Were I a woman, I would use the election in November as a blunt political tool: In one fell swoop, millions upon millions of women could send an unvarnished message to right-wing Republicans, the Catholic Church, the U.S. Supreme Court and gasbags like Rush Limbaugh to shut the heck up. What prompted this blog posting – okay, this is downright rant – is that, among other things, I have a niece, recently graduated from college, who is beginning to start building a professional career and, hopefully, a successful life.
Tag Archives: election
HispanicLatinos within the Democratic Ranks: A Dangerous Unease
So I have a friend – a longtime Democratic liberal stalwart – who announced to me over lunch that he intends to vote Republican in November. I was stunned. His decision upends his long work record and rings totally out of character. You are going against the flow of history, I reminded him gently. A surge in the HispanicLatino community seems to be building in favor of President Obama and the Democratic ticket.
I am just tired of white liberals, he rejoined. I have never felt comfortable around them but now I am done with them.
PBS’ American Experience on Clinton: Incomplete but Invaluable
The retelling of the Bill Clinton story recently on PBS’ American Experience was more saga than the usual documentaries of that renowned series, which seeks to capture and project the nature of an American Presidency and its importance to history. Nevertheless, it set the mind to thinking how different and hopeful were the times then. We have gone from promise to precipice.
The Clinton Presidency of course gave way to the hapless administration of the nation’s affairs and its government by George W. Bush, and it would serve the Obama camp well today to make sure that it does not approach this year’s election in the form of Al Gore, one of the Clinton Administration’s endpoints. Gore bears the unique responsibility of having lost a national election for his failure to carry his home state or others where using Bill Clinton might have yielded victory.
Not Good: Events Taking Shape Without Significant HispanicLatino Participation
It says a lot about the country today that the Republican nominee for President is being chosen without any meaningful participation by one of its largest population groups. Aside from Florida where the HispanicLatino vote played some role, the HispanicLatino electoral quotient in the primaries and caucuses has been nil, which is in stark juxtaposition to the cover of Time magazine that has so many across the nation twitter. Yesterday’s primary in Arizona – of all places – saw almost no participation by HispanicLatinos. In a different world, HispanicLatinos should have rushed to vote for a more moderate Republican candidate win. But HispanicLatinos skipped the primary as if it never existed – a fact that speaks to how bifurcated the country is politically.
National Decline: A Burden for HispanicLatinos
The phrase national decline finally has entered the lexicon of American political thought – and not soon enough. How much time America has to address its national decline is an interesting question given that the nation’s government has entered a period of stagnation and ideological paralysis. The institutions of government, paralyzed by the nation’s increasingly polarized and monetized politics, show no signs of being able to put forth strategies to sustain the nation’s future.
On Stage Last Night: The Old America
If you believe that the country is undergoing a historic demographic transformation and that a new America has emerged with a majority of the country realizing it needs a new way forward, then you need to look no farther than last night’s Republican presidential forum in Arizona. The debate was for and about the old America, that is to say, that part of the country that is willing to hear candidates for the Presidency who would spend 25 minutes…on birth control. The discussion last night was of interest to voters who care about the issues that hardly matter to the rest of America: The bailout of the auto industry that worked; immigration that helps prop up a declining national population and, of course, birth control. And that was the first hour.
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
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