Becoming part of the 80-percent

Hillary Clinton is moving to get more than 80 percent of the Hispanic/Latino vote in November, a measure not seen in half a century.  Perhaps Lyndon B. Johnson received as much or more in his lopsided win in 1964.  In this day and age, support of that kind among Hispanic/Latinos can trigger a landslide.

Clinton appears to be winning majorities across the entire Hispanic/Latino population.  The latest defection is Carlos Gutiérrez, the Cuban-born Secretary of Commerce in the administration of George W. Bush.

The highly respected Gutiérrez sees his vote for Clinton in November as a vote for free and open trade, and he has voiced grave concerns about Donald Trump’s hateful anti-immigrant rhetoric.  To some extent, Gutiérrez perhaps now sees part of what many Hispanic/Latinos for years have seen in Clinton.

For me — for whom cynicism comes easily from my newsroom years — I remember the day I became part of the 80 percent.  My time as a journalist had passed when the Monica Lewinsky scandal involving Bill Clinton blew across the front pages of the nation’s newspapers and millions of television screens with the force of a hurricane.  And Hillary, of course, was in the middle of the storm.

My first time to lay eyes on her was at the beginning of the tempest.  She was the featured speaker at the annual dinner of the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts in 1998 at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington.  The swirling scandal was engulfing the White House five blocks away, with talk of the President’s imminent resignation cascading across town.  Inside the Mayflower, the expectation built among the small, intimate crowd as the time neared for her to appear.

Many in the room were Clinton political appointees, and their tense, worried expressions collapsed into chagrin when someone at the table interjected the specter of impeachment. The person seated next to me suggested Clinton should have called in sick. Another speculated she would look a mess.  Someone referenced The Taming of the Shrew.  Soon enough, the number of Secret Service agents deployed grew, flooding the room.  Expectation muffled the chatter and noise.  Gossiping mouths stopped in mid-sentence; wide, inquiring eyes said everything.

And then there she suddenly was.

She was resplendent in a blue dress.  Her hair, perfect.  Her smile wide.  She did not hold her head high so as to avoid. Rather, she was making direct visual contact with people and waving at friends she recognized.  She had entered the arena.

Audiences by tradition stand by rote when the President’s wife makes an entrance. But this crowd rose slowly, near-paralyzed at what it saw:  A woman not cowed; an individual with self-respect intact; a professional driving a stake into the ground to claim it; a winner in command.  Her glamour radiated her courage into the crowd.  The crowd embraced her in ever-growing applause.  Her countenance struck me, and I could only wonder what was coming next.

What came next was a long, protracted dinner that must have been excruciating for her.  With hundreds of eyes on her, Clinton carried on conversations with others at the head table as if they were talking about Kramer’s latest antics on Seinfeld.  At long last, the actor Jimmy Smits introduced her, and it was her turn to speak in a room at near-silence.  The waiters and waitresses had joined their also-entranced supervisors, all conjoined in the drama.

She started by joking about the many beautiful people in the room, cleverly underscoring her own bedazzling aura.  Then, after the usual acknowledgement of political potentates and luminaries large and small, she plunged into a speech that without any teleprompter or notes ranks as one of the best speeches I have ever heard about the state of the Hispanic/Latino community and its promise.  She was nothing short of brilliant.

She talked about her time growing up and coming to understand the complex history of the Hispanic/Latino in this country.  The statistics and figures and facts she drew from her head were as normal as the breaths she drew from within.  More important, she provided context.  She knew where everyone in the room fit in the current and future story of the country.

In an ever-confident voice, she talked about registering voters in South Texas Hispanic/Latino precincts in 1972.  She talked about children and the role of women, of Hispanic/Latino veterans, the need for all to commit to civil rights and social progress.  Her demeanor demanded respect.  She mesmerized the crowd.  And she caught me off guard.

I was not expecting anything like what I saw that night.  I wish I could swear that at the time I entertained the thought that she, not Bill, should be President.  I did not.  I was too in shock to see it.  But I see it now.

Since then, she has given hundreds of speeches to Hispanic/Latino audiences throughout the country.  When you are in the marketplace for as long as she, your brand gets around, and if your brand is one of competence, intelligence, courage, compassion and loyalty, the brand sticks.  And as every marketer in this country knows, Hispanic/Latinos are brand-loyal if anything.

What you see is what you get with Hillary Clinton.  She is neither shrew nor saint.  But compared to Donald Trump, she is eminently presidential.  Has been for years.

Since her youth, Hillary Clinton has given to the Hispanic/Latino community.  She has invested real, hard work on behalf of Hispanic/Latino children, so much of the nation’s future.  Her soul gives others hope.  Now a rate of return awaits her dedication and commitment.

An 80-percent-plus rate of return is about right.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

An American Vote Lost

It was one of those coincidences that has happened to me often in life.  Not but two days after Khizr Khan, with his wife, Ghazala, standing by his side in stoic support, delivered his jaw-dropping defense of the Constitution at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, I boarded the Southwest flight home to Austin via Dallas.

I had noticed what seemed to me was an Indian family in the waiting area.  They easily could have been Pakistani like Mr. Khan.  I took my aisle seat and knew the middle seat would not remain empty.  Indeed, while looking out the window for that unseen cloud formation that I always fear is going to force a screw out of the wing and send us plummeting to earth, a young man took the window seat.  And not long after him came another young man who I came to know by his nickname, Nish.  He was part of the family waiting to board in the last group.  He took the middle seat.

I soon learned that Nish, his parents and a brother after landing in Dallas were driving to Oklahoma City for a wedding, well, two weddings, really: the first a Christian ceremony and then another of the same couple he said would be in Hindu.  I immediately warned him to get on Interstate 35 quickly to try to avoid the construction mess near Denton, 30 miles north, where my sister lives, lest they add an hour or two to their trip.

With the plane rising into the clouds, I also learned that this young man was hell-bent on a military career, not unlike Captain Humayun Khan, who had died a hero in Iraq in 2004 helping defend his fellow soldiers and whose valiant legacy as embodied by his father at the convention might have been the turning point of the 2016 presidential race.  I asked Nish if he had watched the Khan speech.  He said yes, and the conversation, of course, quickly careened into all things Trump.

I was intrigued by Nish, who said he works as a paralegal at a law firm in northern Virginia while working to figure out a way to get into the Army’s officer training program.  His youthful earnestness and ambition were endearing, and so knowing something of how these things can be short-circuited, I began to give him some advice about how he might be able to jump-start the process of gaining entry into the military at the officer-training level.  He grew greatly enthused.

As we talked, he confirmed he was Republican at heart but that Trump was beyond the pale.  I got the sense he could easily vote for a Ryan-Rubio ticket in 2020.

I found his enthusiasm ennobling but also troubling.  I usually have not counseled young men or women to pursue careers that might cost them their lives.  But one cannot deny a patriot his calling whatever his political persuasion or his religion, something Trump, who would purport to be Nish’s commander-in-chief, does not.

Nish’s parents were born in India; Nish and his siblings here.  But Nish like so many products of immigrant parents knows instinctively that there is no escaping being labelled an immigrant in a land in which minorities are singled out for attack – even minorities who were here before the founding of the country.

Republicans like Trump and the know-nothing wing of his party do not realize that attacking minorities re-enforces the ethnic, religious and cultural constructs that support their different roots and identities.  Attacks on minorities even overcome sentiments within immigrant groups, for no one should doubt the sometimes real animosity that exists between Indians and Pakistanis.  In the fight against Trump, there is no difference among minorities.  Ask Cuban Americans who year after year increasingly are joining every other Hispanic/Latino group coalescing against recalcitrant Republicans.

Public opinion surveys reveal that an incredibly high number of Americans — as many as 40 percent! — believe most Hispanic/Latinos in the United States are immigrants – and ‘illegal immigrants’ at that.

In today’s toxic environment, Nish will remain ever the son of immigrants – even were he, God forbid, to perish somewhere like Capt. Kahn did for his country.

Were that horrible fate to await him, he with grim coincidence would join the thousands of Hispanic/Latino military service men and women who sacrificed their lives for a country that produces the Trumps of the world.

All of these thoughts were going through my mind as I listened to Nish soberly yet excitedly talk about his future.  What an incredible young man.  Trump does not know what he is losing.

But in Trump losing the American votes cast by Nish and millions more like him, America gains and the legacy of Capt. Khan and thousands of Hispanic/Latinos heroes vouchsafed.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

As Important as the Khans

Reports that Donald Trump almost matched Hillary Clinton in raising money for the month of August for his campaign should alarm everyone.  In the end, the news could overshadow the events leading up to and after the Republican and Democratic national nominating conventions.

The money Trump raised in July, about $82 million, came mostly from small donors.  If Trump can harness the full potential of his base, he could turn around a race he is currently losing.  If it is about the money, Hispanic/Latinos need to take note.

Trump has made religion and the color of one’s skin a cornerstone of his campaign though he might deny it.  He is close enough to the White House for Hispanic/Latinos to make a trip to the credit union if necessary.  After all, as I have said before, this election is an existential matter.  It was and is for the parents of Capt. Humayun Khan.

Trump as President is an immediate, direct threat to the existence of many in our community.  More so, he endangers the existence of the republic and our democratic form of government that in the end could endanger the very existence of humankind itself were he to get his hands on the handles and gears of war or delay us in making hard decisions about climate change.

Forget the rising oceans for now.  It should be enough for Hispanic/Latino parents to worry about their sons and daughters once again being shipped out to war to return mangled or killed or their skins and minds damaged in more ways than one.

It should be enough for Hispanic/Latinos — especially veterans who have voted Republican — to be repelled by someone who mocked a Gold Star mother; got his hands on a Purple Heart even though he got five deferments from serving in Vietnam; denigrated prisoners of war; and called a general who served all of his life in the military a failed person.

Imagine Donald Trump meeting flag-draped coffins at Dover.  Of what possible comfort could he be to a family in tears, this man for whom empathy is so distant?  Imagine the rage for any war-deaths that result from the decisions of a President who knows nothing about foreign policy but can command troops into battle.  How long before a constitutional crisis would ensue?

Against that backdrop and in tandem with our lower voter and electoral participation rates, Hispanic/Latinos have never contributed in any significant way to political campaigns.  Most Hispanic/Latino households do not have $25 lying around to give to anyone, much less a presidential campaign.  Worse still, high-net-worth Hispanic/Latinos have not been especially supportive either.

It is time for everybody to give.  This race could turn.

Bernie Sanders raised tens of millions of dollars in small sums from millions of contributors, many of whom never had given to a campaign.  Likewise, Trump’s campaign coffers could explode overnight despite his plunging poll numbers.  Hillary Clinton since her convention has opened up a significant lead over Trump in national surveys of registered and likely voters.  But that should neither excuse nor preclude us from giving.  Candidates with larger leads than Clinton’s today have lost.

As a group, Hispanic/Latinos cannot give much, but one million Hispanic/Latinos averaging $25 now and in September and October amounts to $75 million.  That is a lot of money but hardly enough.  Nevertheless, it will be money well spent, especially if the economy and the stock market were to tank were Trump to win.

Instead of giving up two hours of wages or so, many Hispanic/Latinos might have to give up their jobs — or much more.

Like the Khans, we have a lot of skin in the game.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

At Year’s End, the Enduring HispanicLatino Story

So the year ends and so does this blog on a regular three-times-per-week basis.  In the year that begins tomorrow, change and events will continue to rock our world.  Sadly, television too soon will break into our lives with news of another mass shooting.  The possibility that Israel will launch its already-planned attack on Iran’s nuclear installations becomes probability as each day passes.  By the end of the spring, the fragile economy might have been harassed back into recession by obdurate House Republicans whose political near-sightedness obscures the electoral razor atop their noses.  Still, despite the immediacy of these events, the most transcendental if not outright existential story for the country remains how HispanicLatinos develop socially, economically and politically.  And so from time to time a thought or two on the subject will appear in this same space.

The beginnings of the HispanicLatino storyline appear old already.  The drumbeat of demographic change has become monotony.  Yet the story is just beginning.  The objective of this blog, which began in the late summer of 2011, intended to advance foundational thought and reflection beyond the routine talking point of a Hispanic/Latino population remaking the country.  HispanicLatinos, after all, will prove more important than the next mass shooting or the combined competitive evolution in the near future of the Brazilian, Chinese, Indian and Mexican economies.  HispanicLatinos must succeed for America to survive.

The HispanicLatino phenomenon, though, is not easily captured.  It seems an apparition in slow-motion, though it is not.  Millions of HispanicLatinos are making millions of individual decisions in their lives daily – from diet to debt – that in the long run will be more important than whether the European Union survives.  The composite meaning of those decisions escapes the attention it deserves for many reasons, not the least of which is the slow, drawn-out understanding by HispanicLatinos of their importance to the country.  The failure of the majority of HispanicLatinos to not understand the historic proportion of their existence relative to the rest of the population threatens the country.  It is, in fact, a matter of national security.

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Amid the Chaos, the Fire of Promise

The end of the year holds promising signs for the country and HispanicLatinos – unless the Republican-held House of Representatives drives the global financial markets into turmoil and drags the economy back into recession and/or various foreign crises detonate.  If not for the fiscal cliff, the nation should be able to look forward to start moving again and leaving the blight of the disastrous Bush years behind – finally.  With wars ending (and hopefully none soon aborning) and the economy slowly eating away at the remaining distressed properties in an improving housing market, the country can begin to assess what it needs to do to fix itself for the years ahead.  Finding the will to rebuild its infrastructure, expand its domestic energy supply and strengthen its educational systems, the nation can deliver on its promise.

Though it takes courage to tackle the issues at hand, a strong economy can salvage much.  With the Bush Recession slowly lifting, the oft-misused phrase “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” comes closer to being true.  No country’s economy is better positioned to explode – and burn with a flourish.  Some of the country’s travails – a plague of obesity, students saddled with hundreds of billions of dollars in debt, a corrupted Washington, a broken immigration system, an increasingly farcical Supreme Court – are redeemable.  For that precise reason, HispanicLatinos need to step up their efforts to help resolve the challenges that vex the country.

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Forward? Perhaps. Perhaps Not.

It seems inconceivable.  Republican leaders in Washington and elsewhere do not get how dangerous the fire they are playing with is.  On almost every front – ranging from the disaster of the fiscal cliff to the submarining of President Obama’s governmental nominations to the prosecution of Benghazi to control of dangerous weaponry that kill kids to contraception to defending millionaires’ tax bills – Republicans are the ancien régime before its collapse in France.

It is one thing to not understand that the country no longer agrees with their positions on everything from taxes to gay rights to woman’s choice to climate change.  It is quite another thing to not realize that the country is ready to move on.  For Republicans, the latter is the more dangerous.  Since the country knows what it believes and thinks, when it decides to move on, it will and start leaving the past behind – and it has.

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When Small Should be About Something Bigger

The political bickering over the fiscal cliff looks small, and it is, in comparison to the larger demographic cliff the country already has sailed over with greater implications by far.  The fiscal crisis in Washington today is just the beginning of the deeper financial plunge ahead – unless the economy is transformed to create new jobs with better-than-average wages to increase revenues, that is to say, expand the middle class.  The Congress and the President can negotiate tax rates but they can do little about the birth, death and obesity rates changing the country and its fiscal foundations far more profoundly than current balances in the federal government’s accounts.

The largest of the combined financial problems, of course, are Medicare and Social Security – whose futures look problematic since the elderly are living longer, minorities are not earning enough to support these programs and the young are incurring obesity-related health-care costs scores of years before they should.  When looked at analytically, the precise importance of the HispanicLatino population to the nation’s future becomes glaring.  You do not have to know the actuarial and budgetary numbers to understand that the current fiscal abyss is part of the much larger problem.  You cannot expect a growing HispanicLatino population with low, static incomes to support the growing cost of everything.

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On Gay Marriage, HispanicLatinos Move Beyond Their History

The Supreme Court’s decision to rule on gay marriage after sidestepping the issue for so long constitutes another pivotal moment in the development of the new Hispanic/Latino social and political identity.  Like every group that evolves into the consciousness of being an American, HispanicLatinos become in various forms the products of efforts to attain the American ideal — which changes over time.  The American of today is not the American of the 1960’s and certainly not the American of a half century later.  Neither are HispanicLatinos.

How exactly HispanicLations evolve — bombarded as they have been by the sweeping forces that have transformed society during five decades of halycon change — is not yet fully evident. In many ways Hispanics or/and Latinos are still discovering themselves.  Many are sinewously insecure.  A population that goes by two different names cannot be anything but a collection of individuals still figuring things out — advancing the idea that HispanicLatinos are not like everyone else.  Indeed, they are not alike in many ways to each other.  But regarding gay marriage, it would appear that HispanicLatinos in toto have moved past their former thinking — and, thus, their former selves.

The more interesting question is why HispanicLatinos are not following the script they were once expected to read from and, more so, how does one address them in the third millennium of modern time and the third century of the American Republic?

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Dying Inside the Border Should Be Enough

The recent fire in a factory in Bangladesh that claimed the lives of114 garment workers generated international headlines and calls for reform of working conditions in similar plants in Asia.  Yet the ongoing human tragedy along the border with Mexico somehow escapes notice.  Scores of mostly Mexican immigrants are dying trying to get across along the frontier.  More than 120 bodies of human beings once treking through Brooks County alone in South Texas have been found this year.  They died of exposure to harsh conditions, rattlesnakes, dehydration and foul play.  The number of victims more likely reaches 500.  Authorities estimate that only one in four victims is ever found.  The chances of surviving are low.

This ghastly, sad human toll is only one of the imperatives that should be driving discussions about immigration in Washington.  At the moment, though, there does not seem to be a draft plan being discussed uniformly by all interested parties.  If a breakthrough is not soon achieved, it will be a long time before today’s propitious, post-election opportunity comes again.  And, if the latest jobs report from the Department of Labor released last week indicates an economy turning around, then it will become again the magnet dulled by the Bush recession and by the slow recovery afterward.  Would now not be the right time to put a system in place so that future immigrant waves are not chaotic repeats of the acrimony and suffering of the past three decades? 

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Building New Rhetoric Not New Walls

Two standard phrases crop up the instant that lawmakers, bureaucrats and the media begin to talk about immigration:  Resolve the problem and comprehensive immigration reform.  Talk in Washington about resolving any large-scale challenge is rather ambitious given the city’s ever-steepening warps in its already pockmarked ideological-rhetorical terrain.  Immigration is not an easy subject to talk about dispassionately, and so how Washington gains traction on immigration no doubt will be affected greatly by how lawmakers and the President manage the fast-approaching fiscal cliff.

The 2012 election, it is said, opened Republicans to accept the possibility that they might have to compromise on immigration, something that most of those commonly referred to as the Tea party adamantly oppose.  The corporate side of the Republican equation, however, is in favor of something being done, and corporate America has more of the power now.  It is not surprising that it also is driving a good part of the discussion of how to avert the cliff.

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