After their innumerable convention speeches, backslapping meetings and highly produced self-congratulatory videos in Charlotte and Tampa, the two political parties now confront the challenge of developing a strategy to attract and persuade Hispanic and Latinos to vote for either President Obama’s reelection or Mitt Romney’s candidacy. The polls are testing sorely the conviction of political strategists that a growing number of HispanicLatinos are swing voters whose decisions presumably would make a real difference in the election.
Tag Archives: HispanicLatinos
Why Obama
Little at the Republican convention in Tampa jolted the 70 percent or so of Hispanics and Latinos – whom the polls suggest are already in President Obama’s corner – to rethink their support for his re-election. I still do not know what henna is exactly even after I looked it up on the internet. I thought I overheard a woman at a restaurant in Charlotte say that “Romney makes me want to rip the hens out of my hair.” A search on Yahoo for ‘hens’ and ‘hair’ later got me to henna. Ripping either from your head sounds dreadful – perhaps bad enough for even traditional Republican-voting Cubans to reconsider their presumed vote for Mitt Romney. If the question does linger for more than a passing moment in any HispanicLatino mind, it can be answered with another question: Why HispanicLatinos?
Hillary and HispanicLatinos in 2016
The just-past national conventions dropped a number of stones into the political pond ahead of 2016. The splash from each stone might be dismissed as early speculation but in politics speculation mists the leaves of future candidacies. From each splash-point already radiates the ripples that will form the ebb and flow of the currents leading to the next series of election cycles.
Some of the ripples emanating from Charlotte and Tampa were larger than others. Some will have staying power but most will run out of energy over time, dreams lost in the backwaters of unviability. Other currents, perhaps waves, might form as human events trigger as yet unseen political storms. But whatever crests come at whatever time, they will have to lap up against the immediate reality of a woman named Hillary Clinton.
The Conventions: A Watershed
Posted on Thursday evening for Friday, Sept. 7, 2012.
I wrote late last year that I sensed that the HispanicLatino finally was turning the corner to become part of the national consciousness. The geographic concentration of the vast majority – about 75 percent – of the HispanicLatino population in eight states historically worked against its inclusion in the normal affairs of the nation. For that and other reasons, HispanicLatinos for decades have been absent from national commercials, television news sets and the decision-making processes of government, organizations large and small and corporations of any size and their boardrooms. And from opportunity itself. It is as if a group of individuals in the millions whose forefathers arrived in all of the Americas more than a century before Jamestown did not exist for much of the nation. The misplaced notion that most HispanicLatinos conducted their daily lives in Spanish abetted their lack of consideration in the normal, day-to-day thinking of managers, bureaucrats, business owners and corporate planners.
An Aware Clinton and the New Demography 40 Years Later
Posted Wednesday evening for Sept. 6, 2012.
It was Bill Clinton who was the first President to put into words something already afoot: The remaking of America. In the days after he won election in 1992, Clinton said he wanted a Cabinet that reflected America. He proceeded then to assemble a Cabinet that included two HispanicLatinos, San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and Denver Mayor Federico Peña as Secretary of Transportation.
Clinton – the most capable and aware President since Lyndon Johnson – understood what few Americans did, that the country had begun a historic demographic shift already changing the country. Sometime in 1972 or therabouts, twenty years before Clinton organized a more demographically correct Cabinet, the population replacement rate of the “white” population had already dipped below the necessary 2.1 births per woman and it has fallen each year since to probably 1.7 today. Such a decline in demographic terms creates a void and triggers an extremely powerful force for change, with the potential to cause countries to disappear — a very high price for a nation to pay. But stepping into that breach a growing HispanicLatino population already was leading the formation of a new demography critical for the nation’s survival.
Coming full circle 20 years after he was first elected, Clinton addressed a Democratic national convention last night that reflected the new America that its new demography has created. Benita Veliz, the undocumented student who addressed the convention, represents a vital part of the new demography America needs and requires. Veliz introduced another immigrant from an earlier generation of HispanicLatinos, Cristina Saralegui, a Cuban American long a fixture on Spanish-language television at Univision and now Telemundo. Saralegui debunks the notion that all Cubans are Republicans. Saralegui delivered a full-throated personal endorsement of Obama that spoke about the future of the America that Clinton understood was changing long before most decision-makers.
Revival in Charlotte
Posted on Tuesday evening for Sept. 5, 2012.
The polls all say Hispanic/Latinos are solidly in President Obama’s corner. To what degree is the question. The surveys suggest their support bumps up against 70 percent – higher than the share Obama won in 2008. I pay very close attention to my family when I am around them for signs that corroborate national political storylines. I learned the hard way to pay attention to them, especially one sister in particular who undoubtedly is the most conservative of my seven siblings. She did not even like the sainted Ann Richards. During the Monica Lewinsky debacle at the White House, however, she volunteered immediately when I inquired from Washington that she did not think that President Bill Clinton should resign. Of course, my sister said, what he did is terrible, but do not rush to judgment. I was skeptical for days thereafter but she was proven right when Clinton not only did not resign but went on to be an exceptional President. And a great ex-President.
So it is that over the Labor Day weekend I became convinced that the support for Obama among HispanicLatinos has increased and that the intensity level is high – higher than four years ago. I believed before – but am now convinced – that HispanicLatinos took the incessant drumbeat against immigrants by the Republican right wing personally. Recent polling by Miami pollster Sergio Bendixen suggests the same thing. It was not what my sister and her husband said this time. But they harbor no doubt. Not so four years ago. Even after Obama won the nomination. They were not really sold on him. But something has changed.
Dimension and Democrats
Now that the Republican national convention has gone into the books as one the least effective political gatherings in American history, come now the Democrats to put before the nation what most Americans might regard as too stark a choice. There is a tendency for 24/7 pundits and partisan strategists to reduce elections to clear-cut choices between a Democratic or Republican philosophy when parts of either are needed to govern. Viewers got a sense that the Romney brain trust was hoping to develop a different dimension on immigration so as to pull back from the rhetoric that has offended so many HispanicLatino voters.
A swing and a miss but they got a YouTube sensation out of it
Posted on Thursday night for Friday’s blog.
Mitt Romney’s speech was a single with no one on base. Whether the voters move him around the bases is very much a very open question. The curve balls the Republican national convention threw the country were too simple and the lines too obvious. Hispanics. Check. Women. Check. Marriage. Check. Romney could have hit a homerun, but when you start with another Bush, it is hard to be taken seriously. Jeb Bush defending his brother – certain to go down in history as the worst of presidents – reminded the country of how bad George W. Bush was, how bad a time the country is having recovering and how bad Mitt Romney might be. The video promoting Romney before he spoke included photographs of Romney’s father, who with his record on civil rights probably would not have supported Arizona’s anti-HispanicLatino that are metastasizing across the country.
This whole enterprise is warped somehow. The forced, awkward elevation of the man, the lofty descriptions of his business record, the declarations of self-achievement – they all evoke that old Shakespearean line: “I think he doth protest too much.” And poor Clint Eastwood. He represents the skeletal notions of a make-believe past. The disrespect for the Office of the President with the empty-chair act was astonishing. I felt sorry for Eastwood and for the men and women who felt they had to prop up Romney with faded delusion and crudeness. The computer severs at YouTube might be confused at the NSA with spinning centrifuges in Iran. Not far behind Eastwood were the retellings of family stories – from Marco Rubio’s oddly agitated speech to Ann Romney’s pasta-and-tuna saga of the other night. They sounded hollow and lonely, even, perhaps meant to scare people into loss. I figured out that loss was the theme of the convention. Loss of security. Loss of jobs. Loss of families. The concept of the family was used to frighten, not to inspire. I also figured out that Paul Ryan is Eddie Haskell.
Not a Good Night at the Political Ballpark in Tampa
Posted on Wednesday night for Thursday.
Strike two. For a country worried and anxious about the future, the second day of the Republican national convention was breath-taking in its failure to produce anything that the nation could use to begin to rethink its future. Instead, Paul Ryan’s speech was an ongoing lament about problems that President Obama’s predecessor caused. The only attempt at authenticity was a prerecorded video about the Bushes – one defeated for re-election and the other someone the country wishes it had never elected. Even a solid Republican had to worry about that kind of a start.
Small as Small Is: The Republicans in Tampa
Posted on Tuesday night as Wednesday’s regular blog.
The Republican convention last night seemed, well, small. Perhaps because the hurricane reduced its schedule, perhaps because the hall looked miniature, perhaps because the too many empty chairs diluted its energy – for whatever reason, the thing looked smaller than similar events in the past. I could not put my finger on it, except that I suspect that most people in the room feared that most Americans watching – if they watched – do not believe what they heard. I sense strongly, too, that the delegates in Tampa do not believe that Mitt Romney can win. All seemed out of sync, including the much-anticipated speech from Ann Romney, dressed in Nancy Reagan red. I will leave for women to judge if she connected with them. To me, it was a sycophantic appeal that did little to address the threat Republicans pose to women – a startling oversight in light of the fears raised anew by Todd Akin of Missouri and Paul Ryan.
Any personal story can be interesting. Any couple’s past can be lovely but it is useless to what happens next if it is just a story.