Tag Archives: Obama

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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The HispanicLatino Vote Matters, Right?

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Presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney speaks today at a meeting of HispanicLatino business owners in Washington, D.C., where he reportedly is going to chat with Marco Rubio.  Who knows what they will talk about or what Rubio’s chances realistically are of landing the second spot on the GOP presidential ticket but it should get the attention of individuals who do not think the HispanicLatino vote is not going to be important – much less potentially decisive – in November.

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Same Sex Marriage Does Not Trump Arizona

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Many years ago one of the most influential books ever written shaped my own political identity and my view of the world. Ostensibly about the presidential campaign of 1960, Theodore White’s Pultizer Prize-winning The Making of the President told the story of how John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson survived one of the narrowest presidential victories in the nation’s history.  But more than simply converting a political story into a highly interesting narrative, White wrote revealingly about how political markets are hardly more than consumer markets.  In his eyes, fifty states and the District of Columbia – each one different from the other – comprised 51 political markets with many more submarkets of voters, hundreds in fact.  They still do, if not more so.

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PBS’ American Experience on Clinton: Incomplete but Invaluable

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The retelling of the Bill Clinton story recently on PBS’ American Experience was more saga than the usual documentaries of that renowned series, which seeks to capture and project the nature of an American Presidency and its importance to history.  Nevertheless, it set the mind to thinking how different and hopeful were the times then.  We have gone from promise to precipice.

The Clinton Presidency of course gave way to the hapless administration of the nation’s affairs and its government by George W. Bush, and it would serve the Obama camp well today to make sure that it does not approach this year’s election in the form of Al Gore, one of the Clinton Administration’s endpoints.  Gore bears the unique responsibility of having lost a national election for his failure to carry his home state or others where using Bill Clinton might have yielded victory.

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On Stage Last Night: The Old America

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If you believe that the country is undergoing a historic demographic transformation and that a new America has emerged with a majority of the country realizing it needs a new way forward, then you need to look no farther than last night’s Republican presidential forum in Arizona.  The debate was for and about the old America, that is to say, that part of the country that is willing to hear candidates for the Presidency who would spend 25 minutes…on birth control.  The discussion last night was of interest to voters who care about the issues that hardly matter to the rest of America: The bailout of the auto industry that worked; immigration that helps prop up a declining national population and, of course, birth control.  And that was the first hour.

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Small Steps in the Direction

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Because HispanicLatinos already are a great part of the nation’s military and will be a larger part still in the years ahead, they should monitor President Obama’s recent decisions to assert American power in the South China Sea.  From Australia to the Philippines to Thailand, the United States is creating pockets of American strength to make sure China’s growth as a world power does not retrace the erroneous path that Japan took more than 70 years ago.  Left unchecked, a totalitarian Japan swept across the Pacific and only a bloody effort led by the United States pushed them back.

You have to be on top of things to know how cleverly China is going about its business as it senses that the balance of power not only in that region but in the world is moving away from the United States.  Building gigantic commercial ports that also can accommodate the large naval vessels it is constructing at high speed is one of the easier examples.  China is active on all fronts, from Iran to Latin America to outer space.  No one begrudges them their advancement as a world power and their development as a new and important nation.  But let us make sure that the Chinese rise to power is not predicated on thinking that the United States is going to go silently into the night. Continue reading →

On Florida and Jan Brewer and Ann Richards

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It is interesting to see the national media try to make sense of the HispanicLatino vote in Florida before the Republican primary on Tuesday.  The media speaks of it as one vote, and it is in a sense.  The HispanicLatino vote next week could be as much as 80 percent Cuban American.  But most HispanicLatinos in Florida now vote Democratic, so the media would be more accurate to describe the group voting next week in the GOP contest as the Cuban Republican vote, and they should point out that it is shrinking as each day passes due to its aging nature.  Continue reading →