A cardinal rule in politics holds that you cannot beat somebody with nobody. Another rule becomes operational when the first rule is violated: Political animals roam the landscape in search of a political void. Another reality is that journalism is not dead – meaning no one should crown Newt Gingrich just yet.
Tag Archives: Florida
This Time is not an Act
So I was sitting with a HispanicLatino executive in the movie business in Los Angeles recently. The views expressed on the Obama Administration’s handling of immigration did not surprise me. The ferocity of the comments did. They were not part of the usual script. The conversation in Hollywood confirmed what I have been thinking for many months: That unlike other national elections in which immigration is important then tends to fall by the wayside, this one is shaping up differently.
From a number of perspectives, the power of the issue is real – real enough to tip what looks like a close election in the making. It is certainly real for a significant number of HispanicLatinos. How many? In a close election, 500 votes can be significant. Had only 1,000 more HispanicLatinos voted in Florida in 2000.
Angered by the Obama Administration’s failure to achieve immigration reform (read that some sort of legalization program) and by the number of deportations that by November of next year will number by far more than a million, many HispanicLatinos are ready to hold back on President Obama’s re-election. How many? As I said…
The predicament the Administration finds itself in is delicate, and any attempt to triangulate the issue Clinton-style is nearly impossible. No amount of pitting sides against each other while appearing to be the good guy is going to reduce the intensity of a substantial number of HispanicLatinos on the issue. How many? As I said…
A growing number of HispanicLatinos dogging Obama on immigration know that attacks on immigrants – whether legal or not – are attacks on them. As silent as the HispanicLatino population often appears, most are quite aware of the intimidation and harassment – and intentions – of racist bullies in Alabama and Arizona and elsewhere. Many HispanicLatinos would think that perhaps a black President and African Americans on his staff would understand.
Usually immigration has lost its currency as an issue by the time of the national election. But this time, a credible part of the HispanicLatino community is intent on keeping it alive in the closing stages of the general election that could force it to gain traction among non-HispanicLatinos. This is a worst-case scenario for Obama. Thus another attempt is being made – at least for show – by congressional Democrats to achieve “immigration reform” whose failure they hope to pin, deservedly, on Republican members. But all is not as it appears.
GOP strategists know full well that the demise of any reform legislation will only fuel the issue among HispanicLatinos. Losing on immigration for them might well mean winning in November – not in the classic sense of HispanicLatinos not voting for them but through enough HispanicLatinos not voting at all, while keeping the issue alive among anti-immigrant voters.
It seems the die is cast on immigration: Any semblance of “immigration reform” in Congress would enflame the issue from the start. On the other hand, the ongoing deportation of individuals and rising anti-HispanicLatino rhetoric have created a sensation within parts of the HispanicLatino community that portend more conflict with the administration than it realizes going into November.
Immigration and the election appear headed to the final act as thriller and nightmare – for a million and more reasons.
Blogs published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or invariably in between.
The Education of Marco Rubio
A friend of mine called to yell at me about Wednesday’s blog on Marco Rubio, whom, my friend supposed, I was defending. Well I was, in part.
We cannot live in a nation in which people bend to the fringe, in this case the same whacko-birthers who would disagree with Christ Himself if he appeared and told them President Obama is a citizen and is legally entitled to hold his office, having won the votes of more than 69 million of his fellow Americans in a fair election.
When does this nuttiness end? Now, because a senator’s parents were born outside the United States he cannot be Vice President or President? Nonsense. The other side of me, however, disdains the politician who wants to have it both ways – and Rubio clearly does. But there is much more to the story.
Note: the author served in the Clinton and Obama administrations.
In conveying the idea that he is part of the Cuban exile community that fled Castro when in fact his parents departed Cuba for purely economic reasons, Rubio spun the kind of narrative that candidates for high office require. But his pushing back is against The Washington Post, whose editors published the story that now threatens to ensnare Rubio in his own deception – and not the birthers.
In so doing, Rubio might not be worthy for higher office because he does not appreciate the larger truth: That the birther movement is the angry expression of the part of the nation’s population that is reacting to its new demography.
Rubio evidently does not realize that throughout the country too many of his fellow party members, like the birthers, are reacting to the nation’s changing demographics in the kind of negative, predictable ways that good leaders would decry – except that Rubio does not. Yet large segments of his party seek to diminish HispanicLatinos and their standing. For that same reason, any of the Republican presidential candidates who have not denounced the birthers are giving aid and comfort to anti-HispanicLatino sentiment. The promise of young and talented men and women like Rubio is that they might be able to help the nation transition into a new chapter in its life, not enable the crazies.
However the Post might confront one important HispanicLatino with lofty aspirations, it is not as damaging as the actions of Republican-controlled legislatures passing real laws that push minorities back into the 1950’s with regressive new laws on voter registration and identification that will restrict the very freedoms at the ballot box that Rubio’s parents did not enjoy in the days of the military dictatorship that preceded the Castro regime. Republicans in states they control are slashing education budgets and in the process myopically crippling America’s future.
When New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie spoke at the Reagan Library last month in California, I thought I saw its former governor, Pete Wilson, sitting on the front row. Wilson was the man who in his re-election bid in 1994 ushered in the modern-day reaction against HispanicLatinos that has now swept the nation. I wonder if Wilson was in the room at the same library in August when Marco Rubio gave his own coming-out address that, no, by no means, was meant to signal that, yes, yes, he is very interested in being on the national ticket.
Rubio is very much eligible to be Vice President of the United States. But he might not be qualified for the demands of our times. Nevertheless, his rights should be defended. Too bad he cannot bring himself to do the same for others.
Blogs published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or invariably in between.
From Castro to Rubio: The Attack of the Birthers
So what to make of Marco Rubio’s problem. First, to his defense: Some reason other than respect for the Constitution must motivate the attack of the birthers who believe he is not eligible to be vice president. They think that Rubio’s parents being born in Cuba disqualifies the Republican U.S. senator from Florida from being nominated by his party. But, of course, anyone born in the country can run for office – any office.
The trouble brewing for Rubio is not the whacko crowd. Yet even someone already being compared to Ronald Reagan can have an issue or two, and one of Rubio’s is that he misstated when his parents emigrated from Cuba. It seems that he has wanted people to believe that they were part of the exiles who fled communism and Fidel Castro, who took power in 1959 – except that his parents had left in 1956, when Fidel was in Mexico in exile reorganizing and trying to find support for his revolution.
The facts do not add up for Marco. But they do add up rather nicely for others, some of whom could easily be found in the Democratic White House or in the camps of some of his Republican rivals. They know that Rubio is running for vice president. Anyone who does not believe it does not know how this works, despite his denials as late as this week.
For the White House and his rivals, Marco Rubio would be a nightmare. For President Obama, the Republican spin machine is capable of convincing enough HispanicLatinos that the GOP better suits their interests – enough to tip Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Virginia and perhaps New Jersey but certainly Florida. For Rubio’s potential rivals for the vice presidency within the party, they already face GOP strategists who want to balance their party’s anti-immigration and anti-HispanicLatino rhetoric with a telegenic HispanicLatino on the ticket who is the son of immigrant parents.
The odds for Rubio’s selection most likely are tied to how the economy performs. If it, as expected, does not improve by late next year and Obama’s standing in the polls remains wretched, Rubio’s chances diminish. But if Obama is within striking distance and the GOP senses that Democrats have done a good job organizing the HispanicLatino infrastructure, Rubio will be on the ticket. It is an ironic paradox. The more effective Democrats are at organizing the HispanicLatino vote, the greater the chance that the GOP will choose Rubio.
So it is to the White House’s advantage to cripple Rubio now. Other parties interested in waylaying Rubio easily could be supporters of Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan. After lightning struck Sarah Palin in 2008, the list of would-be GOP vice presidential hopefuls could run into the dozens. Thus the fight is on, and Rubio’s current problems are significant – because he has significant opponents.
Rubio’s supporters have their work cut out for them and they should invest some time and energy to see if any former Presidents or Vice Presidents had parents born outside the United States.
After that, they can start to figure out how these many years later they can corral enough voters of Mexican descent who make up almost 65 percent of the HispanicLatino population to support his revolutionary candidacy.
Note: Next week, a more detailed essay on the 2012 election will be available on this website.
Blogs published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or invariably in between.
The Unreality of Being Lola
Everything seems unreal. The economy is stuck with no prospect of renewal. We are still in Afghanistan and Iraq. Greece, its economy about the size as that of Massachusetts, could set off the next financial contagion. Millions of additional homes and properties are still underwater and face foreclosure. Next door in Mexico 40,000 people have lost their lives since 2006 as the drug cartels metastasize. And no one talks about America’s impending decline. Unreal.
Adding to the unreality was the Republican presidential debate Tuesday in Las Vegas. Vegas. The city in the desert that should not be. The most unreal of cities. A desperate city of desperate people.
The debate undid the German expression Einmal ist keinmal (once is never), the idea being that if something happens only once it did not happen at all, for how is anyone to know anything about it relative to something similar. And so the debate was just like the last one, another example of our collective race to the bottom.
The idea that Herman Cain is really in contention to be the nominee of a party dominated by white southerners is unreal. That Willard Mitt Romney as governor of Massachusetts signed a version of the Obama health care plan and now disowns it is unreal, but not as unreal as the Republican rank and file willing to forget that fact in their single-minded blood-thirst to beat the President. That Newt Gingrich – who abandoned his sick wife in the hospital – can talk about the need for the nation to come together as a community to provide heath care is unreal. And any race in which two Texans are running for office after the spectacular fiasco that was George W. Bush is beyond any reality.
That Michelle Bachman is on stage is equally surreal. When Harry S Truman became president, the pundits bemoaned his ascension, thinking him unfit, barely educated and corrupt. Yet Truman was real, and he had studied Latin and Greek and was not the illiterate, uneducated phony the press expected him to be. That the country countenances someone like Bachman as a candidate for president shows the depths of the unreality that has gripped the country – and the superficiality.
Who are these people?
That is the question the Republican electorate seems to be asking itself. One survey suggests that almost 70 percent of Republican voters remain undecided about the current lineup. I have to wonder how many will still be undecided after the nominee is chosen.
The GOP debate on Tuesday started at the same time as the telenovela on Telemundo that chronicles the life of the tragic Lola Volcán. Over-the-top soap operas on Univision and Telemundo are easy ways to re-enforce one’s Spanish. Dashing dudes and curvacious women do much to conjugate. Verbs, too. Thinking that the candidates’ show on CNN was more important and real than Lola’s latest travails, I started watching the debate. Lola was hands down more real. And so I escaped into that reality, at least for an hour, as she battles yet another demon in her life, an evil named Diana Mirabal.
If we could only stand up to the demons confronting the country as bravely and as resolutely as Lola does hers.
But our unreality, alas, is real.
Blogs published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or invariably in between.