HispanicLatinos are living through a nationally decisive moment. The pressure is building on HispanicLatino leaders – elected, appointed, self-proclaimed and otherwise – to step up to a point in history as important as any since the mid-1960’s. In but a few months, the Supreme Court could waylay the progress HispanicLatinos have made over five decades to achieve social, economic a political parity with mainstream society – and in the process the Court could jeopardize America’s very future.
Category Archives: Leadership
From W to Newt: Downward, Ever Downward
I remember watching George W. Bush on television at one of his first group meetings with foreign leaders. It was a NATO summit meeting of European leaders in Brussels six months after he took office. As the leaders gathered for the traditional group picture, they stood around the nervous President of the United States, who at one point looked up and behind him to laugh at something one of the leaders had said. In that split second, Bush looked like a lost schoolboy, out of his element. I will never forget the thought I had then.
This country is rich – rich enough to squander the Presidency.
Any country that would elect a neophyte and a person so lacking in intellectual depth was presumptuously wealthy enough to risk the Presidency on someone whom I was convinced would be a disaster. I had only a clue from someone who knew him how much of a debacle was at stake. Now we all know. The same thought came to me as I watch the spectacle of today’s Republican presidential candidates.
A Different Kind of Tea Party
My tea this morning is perfect. As Premier of China and head of government and the State Council, I seldom get a bad cup of tea. The intra-party struggles have been resolved. We seem to be managing that burst of inflation that reared its head in the economy. Our balance of payments continues to grow spectacularly in our favor. Things are fine. We need to open up credit a bit more, but generally we are on our way. Why do I feel so odd, then?
What Luck!
Newt Gingrich’s proposal for local citizen juries to decide which of the individuals illegally in the country gets to stay is of course nuts. Why even discuss it? The arguments against it are monumental. The idea is being laughed at across the board and it shows one of the reasons Gingrich would be an excellent choice for Republicans to nominate as their candidate for president – if they want to lose in a landslide.
Thinking Beyond the Recession
An unforgiving national unemployment rate of nine percent and stagnant – or declining – wages for the average household for the last ten years dominate the minds of Americans worried about the economy. As important is the number of business closings, though it seldom gets the same amount of ink. More than 1.5 million businesses have closed since the start of the current recession. A high unemployment rate and extenuated business closures feed off each other in an economy with little demand. Continue reading
Crockett Keller, Meet Joshua
Years ago as a teenager in the mid-1960s at the height of the civil rights movement, I would take the bus down from the dusty and dry plains of West Texas in August to go to high school in San Antonio in South Texas, returning home for Christmas and then for the summer.
I loved the trips. The trip south was the more exciting. Back then buses were clean and safe, and the bus driver through his mirror looked at me to make sure I was secure and he and his bus would carry me to a completely different world. Listening to my little transistor radio – that age’s version of the iPod – I would stare out the window and watch the land begin to fall and the flat and empty terrain change. The further south the bus sank the greater the number of trees and the greener the grass got – and some of the rivers actually had water in them.
The Hill Country was always beautiful. It is like no other part of Texas, especially in December. The bus would roll by ranch homes, with singular rows of red and green lights outlining their roofs, snuggled in between the hills. Thin trails of blue smoke would drift from their chimneys. I was a blessed soul seeing Christmas cards come to life. I especially liked arriving at little Mason, Texas, whose courthouse seemed enchanted. It appeared to me like a little Hapsburgian castle. Ringed by a small stone fence, it seemed to have dropped from an Austrian sky. I half-expected the Archduke Ferdinand to step out of it and get gunned down by Serbian nationalists.
The reason my thoughts would turn from idyllic and romantic meanderings so abruptly to thoughts of violence was only moments away. Just as U.S. Highway 87 bends away from the courthouse a huge billboard in black letters on a white backdrop proclaimed “Martin Luther King is a Communist” with the word communist underscored.
Memories of those times came back to me this week when a news story popped out about a man named Crockett Keller, who owns a gun shop in Mason. Keller refuses to make his services available to Muslims and to people who voted for President Obama. Well, that would include Catholic me and most HispanicLatinos. How sad. It was a far different experience for me when the bus stopped for a few moments in Mason by the side of a store. I would run in to buy a candy bar and Coke. The German lady recognized me after my first trip and would always smile. In between the haters and the angered, other people make the world better.
I wish I could remember when the sign changed. King was assassinated in 1968 precisely so that no one in the country would be discriminated against as Mr. Keller seems to think he has the right to do.
After the jarring sign, the bus would continue to flow south, and I would get excited. Within yards of the road just north of San Antonio, a spring would gurgle from the ground. A real spring. For someone from the driest part of Texas, water springing from the ground is a near miracle. Memory unreliably brings back the name of the spring as Joshua, the prophet who led the Hebrews to the new land of Canaan. In one of the battles the Hebrews had to fight, God is said to have hurled hailstones from the heavens to help them.
My first thought for Mr. Keller was a ton of hailstones, except that after all these years, I remember Dr. King, and I realize there always will be people like the gun shop owner. He was preceded by the people who put up the long-gone billboard. They were there in 1965, they exist in 2011 in the likes of Govs. Jan Brewer in Arizona and Robert Bentley in Alabama and the Loudon County Republicans in Virginia who circulated a picture of President Obama shot through the head – and they will persist even until 2065.
But there always will be people like the bus driver and the German lady at the little store. And there are other many good people in Mason and even in Alabama and Arizona and Loudon County.
And there will be always springs of hope.
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.
Surely Al Sharpton or Sheldon Cooper Can Help
The scripted HispanicLatino stood up to ask his question at the Republican presidential debate in Nevada last week. The incisive power of the question sucked the air out of the room. Viewers were left reeling. “What is your message to the Hispanic community?” was Robert Zavala’s riveting question.
Not: Hey, guys, who has caused the nation more harm in the past 10 years: Bankers and Wall Street investment companies or immigrants in the country illegally?
Not: Riddle me this: You say you want to create jobs. Why do corporations and banks with more than $2 trillion and perhaps $3 trillion in assets not invest in economic development in the HispanicLatino community – or any community?
Not: Say, I do not know if you have noticed but Mexico right next door each day edges closer to be taken over by narco-traffickers. You got anything to say about that? And I have a follow-up question: If the United States did not have a massive drug-consumption problem would Mexico have a massive drug-cartel problem?
Not: I’m curious. What is going to happen in Cuba when Fidel Castro dies? A massive migration northward? And is there anything to fear from Hugo Chávez in Venezuela?
Not: Ah, don’t you get that your trash-talking on immigration makes HispanicLatinos who might vote for you uneasy and is making many more of them angry?
Not: Excuse me, but: No one is taking the jobs that HispanicLatino laborers are abandoning in Alabama in wake of that state’s anti-immigration law. Aren’t we losing jobs and hurting the economy when tomato crops rot in the fields? Would you as President allow states to override federal law at will?
Not: You know, insured children are an economic development tool and preventive health care keeps kids out of expensive emergency rooms: Aside from beating each other up about who had the most uninsured kids in their state when some of you were governor, what do plan to do about it as President?
Not: With the country nearly bankrupt, how are we going to convince HispanicLatinos – like John F. Kennedy asked the country in 1961 – that they are being called upon to do more for the country than the country can do for them?
Not: I know you guys are really smart, but HispanicLatinos are, too. They make up more than 15 percent of the population but only about 6 percent of doctors. Don’t you think this is something that we should be concerned about as the Anglo population ages? And wouldn’t some form of affirmative, strategic action help?
I do not know Mr. Zavala but I have a question for him: What planet do you live on? Perhaps the geeks on CBS’ The Big Bang Theory can help. Koothrappali, who cannot speak to girls, whispers into Wolowitz’ ear to ask questions.
At least Koothrappali knows what to ask.
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.
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