Many years ago one of the most influential books ever written shaped my own political identity and my view of the world. Ostensibly about the presidential campaign of 1960, Theodore White’s Pultizer Prize-winning The Making of the President told the story of how John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson survived one of the narrowest presidential victories in the nation’s history.  But more than simply converting a political story into a highly interesting narrative, White wrote revealingly about how political markets are hardly more than consumer markets.  In his eyes, fifty states and the District of Columbia – each one different from the other – comprised 51 political markets with many more submarkets of voters, hundreds in fact.  They still do, if not more so.

White’s book gave birth, in many ways, to the evolution of modern political campaigning as surely as did the great issues of the time, for it foreshadowed the increasingly balkanized, partisan politics that now paralyze the country at one of its most critical passages in its history.  Civil rights, abortion, same-sex marriage all resonate differently within these submarkets – and with different intensity within each one.  This political reality drives campaign strategists to try to weave a national political narrative atop a structure of groups and subgroups and concoct strategies to increase voter turnout within those same subgroups.  Successful campaigns that succeed in doing both almost always will win. (The same applies to corporations and large organizations as they try to figure out the HispanicLatino community.)

Thus in the days after President Obama endorsed same-sex marriage, the news media are full of speculation and analysis about how it will affect his re-election efforts, especially in already marginal states with, of course, inherent subgroups of voters.  As is often the case, however, sometimes the larger issue at stake is clouded by another story that probably resonates more so and that the polls never pick up because some questions are hard to plumb.  Thus The Washington Post’s story on what Mitt Romney did in high school – attacking a student who was probably thought to be gay and cutting off his hair – could be resonating with many more people than same-sex marriage.

It sort of stands to reason: Same-sex marriage is one of those stories that in reality affects so few people but hazing is something that many more people have either felt directly or indirectly.  In fact, I would submit that most HispanicLatinos feel that they are being hazed right now by laws that Mitt Romney supports in Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Texas and other states .  And localities after the Supreme Court rules in favor of Arizona’s patently offensive and racist laws will only increase the feeling that HispanicLatinos are having more than their hair cut off.

In the aftermath of Obama’s announcement, a reporter from a national television networks set off to find HispanicLatinos in opposition.  Of course, he found a fundamentalist preacher in Orange County in southern California and his assistant opposed to it.  I guess if I wanted to find a Wisconsin dairy farmer’s opinion on cheese heading north of Madison would be a safe bet.  In the world of segmented politics, are HispanicLatinos so opposed to same-sex marriage that they will vote against a President whose opponent is a Republican whose party is enabling the most anti-HispanicLatino rhetoric this country has heard in generations?

The reporter might have inquired if, pushed to the wall, these two HispanicLations – who seemed to be rather recent arrivals to the country and are therefore more vulnerable to real anti-HispanicLatino rhetoric – might not end up voting for Obama.  How could the possibility of direct assault on their families compare to two men or two women getting married 50 miles up the Hollywood Freeway?

Were HispanicLatinos nationally to vote in a significant way for the Republican candidate over the Democratic nominee based on same-sex marriage would surely have been interesting to Teddy White.  It would be to me, too, but, more important, it would have longer-term ramifications for all HispanicLatinos, not just the ones fixated on so irrelevant a topic.

Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.