Tag Archives: Romney

Julián Castro and the Democrats’ Looming 75-Percent Solution

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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 →

Eva Longoria and Clint Eastwood: Changing Drivers for America’s Future

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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.

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Romney’s trip: More than a stumble here and there

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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.

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The temptations of Marco Rubio

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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.

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2008 and 2012: No change yet

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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.

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Gun Control and Reality

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I go back and forth on this gun control thing.  Growing up in rural Texas with a father who hunted and who during the Cuban missile crisis got his rifle out of the closet and got it ready, I favor the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms.  I cannot imagine that the founders who, however elitist, did not recognize the dangers of new settlers making their way unarmed through the wild forests of a new country.  It is nonsense to think that individual citizens cannot protect themselves.  And I cannot imagine that anyone would think that citizens cannot use whatever means to defend themselves against oppression.  Think Hafez al Assad in Syria and his father, Bashar al Assad, or Joe Arpaio of Arizona for that matter. I am glad Hispanics or Latinos have the Second Amendment as their last resort.

On the other hand, the violence wrought by handguns and the possession of larger weapons really is a wholly different matter.  But how do you control the possession of arms so that someone like the shooter in Denver today would not have been able to do the damage he did this morning?

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Latino Veterans: An untapped source within the Hispanic community

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More and more Hispanics or Latinos are coming to understand their unique placement in the flow of American history that at this moment calls on them to understand their growing responsibility for the fiscal fate of the country.  Two groups within the HispanicLatino community know and feel the mounting obligation the best:  College-educated professionals and veterans.  Individuals holding college degrees most often are the ones who rise to play leadership roles within the community.  But the vast numbers of HispanicLatino veterans – many of them having put their lives on the line for the country – are as cognizant and are especially important today.  They, more so than most, know what is at stake in a pivotal election in which they can make a decided difference.

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Say it isn’t so, Rupert: Romney Going Negative on HispanicLatinos

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Regular readers of this blog know that some weeks ago I wrote that the Romney campaign might have decided tactically to give up on the HispanicLatino vote.  Nothing otherwise explains Romney’s lame performance at the NALEO conference in Orlando three weeks ago. I suggested that Romney might now allow his friends at the SuperPacs to run an anti-HispanicLatino strategy in selected states to whip up working class whites a la Willie Horton to make up for any lost share in traditional GOP HispanicLatino support.

A story in The Washington Post about a tweet by Rupert Murdoch supports my suspicion.  “Murdoch was among 50 people who met with the former Massachusetts governor at the Union League Club in New York City (last week)….At the meeting, Murdoch pressed Romney and his aides to get tougher on Obama and asked about Romney’s stance on immigration. He later tweeted his thoughts in response to a follower who said Romney has brains but needs more stomach and heart…(Murdoch tweeted): ‘Romney has all these and more, but just to see more fight. And Hispanics a surrender to O. Cn not afford, hurts senate too.’”

Murdoch’s disjointed, contorted tweet implies that he walked away from the meeting with the impression that Romney has surrendered HispanicLatinos to President Obama, something Murdoch feels Romney cannot afford to do.  But trailing 68-24 percent among HispanicLatinos in the polls, Romney might feel he has no option but to revert to a strategy that attracts voters scared and anxious about the economy and the nation’s new demography.

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Intensity after Court decision is not one-sided

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I am often struck by the conventional wisdom that sprouts instantly on television after, say, a Supreme Court decision on health care.  Conventional thinking is like angel dust to reporters who in the immediacy of an event have to say something that by the end of the day is repeated often enough during the 24/7 news cycle that it becomes fact.

So it is with the “intensity argument” that is supposed to give the Republican campaign of Mitt Romney a much-needed boost in the arm.  Trailing in every state that is supposed to be competitive in a supposedly close election, Romney, it is thought by the conventionalists, received an injection of energy sure to change the dynamics of the campaign.  I am not convinced.  I doubt more can be done to increase the anger-level of the virulent anti-Obama camp.  In contrast and perhaps as important is the fact that three million young Americans up the age of 26 can stay on their parents’ insurance policies.  Add to that perhaps as many as five million grateful, anxious parents and anyone can begin to see that the intensity argument does not flow in one direction only.

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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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