Category Archives: Leadership

What Ted Cruz Has Wrought

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My rip-roaring social life allows me to watch Air Disasters, a program on one of those cable channels skipped over by millions.  Each episode analyzes and documents the cause behind the tragic destruction of a plane loaded with human life.  Each story revolves around a small thing – a screw, a wire, a microscopic air bubble – that over a period of time went unattended and then went on to trigger a series of regrettable, irreversible events.  The screw suddenly pops at the wrong time at the wrong place.  A wire long-frayed blows.  A microscopic air bubble balloons into disaster.  Perhaps the very design of the plane itself lends itself to ruin.

Ted Cruz’ win last night to become the nominee of the Texas Republican Party for the Senate was a hard-earned victory that was a very personal triumph for him.  But it speaks more to what Texas Democrats did – or did not do – years ago to avert catastrophe, which is what the 41-year-old Cruz is for them.  For years, the decision-makers in the party that once dominated political life in Texas began to commit the mistakes that have now caused a historic crash that will reverberate for decades, yes, decades to come.  The beatdown that Cruz gave the incumbent lieutenant governor last night is nothing compared to the beatdown Cruz has given to Texas Democrats who believed that demography alone would bring their state back into the blue column.

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The temptations of Marco Rubio

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It long has been a political truth that delegates to the 1956 Democratic National Convention in Chicago did a young, brash and wealthy John F. Kennedy a favor by turning back his bid to be the party’s vice presidential standard bearer.  The thinking holds that without Kennedy on the ticket his Catholicism could not be blamed for Adlai Stevenson’s overwhelming loss to an incumbent President.  At the same time, however, Kennedy’s high-profile battle on the convention floor boosted his chances for the 1960 presidential nomination.  When he knew he did not have the last few votes he needed, Kennedy pulled the plug and magnanimously endorsed Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee on national television.

One wonders if the same truth does not apply to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, whose potential candidacy for the Republican vice presidential nomination was given a second wind last week by former Florida governor Jeb Bush and former mayor New York City Rudy Giuliani.

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Dropping the Ball: Ending the Sports Madness

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I wonder how upset most college presidents would be if all of a sudden — overnight — their football programs were ripped apart like the NCAA did Penn State University on Monday.  Earlier this week, the top college enforcement organization eviscerated football from a football-crazed campus.  Were that to happen at other schools, I would not be surprised if a fair number of college presidents might not let out a cheer, privately, of course.  You see, football is out of control at most colleges.  Football programs are nothing more than revenue-producing businesses that push power at the expense of college presidents and faculty members to coaches of teams most of whose members do not ever graduate.

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The America of the Future: What HispanicLatinos Make of Themselves

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The United States is always in the act of becoming, remaking itself.  Like all nations, America’s population replaces itself through the generation of a new people, except that unlike other nations it has done so in the context of an inventive society endlessly progressing somewhere.  No one has ever laid out a plan for America.  It happened as the result of hard work, freedom, perseverance and luck.  Were the American continent 2,500 instead of 3,500 miles from Europe, history would almost certainly have been different.  Indeed, geography is crucial for any nation.  Left alone for a decisive period, American society was able to adopt the values of a progressive culture that made it special for a long period of time.  Now, its geography and a great demographic moment are remaking a country hard to recognize from even two decades ago, and the role of Hispanic or Latinos is watershed.

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Gun Control and Reality

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I go back and forth on this gun control thing.  Growing up in rural Texas with a father who hunted and who during the Cuban missile crisis got his rifle out of the closet and got it ready, I favor the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms.  I cannot imagine that the founders who, however elitist, did not recognize the dangers of new settlers making their way unarmed through the wild forests of a new country.  It is nonsense to think that individual citizens cannot protect themselves.  And I cannot imagine that anyone would think that citizens cannot use whatever means to defend themselves against oppression.  Think Hafez al Assad in Syria and his father, Bashar al Assad, or Joe Arpaio of Arizona for that matter. I am glad Hispanics or Latinos have the Second Amendment as their last resort.

On the other hand, the violence wrought by handguns and the possession of larger weapons really is a wholly different matter.  But how do you control the possession of arms so that someone like the shooter in Denver today would not have been able to do the damage he did this morning?

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Latino Veterans: An untapped source within the Hispanic community

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More and more Hispanics or Latinos are coming to understand their unique placement in the flow of American history that at this moment calls on them to understand their growing responsibility for the fiscal fate of the country.  Two groups within the HispanicLatino community know and feel the mounting obligation the best:  College-educated professionals and veterans.  Individuals holding college degrees most often are the ones who rise to play leadership roles within the community.  But the vast numbers of HispanicLatino veterans – many of them having put their lives on the line for the country – are as cognizant and are especially important today.  They, more so than most, know what is at stake in a pivotal election in which they can make a decided difference.

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Education: A way to balance the books

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The great and constant plaint from Hispanics or Latinos is and has been education.  Their grievances have as their origins actual discrimination that kept many of them out of school or condemned as many or more to schools through the years with insufficient resources to maximize their community’s talents and potential – much to the nation’s detriment.  Were the average household incomes of HispanicLatinos to equal overnight that of the average white, non-HispanicLatino household, the nation’s fiscal condition and outlook would be quite different.

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The Modern HispanicLatino: Not Sexist, Racist or Homophobic

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So Hispanics/Latinos have grown into a significant and ultimately critical part of the national population. But what do the times demand of the modern Hispanic or Latino? I write of the HispanicLatino, not the HispanicLatina, for I would not begin to presume on the female consciousness. I am, after all, not a Catholic bishop. So who does the world need the HispanicLatino to be? Who does he need to be for himself?

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Bloomberg: A National Hero

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New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a national hero, not the wannabe fascist overseer of an emerging nanny state as his critics maintain.  Sigh.  Had the HispanicLatino community a leader with the stature and political and financial standing of a Bloomberg and his bravura!  Bloomberg, of course, has taken aggressive stances on smoking and other public health issues, and he now wants to eliminate the super-sized sodas ballooning the national waistline.  Some of the criticism coming his way so far has not come from the seriously overweight HispanicLatino community.

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Say it isn’t so, Rupert: Romney Going Negative on HispanicLatinos

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Regular readers of this blog know that some weeks ago I wrote that the Romney campaign might have decided tactically to give up on the HispanicLatino vote.  Nothing otherwise explains Romney’s lame performance at the NALEO conference in Orlando three weeks ago. I suggested that Romney might now allow his friends at the SuperPacs to run an anti-HispanicLatino strategy in selected states to whip up working class whites a la Willie Horton to make up for any lost share in traditional GOP HispanicLatino support.

A story in The Washington Post about a tweet by Rupert Murdoch supports my suspicion.  “Murdoch was among 50 people who met with the former Massachusetts governor at the Union League Club in New York City (last week)….At the meeting, Murdoch pressed Romney and his aides to get tougher on Obama and asked about Romney’s stance on immigration. He later tweeted his thoughts in response to a follower who said Romney has brains but needs more stomach and heart…(Murdoch tweeted): ‘Romney has all these and more, but just to see more fight. And Hispanics a surrender to O. Cn not afford, hurts senate too.’”

Murdoch’s disjointed, contorted tweet implies that he walked away from the meeting with the impression that Romney has surrendered HispanicLatinos to President Obama, something Murdoch feels Romney cannot afford to do.  But trailing 68-24 percent among HispanicLatinos in the polls, Romney might feel he has no option but to revert to a strategy that attracts voters scared and anxious about the economy and the nation’s new demography.

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