Tag Archives: Hillary Clinton

Meet the Press? Not me.

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A commercial break on Sunday’s Meet the Press on NBC featured a young man in a Charles Schwab advertisement having lunch with his father.  The son challenges his father about not being able to recoup fees from his broker should an investment sour.  “That’s not the way the world works,” his father responds, laughingly.  The young man is easily direct in his rejoinder:  “Well, the world is changing.”

Too bad the producers of Meet the Press do not know what a 30-second ad can tell them.

I am a former journalist who is marinated in the media, to quote former New York Times columnist Russell Baker.  Throughout my life, I have read newspapers and watched public affairs and cable news programming in excess.  But I will no longer watch Meet the Press. 

I began watching the program in the black-and-white days of television at about the time I read my first political book, Teddy White’s The Making of the President, 1960 and before Lawrence Spivak hosted the show.  I was in junior high school in West Texas then. Sometimes the winds of the Permian Basin would sweep away the signal from KMID in Midland and make viewing an adventure in my small town 40 miles away.  Always hopeful, I would tune in before I ran off to Sunday Mass.  No more.

These were the guests on Sunday’s show: Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump’s campaign manager;  Cory Booker, senator from New Jersey;  Keith Ellison, a member of Congress from Minnesota; David Brooks, NY Times columnist; Hugh Hewitt, conservative radio talk show host from California; and Katty Kay, a journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation.  Non-guests quoted by remote were David Axelrod, formerly chief political strategist for President Barack Obama; and someone named Cliff Clayton, an agricultural editor for something called DTN.

As far as Hispanics/Latinos go, I think a Hispanic/Latino woman was quoted for about three seconds in a report on voters.  That was it – this, on a national television network in a country whose Hispanic/Latino population is the second largest population group and whose white population loses about one percent share of the country’s population every 18 months, more or less.

To the producers of the program, it must be really, really important to have a journalist from England tell me about my country’s politics.  And how could I do without the views of DTN’s agricultural editor?

I have nothing against these people, and I am not a provincial dolt with a bad education, and I am not against globalization.  I read Brooks religiously.  Booker and Ellison are fine, I am sure.  Hewitt is a conservative but not deplorable.  And Kay is smart and intelligent.

But part of Sunday’s program was devoted to where Democrats go next after the disaster of Nov. 8.  Nowhere to be seen, much less heard, was someone from the fastest-growing raw-number voter population that voted probably around 70 percent Democratic (this figure is still being determined).

Incredible.

I am of the age of a generation that still flinches at the use of the word damn on television, and I recoil at the social and civic coarseness that has debased society, and so I would certainly never use in this space some of the expletives people use in blogs and tweets.  That is not to say they were not exploding in my mind as I watched Sunday morning.

Seriously, what is going on?

Having been a newspaper reporter, columnist, editor and member of an editorial board and having been a television producer myself and having worked in national presidential campaigns and in the Clinton and Obama administrations once I left journalism and having lived in all parts of the country, I have been around and I know why these things happen.  That does not ease the surprise when I see them happening again and again.

In a way, I could be the traditional, older man in the Charles Schwab commercial not familiar with the new ways of wealth management.  But I will never be as clueless as the producers of NBC’s premier political show.

Things are happening in this country within the Hispanic/Latino community that probably will determine the fate of the country.  The producers have no idea on assessing how to gauge the reaction to Trump’s election – beyond reporting the usual immigrant-scared-of-being deported story.  Is there a “brown” nationalism forming as a logical response to the white nationalism that is core and central to Trumpism?  Are more Hispanics/Latinos buying guns?  Did the 2016 election give birth to a new pan-Hispanic/Latino identity?   Has a false poll narrative (that Trump got 35 percent of the Hispanic/Latino vote) already taken root to become the conventional wisdom among the media and political class and to be spouted senselessly over and over and over again for the next 20 years by the learned guests of Meet the Press?

But who would know otherwise?  That the company that owns NBC owns Telemundo and that the other Spanish-language network, Univisión, airs a highly regarded news program on Sunday are not enough.  Hey, guys, it is not just Hispanics/Latinos who need to know what the hell is going on, to quote the president-elect.

Instead of replaying a Saturday Night Live video that a great majority of Meet the Press viewers probably had seen already, the producers might have considered discussing how Hillary Clinton got five percentage points more of the statewide vote than Obama in Texas; how Democrats won all county-wide offices in once-Republican Harris County (Houston); and picked up four GOP seats in the lower house of the Texas Legislature — all because of the Hispanic/Latino vote.  And that is only Texas.

If it’s Sunday, it is no longer Meet the Press for me.

And judging by my conversations with friends and family, I am sure I am not the only one.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman and writes at HispanicLatino.com.

THE COST ALREADY

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NEW HAVEN, CONN. — Several days later, on the train to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia knowing that I should get used to a surprise a day, I nevertheless still have to pinch myself to believe the raw hate and anger that swelled up from the floor of the convention hall and the delegates who nominated Donald Trump in Cleveland. It was shocking.

As astonishing were the odious speakers, culminating in Trump’s wretched ranting about race and ethnicity. His congratulatory stepping away from the podium and self-congratulatory bopping of his head up and down – feeling the fury he had unleashed come back at him in a rush from the delegates – reminded me of Benito Mussolini.  It was eerie, abnormal.

The many commentators on television who tried to equate this 2016 convention to the troubled 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago were engaging in lazy thinking. In Chicago, delegates fought angrily over the war in Vietnam. In Cleveland, the delegates in reality were hurling invective at half of the country that elected Barack Obama President, fearing, of course, that we will elect Hillary Clinton as well. I got a sense that the Republican delegates intuited their defeat come November, metastasizing their rage.

The Clinton campaign team played brilliantly their hand, running again and again the ad featuring the kids watching snippets of Trump at his foulest worst. Kids in commercials are a powerful force. This was LBJ’s daisy ad. For four days the ads began to build a huge virtual jaw into which on the last day the disdainful Trump walked, his ego clouding the reality around him.

But hate is a potent force that has turned elections in the past, and despite the disaster that was Cleveland, Democrats cannot afford to let up and must work to win the election.

Trump, though, has achieved one of the underlying sentiments of his fellow Republican delegates in Cleveland: He has stymied the growth of the political power of Hispanic/Latinos not only at the national level but the local level as well.

Another, more normal GOP nominee would have seen the demographic writing on the wall and chosen from one of a handful of plausible Hispanic/Latino Republican officeholders. Nevada Gov. Ruben Sandoval or New Mexico Governor Susana Martínez or the ever-ready Marco Rubio were well-suited to the office. Either Sandoval or Rubio would have been a nightmare in a normal contest. But Trump chose Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, forcing Clinton to not accentuate ethnicity and thus Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine emerged on the Democratic side.

For the next eight years, then, unless events intrude, Hispanic/Latinos, already disproportionately underrepresented in the Senate and the House of Representatives, will continue their too-slow entry into the American political mainstream. A Hispanic/Latino on the Democratic ticket and as Vice President would have spurred much-needed efforts at the local level to strengthen Hispanic/Latino involvement and engagement in public and civic life.

It should more than matter to Hispanic/Latinos that in the next eight years great decisions will be taken on issues and challenges that involve their immediate future in which they will have limited say. And it should matter that no one in the White House will take personal interest in the further enhancement of the Hispanic/Latino electorate at the local level.

It is no longer acceptable to entrust in a presidential administration our whole destiny. Nothing beats being at the table. Discussions at tables more often than not lead to compromise. And how quickly can fall off the needs and concerns of Hispanic/Latinos! It has been happening for decades.

I traded e-mails with a friend who earnestly supported the idea of Julián Castro being named Clinton’s running mate. He was disappointed but realistic.

“We have to win the election.”

Indeed.

The cost otherwise would be higher than it sadly already is.

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.

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.

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.

The Enemy Within

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It is hard to see how and why the leadership of the Republican party does not see the danger at hand for its future.  Its leaders are not aware that their party could be only a few years from extinction.  Things do die.  Larger entities than the Republican party – whole empires and powerful corporations, in fact – have disappeared through history.  A political party disappearing is nothing.  On this business of the fiscal cliff, the country already is suspicious of Republicans by a 2-1 margin.  So within a few weeks, the country could blame Republicans for throwing the economy back into recession.  And let us say that another storm like Sandy brews up in the Atlantic next summer, pushes past Florida and instead of wrecking New York and New Jersey parks itself over Atlanta this time.  Already caught in a demographic squeeze as the nation’s population changes, embroiled in an extended Bush recession and then pasted by another blow from the change in climate that Republicans deny – the GOP could be at the precipice leading into the 2014 midterm elections.  They just lost an election that if President Obama had had a better night in Denver one evening might have turned into a landslide.  And now, another storm named Hillary already is beginning to vent its first soft but undeniable breezes for 2016.

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