The spectacle of fundamentalist preachers extending their hands blessing Rick Santorum’s candidacy at a religious convocation in McKinney, Texas, several weeks ago was jarring. The image stays with the mind, especially as the controversy over birth control – can that be right, a controversy in the year 2012 over birth control? – continues to roil the race for the Republican nomination for president and leaves Andrea Mitchell breathless.
Category Archives: Presidential Campaign
On the Catholic Vote
A headline in a news story the other day asked ‘Is Obama losing the Catholic vote?’ The story sought to answer a question that might interest political strategists more so than the American public. It is a curious thing, the relationship that Americans have to government and to religion. Depending on the political environment, Americans rush to any and all sides of any debate involving both.
Texas Means More to the Nation Than to Texans
Though I like to believe I think broadly and that I have strived to shed provincialisms, I am a Texan by birth, and I am heart-broken at the beating my home state is taking and has taken since George W. Bush became President under suspect circumstances in 2000.
It is hard for people, perhaps, to understand what Texas means to Texans. But more so than in sheer nativist or parochial loyalty, my sentiment for the state is rooted in the view that it is essential to the future of the country. So my feelings are more than resentments about how the national press is making a joke out of Texas through the lens of the national political stage. If Texas fails as a state – which it might well do if its growing HispanicLatino population does not accelerate its economic and social standing – the country will fail. Think California, which remains on the ropes and whose educational system – meaning its future – has cracked. California schools no longer are the foundation from which the state blasted into the future and took the world – not just the country – with it. Continue reading
Small Steps in the Direction
Because HispanicLatinos already are a great part of the nation’s military and will be a larger part still in the years ahead, they should monitor President Obama’s recent decisions to assert American power in the South China Sea. From Australia to the Philippines to Thailand, the United States is creating pockets of American strength to make sure China’s growth as a world power does not retrace the erroneous path that Japan took more than 70 years ago. Left unchecked, a totalitarian Japan swept across the Pacific and only a bloody effort led by the United States pushed them back.
You have to be on top of things to know how cleverly China is going about its business as it senses that the balance of power not only in that region but in the world is moving away from the United States. Building gigantic commercial ports that also can accommodate the large naval vessels it is constructing at high speed is one of the easier examples. China is active on all fronts, from Iran to Latin America to outer space. No one begrudges them their advancement as a world power and their development as a new and important nation. But let us make sure that the Chinese rise to power is not predicated on thinking that the United States is going to go silently into the night. Continue reading
Ten Million Here, Ten Million There, Pretty Soon It Adds up to Real Corruption
The reader comments section on the AP story of a Mexican official detained last week at an airport with $1.9 million in a briefcase and backpack were predictably sanctimonious, and of course the money run cannot be defended legally. To these readers, corruption is endemic in all of Latin America and is part of the HispanicLatino genetic makeup.
The same readers might note that at the same time that the official’s plane was in the air, millions of dollars in wire transfers whizzed through cyberspace into the coffers of the so-called super-pacs by supporters of Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich – legally, of course. Two good fellas – a casino owner and his wife from Las Vegas – gave Gingrich $10 million. No corruption or outsized influence there.
When the Supreme Court of the United States unleashed the wave of money that has engulfed the American political process – already undermined by the system before the Court’s disastrous decision, mind you – it made any bungled Mexican money-packing operation look like a lollipop compared to the ten pounds of Belgian chocolate on which the Republican candidates have already gorged themselves in just the first month of the primary season. Continue reading
On Florida and Jan Brewer and Ann Richards
It is interesting to see the national media try to make sense of the HispanicLatino vote in Florida before the Republican primary on Tuesday. The media speaks of it as one vote, and it is in a sense. The HispanicLatino vote next week could be as much as 80 percent Cuban American. But most HispanicLatinos in Florida now vote Democratic, so the media would be more accurate to describe the group voting next week in the GOP contest as the Cuban Republican vote, and they should point out that it is shrinking as each day passes due to its aging nature. Continue reading
Basic Math: A No Vote is a Half Vote
So a Peruvian student in the country illegally, Lucy Allain, now of New York, last week accosts Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and asks him why he does not support the Dream Act. The expected confrontation occurs. He withdraws his hand as if she were trash, she said later. Aides move Romney away from her. I can imagine how she felt. Romney is simply wrong on the issue. More so, in his world, Romney would be called a cad.
But Lucy is wrong on another, vital matter. Asked by Jorge Ramos on Univision’s Sunday news program, Al Punto, for whom she would vote for if she could, she responded that she would vote for neither Romney nor President Obama, who has failed the HispanicLatino community – and the nation – by not pursuing immigration reform, not pushing for the Dream Act and pursuing a deportation program that in the end will prove counter to the national interest if it stands over a protracted period of time. Continue reading
Barbarains at the Gate
President Obama in one speech displayed why only the angriest of furies that could be goaded into action by a Newt Gingrich can defeat him. As important as the State of the Union speech last night was, so was the announcement by News Corporation – read that Fox – that it is creating a Spanish-language network to begin telecasting this coming fall. It was only a matter of time before Fox plunged into the continuously expanding HispanicLatino market. Continue reading
South Carolina Sends Message…to Obama
— This blog is reposted from Saturday night; the usual business-oriented blog on Mondays will be published tomorrow. —
Though it is easy to dismiss that bane of the average American – the so-called “experts” – they do hold vast institutional and collective wisdom – but perhaps it is about the past. All of them – from the left to the right – have been wrong this year. And so in this uproarious year, their judgment is now near useless given South Carolina. None of these experts expected that after three GOP contests three different candidates could call themselves a winner. One does not have to be an expert in these things to sense something is not plumb with things-as-usual. I have been around journalistically and politically long enough to be confounded totally by what has happened in South Carolina. For me, it now is not outside the possibility that President Obama could lose this election. Continue reading
South Carolina Sends Message to….Obama
In this uproarious year, it now is not outside the possibility that President Obama could lose this election. One does not have to be an expert in these things to sense something is not plumb with things-as-usual. I have been around journalistically and politically long enough to be confounded totally by what has happened in South Carolina.
For conventional thinkers, this is not the year to be conventional. My thoughts have been all along that Obama was going to sweep over any of the Republican candidates. Now I am not so sure. Will Florida tell the tale? Perhaps. Watching Mitt Romney on television was looking at someone who, it turns out, is not as good as he thinks he is. This business of running for President is not like directing a takeover of another company – running for President is not insider work. Romney talked tonight as if he were talking to his staff instead of the country. His spiel was canned and repetitive. Newt Gingrich offers something new: New language, new energy, new anger – the stuff of which most elections are made and won. Continue reading