How Should Republicans Spell Landslide? W-h-i-g.

Some 30 years ago, Horace Busby, an advisor to and speechwriter for Lyndon Johnson, famously coined the phrase “electoral lock” arguing that the Republican party would win contests for the White House for decades to come.  Busby, a good man of progressive virtue, had no clue about how the HispanicLatino population one day would upset the Electoral College applecart.

The Republican electoral lock on the White House that Busby predicted lasted a little more than one decade (1980-1992) and had the Supreme Court not taken away Al Gore’s win in Florida, the country might have elected a Democrat as President for 20 years running.  And now the nation would be on the verge of adding four years to that string if the polls are right that President Obama is more than edging towards re-election.  The polls, this week at least,  indicate Obama nearing landslide territory.

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Demographic Implosion

Years ago, supporters of George W. Bush’s push for immigration reform correctly predicted in public that falling birth rates in Mexico and a growing Mexican economy would reduce and stabilize historic immigration to the United States from its southern neighbor.  Bush wanted to disarm critics skeptical of anything that smelled of an amnesty that would add fuel to the demographic change that so many in his party fear.  The ploy did not work.  Immigration reform went down in flames.

Now comes evidence that the life span of the lower-income non-HispanicLatino white population without high school diplomas is falling precipitously – a development that will amplify and accelerate the growth of the HispanicLatino population and its importance to the economy.  Most of this blog draws heavily and directly from a story in The New York Times by Sabrina Tavernise two weeks ago that details in part how the demographic transformation that alarms so many in the country will continue.

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The Supreme Court: Cracking Open the Future

The presidential campaign soon will reach its fever pitch.  October is its apogee.  Amid the din and noise and building craziness of the next five weeks, the Supreme Court holds its opening conference today, ahead of the full term that convenes next Monday.  The Court fittingly will begin its work ahead of the voters’ judgment on Nov. 6 –appropriate because its impending term could overshadow the presidential election of 2012 in the long run of history.

I wonder if the Justices in their cloistered reflections ever consider the fate of their families, their grandchildren in particular.  Historians one day almost certainly could look back and see this Court’s term as the decisive moment when the United States positioned itself for another great century or began to drift inexorably into irrelevancy if not periods of outright civil strife.  In the next few months, the Court will consider critical cases that will determine how the country manages changes in its new demography that will bump up against the basic civil rights of its citizens and of destiny itself.

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Obama on Univision: Pushing Past 70-Percent Support?

Posted on evening of Sept. 20 for publication Sept. 21.

Campaign strategists on both sides of the Democratic-Republican divide fret daily about how big the HispanicLatino vote might be and how high a margin among HispanicLatinos President Barack Obama will rack up in November.  Most polls have him attracting 65 percent of the HispanicLatino vote and some surveys have him bumping 70 percent.  Anything more than 70 percent will trigger an electoral vote rout.

Obama did little to hurt himself when he confronted Jorge Ramos and María Elena Salinas last night on Univision the day after Mitt Romney faced the same journalistic duo.  Obama went to Miami knowing he had to face tough questions from Ramos who is unyielding in his criticism of the administration’s failure to bring about immigration reform – a public commitment made on national television by the Democratic nominee in 2008.  And, the same network reminds us often, Obama’s administration has deported more immigrants than any other in history.  Indeed, Salinas followed up with a question that made the very point.

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Romney on Univision: Unfortunate Distortion

The forum that Jorge Ramos and María Elena Salinas of Univision hosted last night in Miami featuring Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was one of those non-events that should have been more than what it became.  The proposition that Romney had something meaningful to say to a national HispanicLatino population – that the polls suggest has made up its mind in this election, almost to the point of steadfastness – never reached professional seriousness.  Anyone viewing the event might have thought that Romney has hidden but burning support in HispanicLatino precincts across an entire nation when in fact it seemed the audience for last night’s peculiar program came from one precinct off old Southwest 8th Street in Miami.  And Miami does not the national HispanicLatino population make — by a long shot.

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HispanicLatino Political Operatives: The Need to be Decisive

Posted on Sunday, Sept. 16, for publication Sept. 17.

If HispanicLatinos active in the presidential campaigns wait until the morning after the election to make their voices heard about the direction of a new Obama or Romney administration, they will have waited too long.  Obama second-term planning groups and Romney transition teams already are meeting and formulating policy for the next four years – and beyond.  The time is now – before the first vote is cast and long before big-wallet donors waltz into Washington for post-election festivities – for HispanicLatinos to make their concerns known.

Democratic HispanicLatino leaders are more likely than their Republican counterparts to try to author a set of philosophical principles from which should flow demands that are community-minded and community-based.  The just-concluded conventions demonstrated that Democrats are more about the pluribus than the unum.  Republican HispanicLatinos, though, would do well to rethink their traditional laissez-faire approach.

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Now, the General Election: HispanicLatinos, Assets to Victory

After their innumerable convention speeches, backslapping meetings and highly produced self-congratulatory videos in Charlotte and Tampa, the two political parties now confront the challenge of developing a strategy to attract and persuade Hispanic and Latinos to vote for either President Obama’s reelection or Mitt Romney’s candidacy.  The polls are testing sorely the conviction of political strategists that a growing number of HispanicLatinos are swing voters whose decisions presumably would make a real difference in the election. 
 

Why Obama

Little at the Republican convention in Tampa jolted the 70 percent or so of Hispanics and Latinos – whom the polls suggest are already in President Obama’s corner – to rethink their support for his re-election.  I still do not know what henna is exactly even after I looked it up on the internet.  I thought I overheard a woman at a restaurant in Charlotte say that “Romney makes me want to rip the hens out of my hair.”  A search on Yahoo for ‘hens’ and ‘hair’ later got me to henna.  Ripping either from your head sounds dreadful – perhaps bad enough for even traditional Republican-voting Cubans to reconsider their presumed vote for Mitt Romney.  If the question does linger for more than a passing moment in any HispanicLatino mind, it can be answered with another question: Why HispanicLatinos?

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Hillary and HispanicLatinos in 2016

The just-past national conventions dropped a number of stones into the political pond ahead of 2016.  The splash from each stone might be dismissed as early speculation but in politics speculation mists the leaves of future candidacies.  From each splash-point already radiates the ripples that will form the ebb and flow of the currents leading to the next series of election cycles.

Some of the ripples emanating from Charlotte and Tampa were larger than others.  Some will have staying power but most will run out of energy over time, dreams lost in the backwaters of unviability.  Other currents, perhaps waves, might form as human events trigger as yet unseen political storms.  But whatever crests come at whatever time, they will have to lap up against the immediate reality of a woman named Hillary Clinton.

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The Conventions: A Watershed

Posted on Thursday evening for Friday, Sept. 7, 2012.

I wrote late last year that I sensed that the HispanicLatino finally was turning the corner to become part of the national consciousness.  The geographic concentration of the vast majority – about 75 percent – of the HispanicLatino population in eight states historically worked against its inclusion in the normal affairs of the nation.  For that and other reasons, HispanicLatinos for decades have been absent from national commercials, television news sets and the decision-making processes of government, organizations large and small and corporations of any size and their boardrooms.  And from opportunity itself.  It is as if a group of individuals in the millions whose forefathers arrived in all of the Americas more than a century before Jamestown did not exist for much of the nation.  The misplaced notion that most HispanicLatinos conducted their daily lives in Spanish abetted their lack of consideration in the normal, day-to-day thinking of managers, bureaucrats, business owners and corporate planners.

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