The latest attack from the right on President Obama comes in the form of former Navy SEALs who disparage him in a video that seeks to diminish his standing as commander-in-chief. Whoever commissioned the video did so weeks ago when the opinion polls showed Obama leading Mitt Romney – and putting distance between the two. One poll reported something unusual: An uptick in support of Obama among male voters, the group least likely to support him.
Tag Archives: Latino
Manzano So Much More than Navarrette
Where and how does one begin to make sense of what Ruben Navarrette wrote for CNN about Leo Manzano and, by extension, Hispanics/Latinos, be they recent immigrants or descendants from founders of some of the oldest cities in the nation? To start off, the column Navarrette wrote lambasting the young Olympic runner for raising a Mexican and a U.S. flag to celebrate his silver medal in the 1500-meter race was not about Manzano. It was about Navarrette. The object of Navarrette’s anger was not Manzano’s alleged act of disloyalty but something about Navarrette that is not yet settled within his own self.
Navarrette admits as much in the column, which in a way is the most important he has ever written: “Most Mexican-Americans I know would need a whole team of therapists to sort out their views on culture, national identity, ethnic pride and their relationship with Mother Mexico,” the 55-year-old Navarrette wrote. And that is the problem. The problem is not Manzano, who knows who he is and knows what he thinks and who is not going to back down from someone like Navarrette who has not figured himself out at his age and remains incomplete – like many Mexican-Americans and other HispanicLatinos.
Julián Castro and the Democrats’ Looming 75-Percent Solution
Could President Obama’s share of the Hispanic/Latino vote – as high as 75 percent according to some polls – be bumped any higher after Mitt Romney selected Paul Ryan as his running mate? Seems unlikely, but the possibility of freezing HispanicLatino support at that stratospheric number alone should make the mouths of Democratic strategists water. Think of it: Romney, clinging to the anti-HispanicLatino message that he embraced during the primary campaign, puts on the ticket a representative of the tea party – comprised of the most vociferous anti-HispanicLatino Republicans.
If Romney’s campaign already was taking a shellacking nationally – his unfavorable rating among all voters is at an unheard of 49 percent for a challenger to an incumbent President – then among HispanicLatinos Romney has tanked. That sound you hear should be Chicago going in for the kill to seal the election. Continue reading
What the Queen of England Can Teach Facebook
Facebook stock is now down 45 percent from what its first buyers paid for it. So if someone bought $10,000 worth of stock it is now worth $5,500. Yikes. If you start adding zeros to those numbers it becomes real money. I almost dared not open my mouth when in a conversation months ago someone was wondering how to get his hands on some Facebook stock once it became public. But I could not refrain, though I said merely that he ought to think about it before investing.
Eva Longoria and Clint Eastwood: Changing Drivers for America’s Future
A recent news report on CNN — followed immediately by a television commercial — put our current state of affairs in bas-relief. The news report headlined Eva Longoria and Clint Eastwood. Reporters captured Longoria, the beautifully young and erudite Hispanic or Latina actor most famous for her role in Desperate Housewives, attending a fundraising event for President Obama. In stark and almost desperate contrast, observers recapped the aging Eastwood endorsing Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee. After the news anchor took the viewers to break, up popped a commercial for Cisco touting a computerized robotic arm that fixes broken computer production lines at a factory with not a human worker in sight. The producers of the commercial dispensed with all body parts – not even a face. Only a voice accompanied the ad. Intended to be innocuous, the voice instead must cause viewers to conclude unsettlingly that American manufacturers will need fewer and fewer workers in the future.
Romney’s trip: More than a stumble here and there
So much has been written about Mitt Romney’s trip to England, Israel and Poland. Most pundits reduced the trip to the drip-by-drip harm that his surprisingly error-prone campaign is inflicting on his candidacy. Romney’s travels probably were more of a disaster than most observers and Romney strategists perhaps realize. For a critical and more conservative component of the subgroup of Hispanic or Latino voters that Romney needs to win in November, Romney’s journey was especially worrisome. For HispanicLatino veterans, I would imagine, the trip set off warning bells that most of the know-it-alls opining about such things have any notion about, much less an idea.
What Ted Cruz Has Wrought
My rip-roaring social life allows me to watch Air Disasters, a program on one of those cable channels skipped over by millions. Each episode analyzes and documents the cause behind the tragic destruction of a plane loaded with human life. Each story revolves around a small thing – a screw, a wire, a microscopic air bubble – that over a period of time went unattended and then went on to trigger a series of regrettable, irreversible events. The screw suddenly pops at the wrong time at the wrong place. A wire long-frayed blows. A microscopic air bubble balloons into disaster. Perhaps the very design of the plane itself lends itself to ruin.
Ted Cruz’ win last night to become the nominee of the Texas Republican Party for the Senate was a hard-earned victory that was a very personal triumph for him. But it speaks more to what Texas Democrats did – or did not do – years ago to avert catastrophe, which is what the 41-year-old Cruz is for them. For years, the decision-makers in the party that once dominated political life in Texas began to commit the mistakes that have now caused a historic crash that will reverberate for decades, yes, decades to come. The beatdown that Cruz gave the incumbent lieutenant governor last night is nothing compared to the beatdown Cruz has given to Texas Democrats who believed that demography alone would bring their state back into the blue column.
The temptations of Marco Rubio
It long has been a political truth that delegates to the 1956 Democratic National Convention in Chicago did a young, brash and wealthy John F. Kennedy a favor by turning back his bid to be the party’s vice presidential standard bearer. The thinking holds that without Kennedy on the ticket his Catholicism could not be blamed for Adlai Stevenson’s overwhelming loss to an incumbent President. At the same time, however, Kennedy’s high-profile battle on the convention floor boosted his chances for the 1960 presidential nomination. When he knew he did not have the last few votes he needed, Kennedy pulled the plug and magnanimously endorsed Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee on national television.
One wonders if the same truth does not apply to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, whose potential candidacy for the Republican vice presidential nomination was given a second wind last week by former Florida governor Jeb Bush and former mayor New York City Rudy Giuliani.
2008 and 2012: No change yet
What is the narrative of the campaign so far? It might seem to be a bit nebulous since it might revolve in the end on whether Mitt Romney is a tax dodger. Last week I had an encounter with a businessman that might shed some light on what might be the story of the election – especially as the polls admittedly are beginning to bounce all over the place.
Dropping the Ball: Ending the Sports Madness
I wonder how upset most college presidents would be if all of a sudden — overnight — their football programs were ripped apart like the NCAA did Penn State University on Monday. Earlier this week, the top college enforcement organization eviscerated football from a football-crazed campus. Were that to happen at other schools, I would not be surprised if a fair number of college presidents might not let out a cheer, privately, of course. You see, football is out of control at most colleges. Football programs are nothing more than revenue-producing businesses that push power at the expense of college presidents and faculty members to coaches of teams most of whose members do not ever graduate.