Tag Archives: Hispanic

Marco Rubio: Laugh or Cry?

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I am one of those HispanicLatinos who wants to like Marco Rubio.  Anyone who knows and understands how fast HispanicLatinos need to rise within high leadership circles to affect the challenges the country faces should cut a wide swath around individuals like Rubio, especially those gifted with the kind of presence, charm and personality that some people equate to that possessed by John F. Kennedy.  In today’s media-driven world, Rubio possesses all the traits that lead to success.

Except that Rubio is so wrong on so many fronts.

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Romney Lets Golden Moment Pass

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I do not know what President Obama is going to say today in Orlando at the annual convention of the National Association of Latino Elected Officials.  I did hear Mitt Romney yesterday and to say that it fell short of what he needed to do is an understatement.  By my timing, Romney spoke for 16 minutes.  In the 20 or so GOP debates during the presidential primary campaign, I estimate that Romney spent at least five minutes, on average, bashing immigrants and, by extension, HispanicLatinos who, while not making immigration their number one priority, do not cotton to that kind of language.  Romney’s antagonistic language in the last few months amounted to perhaps as many as 100 televised minutes – not to mention the endless repetition of his remarks as sounds bites across every medium in the country.  It isn’t as if HispanicLatinos do not know where Romney stands on things HispanicLatino.  And so 16 minutes hardly would suffice. 

But Romney amazed me:  The national Spanish-language networks, both television and radio, waited for him with genuine interest.  Univision and Telemundo were there, but also were the mainstream media, from which most HispanicLatinos get their news.  CNN and MSNBC carried the address live.  This was not a “gotcha” moment.  He had control of the entire environment.  It was a golden moment for Romney but, like the alleged vetting of Marco Rubio for vice president, Romney flubbed his opportunity.  Perhaps he expects Jeb Bush or Rubio to do what he could not do for himself.  Yet it does not work that way. Folks do not vote for surrogates. He could have achieved 100 percent coverage of the HispanicLatino community to make up for 100 minutes of discord.

If the Romney campaign hoped for some phrase, some language, some image, some narrative to register and make it across the many media gathered there that could begin to turn around the presidential race, the speech it prepared for its candidate was wholly and surprisingly absent of anything substantive.  Who gets this kind of tee-up and whiffs it? 

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Off Comes the Shine on Marco Rubio

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Reports earlier yesterday that Florida Sen. Marco Rubio was not being vetted as a serious vice presidential running mate by the Mitt Romney campaign – contradicted later by the candidate himself – imparts valuable political data.  Perhaps a goldmine. 

The first nugget suggests ongoing debate within the campaign about the strategy for the general election itself.  Thus the hash that became the latest Rubio boomlet was no boomlet at all.  More probably it was a botched attempt to influence internal campaign thinking.

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The Dreamers: Tomorrow’s Leaders – the Force the HispanicLatino Community Has Always Needed

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The next few days or fortnight will redeem Charles Dickens’ it was the worst of times, it was the best of times for the HispanicLatino community.  In a clear signal that it understands the political and fundamental role that HispanicLatinos play in developing the future of the country, the Obama Administration set the stage for the incorporation of 800,000 mostly HispanicLatino young men and women into the flow of American life.  For them, it is the best of times, at least in the short run.  They can think about how to proceed with their lives for the next two years and perhaps longer if they make the most of the time they have been allotted.

But depending on what and when the Supreme Court rules on Arizona’s anti-HispanicLatino law, the rest of the community could well be facing the beginning of the worst of times, starting now, if the Court announces its decision today or perhaps next week.  The Court almost certainly will rule in favor of a law that targets HispanicLatinos specifically so that they any individual who appears to be HispanicLatino can be harassed at the whim of any local official.  Indeed, almost any positive ruling by the Court will encourage local officials, including law enforcement and public school officials, to embark on dangerous self-enforcement missions that in some cases will provoke violence. 

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The Fundamental Choice Mexicans Face

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The Mexican presidential debate last night might have changed the course of the election, scheduled for July 1.  But probably not as much as a student-led revolt against the return of the PRI – the party that dominated the country for more than five decades under governments that were feeble excuses for democracy.  The polls supposed that the Partido Revolucionario Institucional would return to power but now show that perhaps the election was called too early.  Students took to the streets and the internet and seem to have reminded their fellow Mexicans of the PRI’s history.  The students shouting in the streets certainly reminded me of the day in 1990 that Luis Donaldo Colossio two years before he was assassinated looked at me across the conference table in our newspaper editorial board room, a quizzical expression on his face.

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Gail Does Texas

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So Gail Collins sorta ruined my weekend.  The columnist for The New York Times could not have known that I had not planned to pick up another book this week, especially with the EuroCup competition starting today.  Still recovering from Robert Caro’s latest forest-killer on Lyndon Johnson, I thought I had made enough time for a story about the history of the Mossad.  Reading about LBJ and about how Israel ruthlessly wages universal war against its enemies is not easy.  It is going to take me longer to read 200 pages of Collins’ As Texas Goes... as 1,000 pages of Caro.  Laughing consumes more time than you think.  It has been years since I went from beef and bourbon to cotton candy, and you know how long that takes to eat.

There no doubt will be more to say on Collins’ book (on page 32 so far) but I saw her hawking it on MSNBC on Wednesday.  In the ensuing discussion with Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, none of them could put a finger on why Texans feels their state is so special.  They like most people could not get beyond the surprise that, for good and bad, Texans care a lot about their state – a state that seems to have inordinate influence over the nation’s life, as Collins believes.

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Wisconsin last night compounded the value of the HispanicLatino vote for November

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The election results in Wisconsin last night raise more than an eyebrow.  They carry real implications.  The one consequence not being discussed in the post-election analyses on the television sets is the ever-ballooning importance of the HispanicLatino vote.  Take the electoral votes of Wisconsin and perhaps other near-by states out of the equation for November, and it makes Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Florida all the more critical.  As each day passes, the HispanicLatino vote gains greater political currency, and the resources dedicated to it should increase accordingly.  States that are deemed safe today might not be tomorrow, and so whatever additional insurance can be purchased by the campaigns, its cost should not daunt campaign strategists.

The facility with which Gov. Scott Walker swept aside the attempt to recall him also gives rise to the need to review the infrastructure that President Obama’s campaign is building to win in November.  However important labor unions, they can provide only one component of the votes Democrats need.

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Voter purges can lead to voter surges

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Did anyone expect otherwise?  News reports that elections officials are purging hundreds of thousands of HispanicLatinos from voter rolls throughout the nation should surprise no one.  But as easy to identify potential voters to strike from official voting lists through electronic means is the ability to identify them once they have been removed.  President Obama’s campaign has the necessary time and resources to take the steps necessary to protect its flank.  Whether its managers do what needs to be done is another matter.  But no one should think that average voters – HispanicLatino or not – on their own are going to take the steps to make sure their registrations are in order until they go vote – which could be too late.

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The President’s Hair: To Reminisce

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The Washington Post running the photograph of the little black youngster feeling President Obama’s hair to see if it was like his was probably lost on some people.  What it must have meant for that little boy in the process of finding his identity and his manhood.  And however it might be emblematic of other things, it represents also the time and point in which America always finds itself.  The kid could have been a white boy that age, or a HispanicLatino kid.  Upon seeing the image, my mind travelled back to another moment decades ago.

I remember shepherding a class of about 20 seventh-grade black kids to Monterrey, Mexico, on a field trip from Houston, a trip of about 500 miles.  It might have been a trip to the moon – for the kids and hosts alike, not to mention the teacher-chaperones.  Upon our arrival at the hotel, some of the hotel’s staff actually touched the hair of my students, and some of the clerks kissed their foreheads.  My students giggled.  I was embarrassed and touched at the same time – and confused.

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On summer’s eve: An election way down the road to being decided

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As the summer begins, where does the presidential election stand five months before Americans go to the polls?  If retired general Colin Powell is to be believed, he is one of those voters still undecided who make the polls a muddle when in fact I suspect they are not.  I guess we are going to trust his word.  The reality is the election is being decided each day.  It would be a good bet that the endless news cycle is driving more voters to an earlier decision than four years ago.  The much-ballyhooed lack of intensity among voters will be a wash if the campaigns do their work correctly.  Even though the electorates of 2008, 2010 and 2012 will be different one from the other, in many ways the election perhaps is closer to already having been decided – except for the final tally of votes.

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