Tag Archives: demographic

The Debate’s Effect on Arizona: California Here We Come, Right Back Where We Started From

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Against a backdrop of ever-changing polls, the debate last night highlighted the essential political question for Americans – certainly for Mitt Romney’s disdained 47-percent and most assuredly for HispanicLatinos:  Whether they believe the tiger trying mightily to shear his stripes.  All Americans have heard – and seen on videotape – Romney denigrate HispanicLatinos and dismiss at least 47 percent of the American people at a time when national unity is elementally important.  We do not know what he might think of undecided voters after last night.  The polls will soon enough begin to tell the latest version of the tale but no one knows what other images of the candidates – stripes or no stripes – the optical nerves of 70 million Americans sent to their brains.

Did they see a President in Barack Obama or did they see through the superficial arguments that Romney floats into the air hoping that the weight of truth does not crash them back to earth?  The debate and its results are important but there seems to be more going on with the innumerable polls that change storylines from day to day.  Polls of states are more reliable than national polls, and so what is happening in Arizona might be instructive.  Indeed, Arizona might be the most important state in the 2012 election.  And the polls after the debate in Arizona will probably conclude that the public has seen enough of the campaign.

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Comes Before the Court the Future

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Over the weekend, the following letter to Justice Kennedy regarding Fisher v. Texas made its way to Washington, where I hope it is of some benefit.

Justice Anthony Kennedy

The Supreme Court of the United States
One First Street, N.E.
Washington, D.C. 20543

Dear Justice Kennedy:

With all due respect, I hope you are not offended that I am bowing to public reports that you are the possibly deciding vote on Fisher v. Texas.  I hope the clerk who screens your mail is not similarly offended.  I am not a lawyer but I write in the hope that I can help you see Fisher from a different point of view.

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How Should Republicans Spell Landslide? W-h-i-g.

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Some 30 years ago, Horace Busby, an advisor to and speechwriter for Lyndon Johnson, famously coined the phrase “electoral lock” arguing that the Republican party would win contests for the White House for decades to come.  Busby, a good man of progressive virtue, had no clue about how the HispanicLatino population one day would upset the Electoral College applecart.

The Republican electoral lock on the White House that Busby predicted lasted a little more than one decade (1980-1992) and had the Supreme Court not taken away Al Gore’s win in Florida, the country might have elected a Democrat as President for 20 years running.  And now the nation would be on the verge of adding four years to that string if the polls are right that President Obama is more than edging towards re-election.  The polls, this week at least,  indicate Obama nearing landslide territory.

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Demographic Implosion

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Years ago, supporters of George W. Bush’s push for immigration reform correctly predicted in public that falling birth rates in Mexico and a growing Mexican economy would reduce and stabilize historic immigration to the United States from its southern neighbor.  Bush wanted to disarm critics skeptical of anything that smelled of an amnesty that would add fuel to the demographic change that so many in his party fear.  The ploy did not work.  Immigration reform went down in flames.

Now comes evidence that the life span of the lower-income non-HispanicLatino white population without high school diplomas is falling precipitously – a development that will amplify and accelerate the growth of the HispanicLatino population and its importance to the economy.  Most of this blog draws heavily and directly from a story in The New York Times by Sabrina Tavernise two weeks ago that details in part how the demographic transformation that alarms so many in the country will continue.

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The Supreme Court: Cracking Open the Future

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The presidential campaign soon will reach its fever pitch.  October is its apogee.  Amid the din and noise and building craziness of the next five weeks, the Supreme Court holds its opening conference today, ahead of the full term that convenes next Monday.  The Court fittingly will begin its work ahead of the voters’ judgment on Nov. 6 –appropriate because its impending term could overshadow the presidential election of 2012 in the long run of history.

I wonder if the Justices in their cloistered reflections ever consider the fate of their families, their grandchildren in particular.  Historians one day almost certainly could look back and see this Court’s term as the decisive moment when the United States positioned itself for another great century or began to drift inexorably into irrelevancy if not periods of outright civil strife.  In the next few months, the Court will consider critical cases that will determine how the country manages changes in its new demography that will bump up against the basic civil rights of its citizens and of destiny itself.

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HispanicLatino Political Operatives: The Need to be Decisive

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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.

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The Conventions: A Watershed

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Posted on Thursday evening for Friday, Sept. 7, 2012.

I wrote late last year that I sensed that the HispanicLatino finally was turning the corner to become part of the national consciousness.  The geographic concentration of the vast majority – about 75 percent – of the HispanicLatino population in eight states historically worked against its inclusion in the normal affairs of the nation.  For that and other reasons, HispanicLatinos for decades have been absent from national commercials, television news sets and the decision-making processes of government, organizations large and small and corporations of any size and their boardrooms.  And from opportunity itself.  It is as if a group of individuals in the millions whose forefathers arrived in all of the Americas more than a century before Jamestown did not exist for much of the nation.  The misplaced notion that most HispanicLatinos conducted their daily lives in Spanish abetted their lack of consideration in the normal, day-to-day thinking of managers, bureaucrats, business owners and corporate planners.

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It is more than the economy, stupid.

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When does community end?  If the country feels as if it is fraying, that a big scramble is on during which everyone grabs for their own, it is because the sense of unity that fragilely sews together a nation that depends on comity started coming undone first.  It is not the economy, stupid.  The furies of our times are about something else.

The sad and disturbing fact is that many Americans are having trouble handling the new demography that has come down on them pretty fast.  The components of change embedded in the population decades ago by individuals choosing not to have more than two children put the country on a fast track that along with immigration altered the country’s demography.  Now the consequences of those decisions are being reflected in an election that people want to treat as a discussion about the direction of the economy and about its closely-related cousin, Medicare.  But the election is about so much more.  It is about whether the nation at some point understands the dangerous point at which we have arrived, when community is not about everyone.  The Republican line about saving America is rhetorical gauze for something more disturbing.

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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 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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