Category Archives: Uncategorized

Blind into the Night

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My God. They’ve got a madman on their hands.

Fans of the movie The Hunt for Red October will recognize the harrowing line uttered by a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when he realized that a renegade Soviet submarine commander had stolen a new, silent Russian submarine on its maiden mission.   Its revolutionary silent propulsion system was designed to slip through American naval defenses with the capability to launch a sudden nuclear attack on the United States.

As it turns out, the captain of the sub wanted to defect and deliver the ship into American hands to equal the playing field.  To get complete command of the vessel and its nuclear capability, the captain had murdered the Communist party apparatchik with whom he shared the code to the ship’s missiles.

No one is suggesting that Donald J. Trump should be murdered.  But like Sean Connery in October, Trump will have, in fact, the sole power to launch a nuclear strike after Jan. 20.  Be careful what you wish for, Vladimir Putin.  You got what you wanted.

And so did the American people:  Donald J. Trump is going to be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States in less than three months’ time.

How we got here is not as important as what happens next.  Truly, Hillary Clinton was a very flawed candidate and the Democratic Party has the opportunity now to remake itself outside the Clintons’ shadows.  But we will soon miss her competence, experience and intelligence – the three mainstays of the Presidency that Trump lacks.

It is laughable now that we were worried that Sarah Palin would have been a heartbeat away from the Oval Office had John McCain won.  And we 16 years ago also were petrified about George W. Bush taking office.  And we were right.  His lack of competence, intelligence and experience proved horrifically bad.

But we might have not seen anything yet.

We have arrived at a singularly dangerous moment in human history.  It could well be that Trump never wakes up one morning and plunges the country into a nuclear war or a constitutional crisis.  But his election does mean that other dangers will fester.  For one, the great, silent danger of global climate change will almost surely now accelerate.  It is the secret propulsion system that will take humanity eventually to the brink.

For the immediate future, an unwise Supreme Court will abet those in the voting minority who want to take the country back 100 years.  We in the voting majority who won the popular vote must suffer the hope that a Republican Congress will counterbalance Trump.  It is a faint hope.  House Speaker Paul Ryan has the opportunity to be the patriot he says he is.

But I doubt the voting minority that elected Trump will let him.

If he does his duty to protect the country from Trump, Ryan will have to sacrifice his political career.  Faint hope.  So this does not bode well, and it is not hyperbolic to consider the possibility of real civic strife.  This is no movie.

The results of the election sadden me because the sons and daughters and the grandsons and granddaughters of the voters who pushed Trump into office well could rue Nov. 8, 2016, the day the country elected  someone who might be the madman the founders feared.

At the end of October, Sean Connery eases his submarine into the safety of a harbor on the Maine coast, averting disaster.

We can only long this ship America finds a similar haven.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

Here and Present

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In attending a memorial service for a friend, it is at first easy to think only about her and her family.  Soon enough, though, we lose ourselves in memories.  The nostalgia that comes from recalling our relationship to and time with her moves our minds to ruminate on other aspects of our lives.  And those of us no longer young also ponder the immediate future of our own well-being.

Yet something mutes the toll that weighty death take on us – the warm feeling of reconnecting with friends who are friends precisely because they turn out when you need them.  And, it turns out, they need you, too.  There is, in fact, strength in numbers, and the packed cathedral in San Antonio provided comfort for those of us for whom the sudden loss of Choco Meza to a rampant cancer was shocking, its physical finality too real.

Gazing around the church and crowd, I saw many of us who have lived and experienced the modern emergence of the Hispanic/Latino population into an important demographic reality.  And so the Rosary and the Mass we celebrated for her constituted a confluence of both history and future for those of us not yet finished.  That our contemporary died at 64 and that we might be slower in gait does not preclude us from knowing that Choco would not want us to be finished with the enduring business at hand – the social, political, economic and cultural progress and development of the Hispanic/Latino community.

The agenda is full.  It is constant.  And it is perennial – like the cathedral of San Fernando itself.

Having been forced to stand for the Rosary and having to deal with an aching back, I stole outside and walked around the iconic church.  In its illuminated state, I marveled again at its magnificent restoration, led by Father David García, a high school classmate, and a host of others in our beloved San Antonio.  And I take enormous but totally unmerited pride when I walk the one-block street named Treviño on the building’s northern side.  In my mind, the presence of the family name weds me to the cathedral’s old and historic stones that stretch back to before the nation’s founding.  I did not get that feeling walking around Independence Hall in Philadelphia during the Democratic National Convention in July.

And like the cathedral, Choco exists among the personal icons I choose for my life.  No one who met her, as I did oh so many years ago, could forget her wide eyes that would have been wild had they not shone with a goodness that offered immediate acceptance.  Her eyes literally exploded with commitment to the Hispanic/Latino community.  And so she is an iconic reference point for me not only of our history but for the future.

Julián and Joaquín Castro, in emotional remembrances at the end of the mariachi-garlanded service, personified part of that future and, surely, the history of the labors of Choco’s life.  But it was Henry Cisneros who sounded the clarion for us to do nothing less than to extend and continue her work if not her life itself.

Henry called on immediate family first and then cousins and then colleagues and then co-workers and then women whom Choco had helped empower and then the rest of us — and then all us together — to make our presence known as a testament to her.  In groups we stood when called and we echoed what Mexicans proclaim when they at a rally, at a meeting, at an event want to make their presence known and felt.  They stand and shout:

¡Presente!

We are here!  We belong!  We are with you!

The echo ricocheted off the thick walls of the old church with a force so powerful and willful that to my ear became resolve.

The work continues.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

Willie Velásquez: A Model for Our Times

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So the documentary PBS aired last week on Willie Velásquez perhaps accomplished more than its producers wanted:  It focused on a man who blended what so many Hispanic/Latino leaders today, frankly, lack:  A true sense of vision embodied in direct engagement and personal commitment to the growth of the social and political standing of Hispanic/Latinos.   Many talk a good game.  Few throw the ball downfield like Willie in his days.

For today’s young Hispanic/Latinos, Willie’s too-early death is a cautionary tale of the unforeseen sleights that history can throw our way.  What, in other words, would Texas, and therefore the country, look like had Willie lived?  The film – Willie Velásquez: Your Vote is Your Voice, a production of Galán Inc. and Latino Public Broadcasting – recounts his leadership of the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project.  It did not freely speculate what he might have done had he not died in 1988 at the age of 44.  44!

The fact is we lost a strong and unrelenting voice that otherwise would have resonated louder year after year with a passion we desperately needed – and miss today.

With perhaps a better-financed organization as each year passed, he might have done more than we have to marshal the power of the Hispanic/Latino population that had begun to grow in leaps and bounds.  More important, he in all likelihood would have developed – and articulated – a sense of mission and purpose that, truth be told, we are lacking as a community and in too many of our leaders.  In too many ways, we are voiceless with our votes.

I was a young, inexperienced reporter in 1978 when I traveled up from Corpus Christi to San Antonio to profile Willie for my newspaper.  I was barely 26.  I walked into the office of his voter registration project on North St. Mary’s Street near the river.

There I met a man who could see the future and who wanted to help drive the mostly Mexican-American population of Texas and the country into that new future as rapidly as possible – one fueled by a demographic revolution that will not reach its apex in my lifetime but presents a new challenge for us:  What we do with the years ahead?

But I – nor any Hispanic/Latino of note whom I have met in my years in journalism and government – possessed his energy and commitment.  He grew personally and supported the progressive cause that includes the advancement and equal protection of all minorities and women and gays and lesbians.  More so, he would have fostered the ideals and principles and values to guide a minority when it becomes a majority.  He would have reached for something new, and he would not have repeated the atrocities visited upon us in the past.

I remember his eyes growing wider as we spoke.  “In the end, it is all about the numbers.”  I can hear his voice today.  And while all of our lives march inexorably to some end or another, the end that Willie was referring to is what we now are witness to: That Hispanic/Latinos have achieved the numbers to develop a new direction with a new sense of self and confidence to move into the days ahead.

“We are good in some counties, and we are making a difference, but we are not there yet,” he said to me.  Willie was referring to the handful of counties throughout the nation in which the Mexican-American predominated back then.  “But we will get there.”

Indeed we have – with the numbers at least.  But without his frenetic and near-maniacal manner that tossed around a million ideas in his mind, we have not gotten to where we should be.  We are more muddle than made.

Now comes the sad news that one of Willie’s closest associates, Choco Meza – as committed as he to the cause of Hispanic/Latinos and of women – died at the very moment that the country is on the verge of electing a woman to the Presidency.  Another veteran of those early days at Willie’s office, Grace García, a personal friend of Hillary Clinton, would have been in the thick of the presidential campaign.  But she, too, died too young in a car accident almost two years ago.

Women do have the numbers, and the victories for them as for Hispanic/Latinos have come slowly at times.

But they come.

We will get there.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

Becoming part of the 80-percent

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Hillary Clinton is moving to get more than 80 percent of the Hispanic/Latino vote in November, a measure not seen in half a century.  Perhaps Lyndon B. Johnson received as much or more in his lopsided win in 1964.  In this day and age, support of that kind among Hispanic/Latinos can trigger a landslide.

Clinton appears to be winning majorities across the entire Hispanic/Latino population.  The latest defection is Carlos Gutiérrez, the Cuban-born Secretary of Commerce in the administration of George W. Bush.

The highly respected Gutiérrez sees his vote for Clinton in November as a vote for free and open trade, and he has voiced grave concerns about Donald Trump’s hateful anti-immigrant rhetoric.  To some extent, Gutiérrez perhaps now sees part of what many Hispanic/Latinos for years have seen in Clinton.

For me — for whom cynicism comes easily from my newsroom years — I remember the day I became part of the 80 percent.  My time as a journalist had passed when the Monica Lewinsky scandal involving Bill Clinton blew across the front pages of the nation’s newspapers and millions of television screens with the force of a hurricane.  And Hillary, of course, was in the middle of the storm.

My first time to lay eyes on her was at the beginning of the tempest.  She was the featured speaker at the annual dinner of the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts in 1998 at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington.  The swirling scandal was engulfing the White House five blocks away, with talk of the President’s imminent resignation cascading across town.  Inside the Mayflower, the expectation built among the small, intimate crowd as the time neared for her to appear.

Many in the room were Clinton political appointees, and their tense, worried expressions collapsed into chagrin when someone at the table interjected the specter of impeachment. The person seated next to me suggested Clinton should have called in sick. Another speculated she would look a mess.  Someone referenced The Taming of the Shrew.  Soon enough, the number of Secret Service agents deployed grew, flooding the room.  Expectation muffled the chatter and noise.  Gossiping mouths stopped in mid-sentence; wide, inquiring eyes said everything.

And then there she suddenly was.

She was resplendent in a blue dress.  Her hair, perfect.  Her smile wide.  She did not hold her head high so as to avoid. Rather, she was making direct visual contact with people and waving at friends she recognized.  She had entered the arena.

Audiences by tradition stand by rote when the President’s wife makes an entrance. But this crowd rose slowly, near-paralyzed at what it saw:  A woman not cowed; an individual with self-respect intact; a professional driving a stake into the ground to claim it; a winner in command.  Her glamour radiated her courage into the crowd.  The crowd embraced her in ever-growing applause.  Her countenance struck me, and I could only wonder what was coming next.

What came next was a long, protracted dinner that must have been excruciating for her.  With hundreds of eyes on her, Clinton carried on conversations with others at the head table as if they were talking about Kramer’s latest antics on Seinfeld.  At long last, the actor Jimmy Smits introduced her, and it was her turn to speak in a room at near-silence.  The waiters and waitresses had joined their also-entranced supervisors, all conjoined in the drama.

She started by joking about the many beautiful people in the room, cleverly underscoring her own bedazzling aura.  Then, after the usual acknowledgement of political potentates and luminaries large and small, she plunged into a speech that without any teleprompter or notes ranks as one of the best speeches I have ever heard about the state of the Hispanic/Latino community and its promise.  She was nothing short of brilliant.

She talked about her time growing up and coming to understand the complex history of the Hispanic/Latino in this country.  The statistics and figures and facts she drew from her head were as normal as the breaths she drew from within.  More important, she provided context.  She knew where everyone in the room fit in the current and future story of the country.

In an ever-confident voice, she talked about registering voters in South Texas Hispanic/Latino precincts in 1972.  She talked about children and the role of women, of Hispanic/Latino veterans, the need for all to commit to civil rights and social progress.  Her demeanor demanded respect.  She mesmerized the crowd.  And she caught me off guard.

I was not expecting anything like what I saw that night.  I wish I could swear that at the time I entertained the thought that she, not Bill, should be President.  I did not.  I was too in shock to see it.  But I see it now.

Since then, she has given hundreds of speeches to Hispanic/Latino audiences throughout the country.  When you are in the marketplace for as long as she, your brand gets around, and if your brand is one of competence, intelligence, courage, compassion and loyalty, the brand sticks.  And as every marketer in this country knows, Hispanic/Latinos are brand-loyal if anything.

What you see is what you get with Hillary Clinton.  She is neither shrew nor saint.  But compared to Donald Trump, she is eminently presidential.  Has been for years.

Since her youth, Hillary Clinton has given to the Hispanic/Latino community.  She has invested real, hard work on behalf of Hispanic/Latino children, so much of the nation’s future.  Her soul gives others hope.  Now a rate of return awaits her dedication and commitment.

An 80-percent-plus rate of return is about right.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

THE UNTHINKABLE

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Hispanic/Latino leaders at all levels of the community now need to ponder a future few of us imagined only weeks ago:  The election of Donald J. Trump and his ascension to the Presidency and the harrowing horror that awaits.

The summer of 2016 augurs morass for the fall – in more ways than one.  Events in Baton Rouge, St. Paul, Dallas and now Baton Rouge again – and by extension Nice – make November fraught with portent, with more terrorist or mass shootings between now and then in the offing.

The crushing victory by Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump that I expected is now in uncharted waters.  Swift currents of hate and anger and reaction are moving Trump’s candidacy, once moored upon the beach of unviability, into larger streams of possibility.  The worst fears of many in the Hispanic/Latino community no longer loom only as nightmare.

Only last week, I assured a group of Hispanic/Latino professionals in Boston at an event hosted by El Planeta and Conexión near MIT that Trump would not win and that Hillary Clinton would be elected unless unforeseen events spilled out of control.  Almost suddenly, with each passing day, civil strife invokes the specter of reaction and disunion.  An increasing number of voters will find in Trump the candidate who intensifies their fears, feeds their hate or stokes their anger – or all three.

I remember the flush of voters in 1972 sweeping Richard Nixon to victory over George McGovern in the wake of violent protests against the war in Vietnam and loud demonstrations on behalf of civil and human rights.  The unrest scared the electorate into the arms of a man whom history would reveal as a threat to our very republic.  Trump needs no unveiling.  What we see is what we get, already jeopardizing the First Amendment.  Nixon is Jefferson in comparison to Trump.

I know we live in a changed nation whose new demography should provide ballast for the Democratic Party.  I also know, however, that floods can inundate and overwhelm.  Still, 1972 is not 2016.  This is not the country of 44 years ago.  I remain confident that Clinton will win but how many more events between now and the election will lift a swell for Trump?  I do not know how to factor into my thinking the specter of police killing citizens and citizens killing police.

But let us assume the worst: that Trump wins.

For the first time, Hispanic/Latinos need to think through – now – how we will react to increased aggressive policing of the streets and whole-scale police operations across the nation seeking to identify individuals not in the country legally.  A Trump Presidency will empower local law enforcement officers to engage – outside of their scope and mission – in actions that will harm the community directly and Hispanic/Latinos individually.  Not to mention that individual non-Hispanic/Latinos will feel encouraged to take matters into their own hands.

When the current Supreme Court started to undercut laws that once protected the civil rights of minorities, it set the stage for re-fighting the battles we thought we had won in the 1970’s and 1980’s – that now could spatter the streets with violence.

It is not out of the question that Trump as President would act against a Supreme Court that might summon the courage to stand up for the Constitution and for America itself if minorities came under direct attack.  Troops in front of the Supreme Court and citizens surging into the streets with easy guns at the ready.

It is no longer unthinkable.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

Not Normal

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The normalcy of the Republican Party is no more, of course.  What many thought was going to happen did not.  The Donald Trump-Mike Pence ticket upsets what I believed was almost a given: That  the GOP would put a Hispanic/Latino on the ticket, more likely as its vice presidential nominee since I did not think Marco Rubio would achieve enough traction to secure the top spot.  As Rubio sputtered, I thought the chances of a Spanish surname in the second slot in both parties kept improving.

In my mind, any of the 16 other normal candidates for the Republican nomination probably would have gone that route, knowing that the new demography continues to tilt the electorate in the direction of the Democrats.  In response, I believed, the Democratic nominee – whom I always believed would be Hillary Clinton – would respond by choosing a Hispanic/Latino to prevent any erosion among Hispanic/Latino voters.

Almost nothing is going according to what even long-tenured observers thought would be one of the central operating scenarios that would drive the presidential campaign this year: a Hispanic/Latino on a presidential ballot.

In truth, an important opportunity has passed, for the GOP more so than the Democratic Party.  As important a moment has passed for Hispanics/Latinos.  I was hoping for a Hispanic/Latino on both tickets for a simple reason: It would spur the incorporation of Hispanic/Latinos in the national consciousness – something that is needed more than most people understand.  The fact that Hispanic/Latinos have not been an operational part of daily American life at all levels of business and government and media is the very reason Trump has done so well and the reason he choose another white male.

The moment that has passed is striking and it has the potential for roiling already roiled times.  If the GOP is now fast becoming a white party, it seems that Rubio – if he is able to win a tight re-election to the Senate – probably has even less of a chance now of ever reaching the White House.  He started off with such promise for 2016 and now ends with a slew of demerits he would have to overcome within his own party.

The ongoing battle for the soul of the GOP — assuming Trump loses — probably cannot have the face of Rubio leading the effort.

Since he has demonstrated a remarkable ability to evolve and adapt according to changing political exigencies – to put it kindly – he almost certainly must have given thought to changing parties.  Becoming a Democrat is not a reach for Rubio, and he could argue, like Democrats who left the party as rank and file or as elected officials to become Republicans for the past 30 years, that ‘I did not abandon my party.  It abandoned me’.  And he would be right.

Rubio’s fumbled engagement with immigration nevertheless shows that he understands the importance of immigrants to the future of the country.  Rubio is at a crossroads.  Personally, his remaining a Republican clouds his future in no small way.  Politically, he should know that he would be well-received by Democrats.  After all, the electoral value for Democrats of nailing down Florida in 2020 and beyond is inestimable.

On the Democratic side, the probability that a Hispanic/Latino on his or her own could mount a race for the Presidency in the near future without the boost of first serving as Vice President is not high – unless he or she were an exceptionally talented rendition of Barack Obama.  With apologies to the Hispanic/Latinos still being mentioned in the Democratic veepstakes two weeks before the convention in Philadelphia, the importance of the changed circumstances of 2016 is evident.

Hillary Clinton might yet surprise but her decision to not accentuate the issue that is driving significant numbers of white voters to Trump – in an age of increased terror that too many conflate with ethnicity – is understandable, especially for Democratic, reasonable Republican and independent Hispanic/Latino votes.  Their primary goal should be to stop the abnormal threat poses by Trump, not to win the vice presidential nomination.

These are not normal times.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

Nice and Time

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The curdling and compounding effect upon fear and anger by terror and violence is real. The terrorist attack in Nice on July 14 was happening as I was in Boston reassuring a group of worried Hispanic/Latino professionals that I cannot see any way that Donald Trump can win and Hillary Clinton lose the election. I still believe it, yet the attack in Nice is precisely the unknown factor that can recast the race for President.

Few can resist the line Trump again immediately parroted after the horror in Nice once again overwhelmed the entire media and political landscape. We must, Trump said, close the borders and ban Muslims. To be sure, there is reason to re-enforce strategies and defenses against those who would harm us. But Trump means to embark on a national policy of exclusion of any person or group that to him represents the collective fear that produces anger at a national level – and that can win an election he has no business winning.

I have thought long and hard about the probability of Trump getting elected. I have believed from the very beginning — after it was apparent that the Republicans were going to nominate him — that he could not win a general election. I have believed also that the election would not be close. But the terror in Nice, to be blunt, comes at a fortuitous time for Trump as Republican delegates gather in Cleveland.

At the GOP convention that starts Monday, he will have the nation’s attention – a nation truly worried about the future at its most basic level. There, of course, speaker after speaker will rant without exhaust about the presumed answers to the spreading threat of terror. The wrong answers. But the nation needs to hear them in order to begin processing them in real time. And so, to be blunt again, the attack comes at a fortuitous time for Hillary Clinton, too.

The first reaction will help Trump. Yet Nice gives her, the more competent of the two candidates, time to display her strengths and, as important, gives the nation time to digest the latest terror.

An example of the advantage that time gives Clinton is the compressed period she has to react to Trump’s selection of a running mate. Given the upsurge in public sentiment in favor of Trump as a result of Nice, Clinton now has time, indeed, to pursue the idea that she might select retired admiral James Stavridis as her vice presidential nominee.

His selection would underscore her strengths and signal the nation that she will wage the war against terror that Trump only knows to declare.

In pure political terms, Trump’s timing in picking Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana, boxed him into a situation that should now cause Trump’s advisors to try to convince him to retract his offer to Pence. If he does pull back his offer and instead reacts instantly by choosing a running mate with military experience, he might get away with it, but the nation will see how without planning and thought he is. Clinton’s campaign had started vetting Stavridis weeks ago by comparison.

In a presidential campaign as in life, time is of the essence.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

Dallas to Debacle

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The effect on the 2016 elections by the recent shootings by and against the police underlies the struggle to absorb the horror of what has happened.  If the slayings reverberate in favor of Donald Trump, then this week’s events only presage greater terror.  Trump’s lack of understanding of most topics of any magnitude and his shoot-from-the-belt approach —  seriously, no pun intended — would make matters worse.  He has more than demonstrated his capacity to unleash upon the land the full furies of the hate he already has used to fuel his campaign.

Sadly, the assassination of five law enforcement officers in Dallas by a black man transcends tragedy.  The murders personify the country’s new fragility that changing demographics, a difficult economy and vitriol and corruption in Congress are abetting.

Like the new age of climate change that jeopardizes our very existence, we have entered a new era in which race and other critical social stresses animate the possibility of disunion.  It can’t happen here, we are told.  Yet the greatest and most dangerous moment in this already perilous passage into the immediate future emanates from the social media and 24/7 news platforms that govern the public space today.

Ironically, the very tools shedding light into the continuous and discriminate shootings of black men also are the weapons that will be turned against the development of leaders who could lead us through these times.  Those who would lead will have their heads decapitated on social media before they can finish their statements on how to move us forward.  Social media and 24/7 news will serve to make us increasingly leaderless.

If the new-media normal hamstrings President Obama and Republican leaders at so important a moment as this week represents, then it surely bodes ill for the country.  How can anyone float a vision for the future in this unnerving environment?

In this poisoned mess, the country needs a Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Instead, we hear the voices of angry whites and, justifiably, of angrier black men and women who are tired, tired, tired of the rampant murders inflicted on their community by police officers who almost always face no consequences for their actions.  The question is if reaction to action will breed reaction and put us on the path to an abyss.

We as a nation need to rise above ourselves.  But who can call us to our better angels?  White people finally are beginning to understand that black and Hispanic/Latino complaints about law enforcement are neither bogus nor confection, and so white acceptance of reality must be encouraged.  So, too, minority communities must rein in their rancor.  But who can summon us together as a people to make sure that tomorrow or the next days or year or decade are not the beginning of the civic and internal strife that throughout history impelled empires and nations to self-immolate over time?

It can’t happen here denies the possibility of collapse of democratic rule or the arrival of a new holocaust or increasing disconnection that fosters extended paralysis.  It is a view fast becoming antiquated.  The new environment we have entered makes anything possible – even the election of a man like Trump who makes no bones of admiring dictators and dehumanizing his fellow citizens.

Without the anvils weighing her down, Hillary Clinton could have been the one who could speak directly and persuasively to moderate white voters and spark an electoral landslide to set us towards a better future.  O, what judgment history might render on Clinton and her decision to install a personal computer server in her home!  And this is easy stuff for the social media and the 24/7 menace.  What they have done to her we shortly could rue.  Not perfect, Clinton, compared to Trump, is clearly the way to not increase the chances that the new age ahead will be the history of old.

It really does not have to happen here.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

The Veep Matters

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I love Frank Bruni.  The columnist for The New York Times writes as to invoke envy.  He is smart.  He is creative.  I look forward to reading him.  But his column, published Saturday, July 3, while not wrong, was incomplete.  With the best of his writing, he dismisses the importance of whom Hillary Clinton selects to be her running mate.  Utterly inconsequential, he declares.

If you live in the context of Bruni’s world, you also would be wholly on point, correct and logical.  Except that other things are going on in the country that he and others under-appreciate.  I do not have to go too far to prove my point that perhaps major opinion-shapers like Bruni do not know it all.  The surprise Donald Trump sprung on the entire eastern establishment of writers and television experts of CNN, MSNBC, etc. and on seasoned political operatives more than suggests that perhaps the veep-pick-is-unimportant  view, too, is not altogether correct.

I remember, after Al Gore’s defeat in 2000, having lunch with the editorial page editor of a major eastern newspaper.  I proposed that I join his staff to write about Hispanic/Latino affairs.  A new demography, I said, led by Hispanic/Latino population growth, had taken hold of the country and would change it forever.  He listened politely but in the end said, and I quote:  I do not think that there would be enough to keep someone busy writing about Hispanics full-time.  By then, of course, a significant part of the Hispanic/Latino vote already had helped George W. Bush win.  Like so many pundits who dismiss the importance of the Hispanic/Latino vote, who do they think got Bush so close in Florida to win by 500 votes?

My meeting with this highly-placed and influential journalist was not as eye-opening as depressing.  He confirmed my view that some of the most provincial people live in our supposedly most cosmopolitan cities.  And they are not alone.

I met at the coffee shop of the Capitol Hilton not long after Gore’s defeat with a former member of Clinton’s Cabinet.  I told him that a national anti-Hispanic/Latino reaction would seize the country in one of the next few presidential cycles.  I explicitly said it would be in the vein of California’s Proposition 187 that in 1994 was aimed at immigrants but which everybody understood was specifically anti-Hispanic/Latino, and more specifically anti-Mexican and anti-Mexican-American.   I did not get very far with him.

And so, as much as I love Frank Bruni, he and others who should know better do not understand the whole picture. Part of what he does not understand – beyond the reading of the polls that show Hillary Clinton racking up significant support among Hispanic/Latino voters – is that there is also a new undercurrent of thought within the Hispanic/Latino community that is changing it.

A telling story about the roiled times we live in and how the Hispanic/Latino community is changing occurred in Miami a couple of years ago at a meeting of about 100 or so influential Hispanic/Latino leaders from throughout the country.

The meeting was called to discuss the future of the Hispanic/Latino population, and so the attendees were mostly of Mexican origin, but with a heavy Cuban host contingent.  The attendees were mostly businessmen and businesswomen, both Democratic and Republicans.  No elected officeholders nor the usual political consultants were present.  The conference was meant to think and reflect, not preen nor forage for business.  The environment lent itself to mature, calm exchanges.

The most salient moment for me was when a highly visible Cuban American stood and said to the mostly non-Cuban group:  “Now we understand what you are talking about.”  His reference was to legislation that Alabama and Georgia were then considering that was clearly aimed at Hispanic/Latinos.  A significant number of Cuban Americans live in Atlanta and, of course, the Cuban community’s representatives gather in the legislature in Tallahassee just down the road, not far from nearby Tampa.  They heard the confederate gunfire. The sheltered experience of Cuban Americans finally caught up with the rest of the Hispanic/Latino history in the country.

When these most Republican of Hispanic/Latino voters began to understand the threat Trump poses, they set the stage for something much more important and historic:  The unification of Hispanic/Latino groups and their increased participation in the civic life of the country.  And from that is coming a new kind of energy that can work on behalf of a ticket already destined to make history, especially if Hispanic/Latinos could see on the ballot a name like Becerra, Castro, Peña, Pérez or Salazar.

Polls surely are picking up how Hispanic/Latinos feel about Trump, but that is only part of the story.  I wrote in another blog that this moment is of existential importance for Hispanic/Latinos.

Whom Hillary selects is not utterly inconsequential to us.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

Inflection Point for Hillary

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Given the announcement by Attorney General Loretta Lynch that she will accept the recommendation of her civil service employees investigating Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and server, the campaign is at an inflection point.  Nothing good is going to come of this, whatever Department of Justice lawyers recommend, mostly because we do not know when their recommendations are going to come.

Timing is everything in politics, and for us not to know when the report will come and what it will say destabilizes the general election environment that favored Clinton.

For me, the inflection point is not constrained solely to the legal issues of the case. Rather, it is within the internal strategic thinking of the campaign itself.  The campaign must prepare for the worst and must consider — now — how to win an election in the most adverse of circumstances against Donald Trump, who is a true danger to the republic.

I have said it again, and I will say it again.  If the Clinton campaign does not make the Hispanic/Latino vote central to its strategy beyond what we have seen so far, we truly are in danger of losing an election that by any other measure should be a historic landslide.

This is the time for Hispanic/Latinos closest to Hillary to speak up.  If they do not, then they are ill-serving Hillary, the Hispanic/Latino community but, most important, the country.  I know some of those people, and I fear that they love Hillary too closely to not step up and say what needs to be said and done.

These individuals face a daunting task:  A fully effective plan to maximize the Hispanic/Latino vote across the board is a very expensive proposition but it is in my mind a necessary insurance policy.  And nothing is as hard to do within a campaign than convince others to spend money on anything – especially if it is out of the ordinary.  And trying to persuade a campaign to spend serious money takes herculean task commitment.  But it is imperative that she carry Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada and think about taking Arizona.

Were Trump to succeed in winning any of the Midwestern states that he covets, then Florida and the Mountain West can save the Democratic ticket, and this, of course, brings to the fore the need to put a Hispanic/Latino on the ticket.

The cost of exploding the Hispanic/Latino vote is by far more expensive than maintaining the high level of African-American support President Obama received in 2008 and 2012.  More expensive by far than expanding the impact of the women’s vote, of the gay and lesbian electorate, of the Asian American vote.

It is absolutely true that the campaign must spend what it must to try to defend the states that Trump — now given fresh ammunition — is targeting by trying to wrest away non-Hispanic/Latino white voters from Clinton.  Were he to succeed, only one group can fill the void: Hispanic/Latino voters.

The immediate consequence of the announcement this morning is that it takes the steam out of the momentum that Hillary was generating.  Her campaign was building — impressively and quickly — an electoral wave that seemed on the verge of swamping Donald Trump weeks ahead of the nominating conventions, much less the general election.

The slow-down now will cause the polls to change, and when polls change, everything begins to change.  Trump will get a second-wind; more Republicans will come home to their party’s nominee;  GOP  donors reluctant to give to Trump now will; states that vote Republican usually but were thought of as potential Democratic pick-ups now revert to the red column; and Clinton supporters will begin to fret and worry and as they fret and worry they cause some to begin to re-think their support.

And that is all before the report is released and any recommendations known.

The new moment serves to paralyze new thinking in a new environment in which the old playbooks no longer suffice.  To me, supporting the usual voter registration organizations is very important but not as important as devising other ways to broaden voter registration efforts, ones that engage average Hispanic/Latinos beyond political activists and paid volunteers in the process of getting Hispanic/Latino voters to the polls in November.

If Clinton’s numbers hold up in the Hispanic/Latino community as the election nears and becomes a tight affair, then still other states might be viable, especially if serious Republican voters cannot bring themselves to vote for Trump to be commander-in-chief.

Current polling suggests that Clinton could breach the 80-percent mark of support among Hispanic/Latinos in November – a historic accomplishment.  Even slightly elevated levels of Hispanic/Latino voter registration and participation can push her electoral-vote margin out of reach.

To not invest heavily in the Hispanic/Latino now is folly –  foolish and perhaps fatal.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.