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.

Inflection Point for Hillary

Given the announcement by Attorney General Loretta Lynch that she will accept the recommendation of her civil service employees investigating Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and server, the campaign is at an inflection point.  Nothing good is going to come of this, whatever Department of Justice lawyers recommend, mostly because we do not know when their recommendations are going to come.

Timing is everything in politics, and for us not to know when the report will come and what it will say destabilizes the general election environment that favored Clinton.

For me, the inflection point is not constrained solely to the legal issues of the case. Rather, it is within the internal strategic thinking of the campaign itself.  The campaign must prepare for the worst and must consider — now — how to win an election in the most adverse of circumstances against Donald Trump, who is a true danger to the republic.

I have said it again, and I will say it again.  If the Clinton campaign does not make the Hispanic/Latino vote central to its strategy beyond what we have seen so far, we truly are in danger of losing an election that by any other measure should be a historic landslide.

This is the time for Hispanic/Latinos closest to Hillary to speak up.  If they do not, then they are ill-serving Hillary, the Hispanic/Latino community but, most important, the country.  I know some of those people, and I fear that they love Hillary too closely to not step up and say what needs to be said and done.

These individuals face a daunting task:  A fully effective plan to maximize the Hispanic/Latino vote across the board is a very expensive proposition but it is in my mind a necessary insurance policy.  And nothing is as hard to do within a campaign than convince others to spend money on anything – especially if it is out of the ordinary.  And trying to persuade a campaign to spend serious money takes herculean task commitment.  But it is imperative that she carry Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada and think about taking Arizona.

Were Trump to succeed in winning any of the Midwestern states that he covets, then Florida and the Mountain West can save the Democratic ticket, and this, of course, brings to the fore the need to put a Hispanic/Latino on the ticket.

The cost of exploding the Hispanic/Latino vote is by far more expensive than maintaining the high level of African-American support President Obama received in 2008 and 2012.  More expensive by far than expanding the impact of the women’s vote, of the gay and lesbian electorate, of the Asian American vote.

It is absolutely true that the campaign must spend what it must to try to defend the states that Trump — now given fresh ammunition — is targeting by trying to wrest away non-Hispanic/Latino white voters from Clinton.  Were he to succeed, only one group can fill the void: Hispanic/Latino voters.

The immediate consequence of the announcement this morning is that it takes the steam out of the momentum that Hillary was generating.  Her campaign was building — impressively and quickly — an electoral wave that seemed on the verge of swamping Donald Trump weeks ahead of the nominating conventions, much less the general election.

The slow-down now will cause the polls to change, and when polls change, everything begins to change.  Trump will get a second-wind; more Republicans will come home to their party’s nominee;  GOP  donors reluctant to give to Trump now will; states that vote Republican usually but were thought of as potential Democratic pick-ups now revert to the red column; and Clinton supporters will begin to fret and worry and as they fret and worry they cause some to begin to re-think their support.

And that is all before the report is released and any recommendations known.

The new moment serves to paralyze new thinking in a new environment in which the old playbooks no longer suffice.  To me, supporting the usual voter registration organizations is very important but not as important as devising other ways to broaden voter registration efforts, ones that engage average Hispanic/Latinos beyond political activists and paid volunteers in the process of getting Hispanic/Latino voters to the polls in November.

If Clinton’s numbers hold up in the Hispanic/Latino community as the election nears and becomes a tight affair, then still other states might be viable, especially if serious Republican voters cannot bring themselves to vote for Trump to be commander-in-chief.

Current polling suggests that Clinton could breach the 80-percent mark of support among Hispanic/Latinos in November – a historic accomplishment.  Even slightly elevated levels of Hispanic/Latino voter registration and participation can push her electoral-vote margin out of reach.

To not invest heavily in the Hispanic/Latino now is folly –  foolish and perhaps fatal.

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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Unreal Times Are Real for the GOP

As the Republican party continues its autopsy of its epic failure to unseat an incumbent Democratic President laboring under the worst economy since the Great Depression, it should keep in mind the figures 124 million and 62 million.  If at least 124 million Americans vote in a presidential election, they are almost certain to put Democrats in the White House.  In truth, President Obama could have given up as many as four million of his 65.6 million votes last month and still won.  In the 48 months between the election of 2012 and 2016, another 2.4 million HispanicLatinos will turn 18 and most will be eligible to vote.  These new voters represent an increasingly politically-engaged group that last month voted more than 70 percent Democratic.  That is how real and deadly the future seems for Republicans.

In many ways the future is unmanageable for the GOP.  It is one thing to gaze at the spectacle of House Speaker John Boehner dealing with the Tea party in the Republican Caucus in the House of Representatives.  That is bad enough.  But even if Republicans at the national level can somehow moderate their views on issues of importance to HispanicLatinos, women, gays and lesbians and independent voters in general, they will have to deal with radical Republicans at the state level – which for all practical purposes in a digital, 24/7 world can produce unrelenting chaos.  Any story coming out from any state capitol or county courthouse can become a national sensation in a microsecond.  Think Joe Arpaio in Arizona or Todd Akin in Missouri.  That is what makes the 62-million figure important.

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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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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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Lincoln and the Questions of Our Lives

Are we fitted into the times we are born into?  So asks Abraham Lincoln in the new film that should be required viewing for all – more so for modern-day Republicans than anyone else.  The Lincoln in Lincoln is the dream of any Democrat or Republican.  A nation so divided as ours is today, riven by intense ideological rivalries and regional, sectional differences, could use an individual who commands the respect of all to ask the eternal question we ask of ourselves with often vague success, How and where do we fit?  Lincoln did not ask the more important question that has dogged humankind since it attained the power to reason, What does it all mean?  No, he asked the one that we should be able to answer, for we do have the power to control our lives.  Incumbent in Lincoln’s question is the degree to which each citizen and resident of the United States understands his or her responsibilities.

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The Unrepresentative House of Representatives

As the composition of the new Congress that convenes in January becomes clear as the last of the contested races for seats in the House of Representatives are settled, the complaints by Hispanic/Latinos that they are underrepresented sound quaint — especially with the election of new gay and lesbian, Asian, Muslim and bisexual candidates.  A new set of fresh HispanicLatino faces will go to Capitol Hill, but they are the products of a system that is not working despite the continuing diversification of Congress itself.

The truth is that HispanicLatinos are vastly underrepresented in Congress.  Up until the 1970’s congressional districts were drawn by state legislatures with no equity in mind.  In one district, 50,000 voters would elect a representative compared to 500,000 in another, making the votes of the 50,000 ten times more valuable.   Once the Supreme Court ruled in the 1960’s that each citizen’s vote was equal to another, it was not long before each person, regardless of voting status, was to be represented equally.  Today, congressional districts are roughly equal in population, currently standing at about 715,000 each.  But equal numbers in population do not translate into equality for HispanicLatinos.

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