Tag Archives: Hispanic

What Would McGovern Do?

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Sen. George McGovern’s death on Sunday morning could be seen as a final revenge had the 1972 presidential candidate been a vengeful man. It came, after all, on the eve of the foreign policy debate between President Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney.  Even in death, the ever-faithful McGovern rendered another public service to his country. To consider how right McGovern’s anti-war policy was regarding the disasters in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and to reflect on his heroic role as a bomber pilot in World War II and to then accept that someone like George W. Bush sat in the Oval Office as President is to understand how colossally important elections are.

So upon McGovern’s death with a national election days away, there is no quarrel about President Obama’s success in foreign policy and why he should remain in the White House.  Successfully prosecuting Al Qaeda, Bin Laden and the war on terror just as McGovern pursued Axis bombing targets in Germany and Italy, Obama has extracted us from Iraq and is doing so from Afghanistan. McGovern would have done the same in Vietnam, which should have been the last of this country’s interventionist imbroglios had Bush not taken us down a similar path. If Mitt Romney is elected and another set of bumblers take office with him, no lesson will have been learned.

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To Frack or not to Frack

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President Obama in the debate on Tuesday made a passing reference to the role that natural gas can play in the nation’s economic future.  The need in a probable second term to accelerate the development of the country’s immense natural gas resources to power a new century of American power and prosperity is achingly evident.  It is incumbent on the Administration to press forward.  During the British Petroleum oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, there did not seem to be anyone in the inner circles of the Administration with an oil and gas background to provide timely and effective counsel in the worst of happenstances.  And it showed.  So there is reason now to make sure that what could be the best is not mishandled.  The country, after all, stands at the threshold of an astonishing economic renaissance.  An effort on the scale of John Kennedy summoning the nation to win the race to the moon against the Soviets will be necessary, for the mission has many environmental and other hurdles to surmount.

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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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Paul Ryan: Too Angry Too Young

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Gore Vidal many decades before he grew old said in a television interview that the old grow angry when they accept that their youth is indeed lost, never to return.  That was rich coming from Gore, who was angry most of his life, living as he did long before more tolerant times changed public sentiment towards his sexual orientation.  Gore had a reason to be angry, but by all reports he was not the prototypical angry white male when he lived out his last years with more grace than Clint Eastwood and Jack Welch are displaying in their last decades.  Now the times are giving us angry white men like Paul Ryan.  His business suit last night during the vice presidential debate seemed a tight fit, perhaps made so by its efforts to contain youthful, muscular ire.

Eastwood, of course, is now remembered for his vulgar empty-chair routine at the Republican National Convention in Tampa that embarrassed himself and Ann Romney and her kids on national television.  The Romneys all showed up excitedly to see the bonanza of a Hollywood star endorse Mitt for president.  What they got instead were the rantings of an old, angry man taking license with the here and now.  Only a couple months later, Jack Welch, the former chairman of General Electric, also took fictitious liberty with reality, accusing the Bureau of Labor Statistics of cooking the numbers so that the employment rate fell just in time to benefit President Obama’s campaign for re-election.

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Spell my name correctly, willya?

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What is the deal with accents?  Some news organizations and networks noticeably have begun to accent the names of individuals, places and things that carry a Spanish spelling.  Some don’t.  ESPN is almost meticulous about it.  PBS not so much.  The New York Times does it; other newspapers – of all news organizations that should – do not.  How Spanish names and words began to lose their accents has itself been lost in time.  Most of the loss, of course, has to do with the disrespect for the language fueled by anti-Spanish sentiment leading up to and after the U.S.-Mexican and U.S.-Spanish wars.  As important was the market of the time.

Now, amid the new demography of the country, seeing a Spanish name in print or on a television screen with an accent stands out as much as seeing the same name the very next day without one.

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Apple and America: Don’t Look Back

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A friend mentioned a recent column by Joe Nocera of The New York Times analyzing the “unmitigated disaster” of the iPhone5’s new map application.  I am not into technology so it took me a week or so to get around to Nocera’s column – which was not about the iPhone5 as much as about the moment when companies reach an inflection point in their history that causes them to decline.  The same thing happens to the human mind as it ages and, of course, to whole nations.

I am going to abbreviate much of Nocera’s column verbatim and ask readers to consider whether his analysis of Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and Blackberry applies to the cases the Supreme Court is deciding badly on voting rights, affirmative action, political redistricting and anti-immigrant laws.  Jumping from the map app disaster, Nocera wrote: “Though Apple will remain a highly profitable company for years to come, I would be surprised if it ever gives us another product as transformative as the iPhone or the iPad.   Part of the reason is obvious: (Steve) Jobs isn’t there anymore… Apple’s current executive team is no doubt trying to maintain the same demanding, innovative culture, but…there is also a less obvious — yet possibly more important — reason that Apple’s best days may soon be behind it…

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Go Hard Now at the HispanicLatino Vote

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So much has been made of the debate on Wednesday.  With good reason.  President Obama did not do so well.   But my mind goes to the HispanicLatino couple driving off in separate cars to work this morning two days after the debacle in Denver.  What should the couple look for now having heard two years of anti-HispanicLatino rhetoric from the Republican party and, two months before the election, having been told by its candidate for President that they are part of the 47 percent of the country that does not matter?

Before the debate, the couple and perhaps their kids already might have been a part of the 70 percent of the HispanicLatino electorate that wanted Obama re-elected.  A news report the day before the debate had HispanicLatino support for Obama surpassing 70 percent in some polls.  That would be historic, approaching Kennedy-Johnson 1960 and Johnson-Humphrey territory in 1964.

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Not about Sulzberger’s Times, so much as Our Times

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Arthur Ochs Sulzberger was a name that almost any journalist who does not work for Fox News would recognize.  Most HispanicLatinos never heard of him.  The former publisher of The New York Times died Saturday.  As soon as family members announced his death, they started receiving the usual praise that accompanies most men at the time of their deaths.  By almost any measure of those who knew him, Sulzberger merited the honors that made their way to his family.  This posting is not about Sulzberger.  It is more about the importance of the period in journalism in which he lived his life and that his family’s newspaper nurtured.  It would be interesting in a few years from now to see what is written about Rupert Murdoch, another influential publisher and Sulzberger’s contemporary.

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So, Archbishop, You’re Going to Tell Me How to Vote?

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That line could have come from King George VI played by Colin Firth in The King’s Speech.  The archbishop thought he was going to tell the king how to run his business, in this case using a speech therapist without proper credentials to help him prepare for his coronation.   The king with the speech defect put the archbishop in his place.  So comes now Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles who wants Catholics to “let their faith form their political decisions” before they vote this year.  Gomez plans to write a series of essays on the principles that should guide Catholics in this year’s elections.  “We have important obligations as citizens. But we have to carry out those obligations always in light of our duty to God,” the archbishop directed.  Of course, Gomez gets to define that duty.

Almost simultaneously, the Pew Center reported that support among Catholics for President Obama’s re-election has ballooned to at least 54 percent compared to 39 percent for Mitt Romney.  Obama’s rise among Catholic voters came even though Romney picked Paul Ryan, a Catholic with movie star looks, as his running mate.  Since almost 70 percent of HispanicLatinos support Obama, it would seem that as many or more HispanicLatino Catholics support Obama.  HispanicLatinos and the rest of the Catholic electorate will help hand Obama and Catholic Vice President Joe Biden score a one-sided victory in California in November.

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