Tag Archives: HispanicLatinos

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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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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Obama on Univision: Pushing Past 70-Percent Support?

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Posted on evening of Sept. 20 for publication Sept. 21.

Campaign strategists on both sides of the Democratic-Republican divide fret daily about how big the HispanicLatino vote might be and how high a margin among HispanicLatinos President Barack Obama will rack up in November.  Most polls have him attracting 65 percent of the HispanicLatino vote and some surveys have him bumping 70 percent.  Anything more than 70 percent will trigger an electoral vote rout.

Obama did little to hurt himself when he confronted Jorge Ramos and María Elena Salinas last night on Univision the day after Mitt Romney faced the same journalistic duo.  Obama went to Miami knowing he had to face tough questions from Ramos who is unyielding in his criticism of the administration’s failure to bring about immigration reform – a public commitment made on national television by the Democratic nominee in 2008.  And, the same network reminds us often, Obama’s administration has deported more immigrants than any other in history.  Indeed, Salinas followed up with a question that made the very point.

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Romney on Univision: Unfortunate Distortion

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The forum that Jorge Ramos and María Elena Salinas of Univision hosted last night in Miami featuring Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was one of those non-events that should have been more than what it became.  The proposition that Romney had something meaningful to say to a national HispanicLatino population – that the polls suggest has made up its mind in this election, almost to the point of steadfastness – never reached professional seriousness.  Anyone viewing the event might have thought that Romney has hidden but burning support in HispanicLatino precincts across an entire nation when in fact it seemed the audience for last night’s peculiar program came from one precinct off old Southwest 8th Street in Miami.  And Miami does not the national HispanicLatino population make — by a long shot.

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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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