initiative - bilingual education. That's the practice of using a child's native language to assist in teaching English.

Unz and his Colorado chairwoman, Rita Montero, frequently threw out the term in derogatory fashion.

"Nobody understands what it is," he said, motioning to Welchert in a recent interview. "We didn't."

They did make a key decision in those early months. As members of English Plus battled the ballot language to the state Supreme Court, Britz urged them to ease up.

It was clear the court was going to allow the measure on the ballot, he said, and he wanted the most egregious language left in.

That included the penalties against teachers who violated the amendment, which later became a featured issue in the "No on 31" campaign.

On July 28, Britz attended what may have been the most important meeting of the No campaign. He drove to Fort Collins to see Stryker, a medical equipment heiress worth an estimated $960 million.

Stryker, who describes herself as "just a mom in a minivan," had a big stake in what was becoming an increasingly controversial campaign:

Her youngest daughter attends Harris Bilingual School, where native English and native Spanish speakers help teach each other their languages.

"Can you guarantee me a victory for $3 million?" Britz remembers her asking. He didn't promise a win, he said, yet told her, "We will break the code; we will find a message to defeat 31."

But Welchert and Britz didn't want Unz or Montero to know about the money. Their strategy was to wait until late in the campaign to announce the gift, hoping to take the other side by surprise.

Meanwhile, Unz was loaning the pro-31 campaign more than $300,000 interest free.

"We decided to wait until Oct. 1," Welchert said, "and played poor, poor, pitiful me."

The donation was announced two months later, the day before a radio ad blitz began. Again, Welchert and Britz shrugged off advice. Many in English Plus, made up largely of educators and parents, wanted "happy ads" featuring classroom shots.

Instead, the TV spots are dark, showing still pictures of sad-looking children while an announcer ominously lists the faults in Amendment 31. In one, the announcer states children who speak little English, largely Hispanic students, would disrupt the education of "your children" - presumably the majority white families of Colorado.

Media critics called the spots "ugly" and said they preyed on the fears of white voters.

By the first week of October, another Rocky Mountain News/News4 poll showed support for Amendment 31 had plummeted by 20 points to just 48 percent.

Britz agreed to work on the No on 31 campaign on impulse, back in 1998. Then, only California had heard of Ron Unz's plan to end bilingual education.

A Hispanic leader asked Britz why he only came to see her when he wanted Hispanic support on a political issue.

"I said, if (California's) Proposition 227 ever comes to Colorado, I'll be there," he said. "We kept our word."

It wasn't easy. The two said the lure of a simple message - "teach children English" - was tough to counter.

"We thought," Britz said, glancing at Welchert, "I'm going to be honest here, we thought, 'We don't have a chance in hell.' "

Extensive polling told them people didn't understand bilingual education, for example, so they dropped it.

An "a-ha" moment came in September, Britz said. They were interviewing what they considered a typical suburban voter - female, Republican, a parent. The woman was adamant in her support of 31.

Then Britz said her own children would be affected. That her child's teacher might be distracted by having to work with students who know little English.

"She turned," he said. "She said, 'They're going to put them in my kid's class?' "

That moment led to what would become a key slogan for No on 31 - the controversial "Chaos in the Classroom" theme hammered home in their TV ads.

As for the merits of the campaign and the criticism it has drawn, the two say that's politics. Welchert recalls that early meeting with Hispanic leaders.

Victory by cleverness. This will come up again in Colorado, and it will go the other way.

Too bad Simon in California wasn't more clever. A lot of us were (wishfully) thinking he was waiting for an October sujrprise, when his campaign would come out of hibernation, he'd spend his own money, and surprise the dems.

Instead, no surprise, whatsoever.

Ironically Colorado also passed a "campaign finance reform" ballot initiative that ostenibly is to "get big money out of politics." I wonder how many of the people who voted no on 31 did so because of the privately funded multimillion dollar advertising blitz against the initiative - at the same time they voted yes on the CFR one "to get money out of politics." Same ol' same ol'.

The ads shown here in Colorado were ominous sounding and looking--stills of sad little child faces--not a brown one among them. Threats of teachers being jailed for five years. A former Democrat governor, Dick Lamm, came out for 31 and then the Stryker group came up with ads to attack him saying he was a failed politician of the past. I think our current governor Bill Owens (R) was against 31--he does overtime to suck up to the Mexicans. I voted for Owens but at times he can be a lukewarm Republican. We now have a Republican majority state legislature so I'm wondering if some of these things we couldn't get passed through amendments can now be passed by them. Vouchers and a concealed carry law would be a couple of other good ones.

This might be "victory by cleverness", but what it really shows is the effectiveness of negative campaigning in the political world. Everyone complains about negative advertising - but they keep doing it because IT WORKS.

On one of the CSPAN roundtables after the election, one consultant explained it this way. Going negative is easier than going positive. Humans are psychologically wired to understand something negative much faster than something positive.

There are instinctive survival reasons for it, but look at a modern world example. You may be told one time that a certain restaurant is a good place to eat, but you would need to be told that a few times by different people before you would even remember the name of the restaurant. And then be told a few more times before you would go try it yourself. However, hear one story about rats in some restaurant’s kitchen and not only will you never go, but you will probably tell 15 other people not to go either.

Of course in modern politics, the RATS are probably liars.

Like the widow Heinz, the widow Stryker now funds innumerable screwball causes including a recent $6 million to found the "Bohemian Foundation". Its funding will support those who replicate or seek to emulate the "creativity" that ostensibly characterized the early 20th Century. Ironically, someone forgot to tell la viuda Stryker that the fin de siecle movement of the late 19th century was followed by nearly two decades of artistic mishmash. Be prepared!

Western states in particular cannot avoid the language issue. Their citizens will have to decide whether or not they want a Palestinian-style "state-within-a-state" defined by several characteristics: non-English-speaking, scofflaw on things ranging from fake ID to evading taxes by "off-the-books" work to uninsured driving, sub-underclass below poorest local blacks. It will be much like what the PLO had in southern Lebanon in the late 1970s to early 80s - marginally employable even in the best of times, largely criminally-supported.

Get the sticker!

Their citizens will have to decide whether or not they want a Palestinian-style "state-within-a-state" defined by several characteristics: non-English-speaking, scofflaw on things ranging from fake ID to evading taxes by "off-the-books" work to uninsured driving, sub-underclass below poorest local blacks.

Worth repeating, and a bump.

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