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.