Their fangs still dug deep into the rancid carcass of the “Obama-Wright controversy”, the mainstream media and candidates Clinton and McCain have birthed yet another member of the army of walking dead threatening our political system: the Obama-Wright Zombie (And no, the word “zombie” is not being used with any racial connotations or subtexts……I don’t work for the Clinton’s).
Though the visibly weakened Obama has addressed the the issue in a manner that would slay other issues, the Zombie walks, it lives.
And while I feel for Obama personally and though I hope his candidacy doesn’t succumb to this frenzy of political flesh-eaters, my primary concerns are for what the zombie means for race, politics and religion in the U.S.
I watched Wright’s rather lengthy and often eloquent disquisition and defense and find in Obama’s knuckling under to pressure with today’s denunciation of his former pastor reason for concern. Say what you will about Wright, he is, as he stated in his speech, part of a powerful, anti-racist tradition of liberation and faith. Lost in most of the mainstream coverage of Wright’s speech was the Reverend’s contextualization of his statements and life in the very political tradition of the black church. Wright’s comments about the U.S. as an “imperialistic” power that suffered what military analysts like Chalmers Johnson calls “blowback” were taken out of context and fed the still-lingering appetite of a country that prefers reproducing racial superficialities to reconciling the genocidal acts of its history. Wright reminded his audience that Jesus also predicted that the fall of empire under the weight of its own sins. Had Jesus used metaphors that included “chickens” roosting, he too would be electronically whipped and visually stoned and stoned and stoned again.
Also saddening was hearing Obama “outraged” at Wright’s comments about the consequences of U.S. empire. While we can’t expect someone aspiring to to occupy the seat of imperial power to do anything but defend “American exceptionalism” and other Disneyesque myths designed to coverup the U.S.’s bloody history, we should expect Obama not to reproduce the lies and half truths about race, exploitation and violence that are a part of this history.”Hope” can’t serve as a cover for violence; And talk of “change” shouldn’t magically transport us into a state of amnesia.
Beware of zombie politics and the Svengali politics of Democrats and Republicans.
With many of us still reeling and wondering about ABC’s unprecedented and simply devastating display of dumbed down politics during last week’s Democratic debate, this hilarious video from last year says it better than anything , anyone else. Thanks to the Onion for peeling back the layers covering over the Truth about our political system.
Our friends at Brave New Films -the intrepid folks who brought you “Outfoxed”, “Iraq for Sale” and other muckracking videos- have just released “A Dream Deferred”, a shorter, but no-less-moving video that includes the voices of those least heard in the “immigration debate”: immigrant students who want passage of the DREAM act. The DREAM Act would help more than 60,000 students pursue their dreams of higher education by helping them regulate their status.
In conjunction with immigrant rights groups, Robert Greenwald and Co. provide us with plenty of reason to support current efforts to sign a petition asking the 3 presidential candidates, all whom were co-sponsors of the federal DREAM Act, to make the DREAM a reality in their first 100 days of office.
Check it out and, if you feel so moved, sign the petition.
Racial Idealism vs Racial Realism: OBama’s Effort To Bridge the Divide and the DLC
New America Media, News Analysis, Roberto Lovato, Posted: Mar 19, 2008
Editor’s note: Obama’s electrifying speech in Philadelphia on race and race relations points to the realism-idealism gap between his camp and Hillary Clinton’s, writes NAM editor Robert Lovato. Lovato is a writer based in New York.
Barack Obama’s speech in Philadelphia eloquently displayed how the Obama and Clinton campaigns are divided by race idealism versus race realism.
Combining the statesman’s calm cadences with the reverend’s passion, Obama delivered what was arguably the crispest, most important delineation of U.S. race relations by a presidential candidate since Abraham Lincoln gave his House Divided speech.
In response to the ongoing racial pyrotechnics seen most recently in the controversies surrounding Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s former pastor whose racial denunciations from his Chicago pulpit have drawn criticism, and Clinton-backer Geraldine Ferraro who sparked controversy after saying, “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” Obama used his abundant rhetorical gifts to advance the cause of race idealism. His speech tried to weaken the relentless pull of our racial past on our electoral present by pointing to a post-racial future.
“This nation is more than the sum of its parts,” he declared before a very racially mixed crowd of supporters sitting and swooning in Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center. “We may have different stories, but we hold common hopes.” The elevated responses in the Constitution Center seemed to simulate the paintings of children and adults of various ethnicities dancing in a circle as they rise from the ground.
In stark contrast to Obama’s strive-for-higher-ground idealism is the boots-on-the-ground march of the pre-eminent practitioners of racial realpolitik: the Clinton backers of Washington’s Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).
Caught between the current reality of an electorate that’s still mostly white and a primary process that reflects stunning demographic shifts, the racial politics of the Clinton supporters in the DLC reflect a strategic decision to consolidate their white base. Viewed from this vantage point, the DLC’s re-engineered appeals to white racial solidarity preview the new politics of the white minority era that looms on the racial horizon.
More than any other political machine in this very tense political moment, politicians affiliated with the DLC have developed policies and made statements that reconfigure racial politics beyond the Southern Strategy – appeals to white voter fear and anxieties with anti-black policy proposals that successfully transformed the once Democratic-leaning South into a Republican stronghold – that still defines much of the Republican racial realpolitik. DLC affiliates have more or less formed a beeline to make racial comments appealing to white voters as an unprecedented racial reality has come upon America: white minority status.
DLC operatives seem to recognize how quickly the political process is moving past the black-white racial politics towards a Sunbelt strategy targeting a more diverse and demographically different country, increasingly concentrated in the sunny southern states stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Like Obama, the DLC recognizes and anticipates the inevitable domination of the electoral college by Texas, Florida, California and other states heavily populated by Latinos and Asians.
Among the most recent comments and policy proposals by DLC affiliates reflecting the Sunbelt strategy are: the Geraldine Ferraro statement; the strong support for the anti-immigrant policies of the very punitive, anti-immigrant STRIVE Act by Rahm Emmanuel and James Carville, an enforcement-heavy immigration reform proposal which many Congressional Hispanic Caucus members have said will increase racial profiling; the anti-immigrant ads used by DLC Chair Harold Ford during his Senatorial bid in Tennessee; DLC stalwart Bob Kerrey’s claim that Obama attended a “secular madrassa”; the numerous racially-charged comments made by former DLC leader Bill Clinton, and, of course, Hillary Clinton in the course of her own campaign.
These most recent statements and policy proposals by DLC affiliates reflect the DLC’s insights into the post-Southern Strategy, post-Dixiecrat moment. This vision was developed by several of the mostly southern founders of the DLC who, in their zeal to combat the GOP successes with white voters through the Southern Strategy, rejected the affirmative action and other “identity politics” in the Democratic party to return to the old white identity politics.
Asked about the statements by Ferraro and other DLC affiliates, DLC’s press secretary, Alice McKeon, declined to make a statement. Asked if Ferraro was affiliated with her organization, McKeon answered, “I’m not prepared to say anything about that right now.”
Longtime DLC critic and editor of the Black Agenda Report, Bruce Dixon, sees in the ratcheting up of racial politics in this primary season the DLC’s aspirations to make Democrats more competitive against the GOP. “The historic position of the DLC is that they want to compete for Republican voters and corporate dollars,” said Dixon. “Their support for the SAVE Act, the racial attacks on Obama are rooted in this desire.”
Dixon has for many years also questioned the relationship between the racial statements and policy proposals of DLC members and the major funding it receives from corporations and from foundations like the Bradley Foundation, a philanthropic organization which gave the Progressive Policy Institute, the DLC’s think tank, over $200,000. Bradley Foundation also has a long history of giving money to organizations and individuals dedicated to decimating civil rights like Charles Murray, author or the controversial Bell Curve who still supports thoroughly baseless racial ideas like the belief that there’s a correlation between race and intellectual capabilities. “The Clintons, Rahm Emanuel and the DLC have to say these (racial) things because their corporate sponsors need a segmented and divided workforce,” said Dixon. “They can’t possibly do anything else.”
Yet, given the chronic inflexibility of politicians of all stripes to articulate the real problems of race in the United States, Obama’s race idealism may, in fact, mark the beginning of, as he promised, real change. Charles Murray himself noted this on the National Review website after Obama’s speech. “As far as I’m concerned, it is just plain flat out brilliant—rhetorically, but also in capturing a lot of nuance about race in America,” he wrote. “It is so far above the standard we’re used to from our politicians.”
Race idealism, who knows, may very well carry the day beyond the primaries and the general election.
This story from ABC 7 in Arlington, Virginia reports on the latest ad antics of the anti-immigrant set. Ads placed across the U.S. by a group calling itself the Coalition for the American Worker (CAW) are blaming black unemployment on Latino immigrants.
To further entangle matters, the spokesperson in the ads is Frank Morris, a former head of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, whose “facts” are wholly and absolutely fudged:
That ABC-7 should cover this so uncritically no longer surprises given the degree to which lies and myth have thoroughly saturated the political sphere and society in general.
But what this should move some of us to do is re-read people like Hannah Arendt, Jacques Ellul and others who’ve watched the especially rapid spread of such screed in times of crisis. Give their latest racial riffs, Hillary Clinton’s campaign seems to have caught on - but in the wrong way.
All the more reason to make three of my favorite words today’s anti-mentira mantra: Claridad, Claridad, Claridad.
We live in such reactionary times that rare is the moment I can read an editorial in the New York Times (or most other of the few remaining dailies) and agree with any depth of emotion.
After all, we do live at a time when “liberal” is the new “right wing”.
But for today, at least, I do agree with the empire’s paper of record. This editorial appears to bear the mark of lone Latina NYT editorial board member, Caroline Curiel, or someone who did their homework.
This line, in particular, seems unprecedented for the NYT or any other member of the MSM:
Speculation of a black-Latino rift has not been backed up by a lot of data — and it usually ignores the fact that many Latinos are themselves black.
Let’s repeat this in bold letters for good measure” “Speculation of a black-Latino rift has not been backed up by a lot of data“. Too bad they didn’t say this before race relations were dealt such devastating blows in this primary. Still, we should recognize this -and use it for future reference -and to reinterpret what happened.
Mr. Obama confronts a history of often uneasy and competitive relations between blacks and Hispanics, particularly as they have jockeyed for influence in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and New York.
Hispanic voters are used to being wooed rather unevenly by presidential candidates, most of whom have shown few signs that they get them.Latino voters are citizens, not always immigrants or even recent immigrants. Often their family roots in states like California, Texas and New Mexico predate statehood. These voters don’t need to debate English versus Spanish; many speak both. They are younger, as a group, than non-Hispanic voters, predominantly working class, and they care more than anything about bread and butter issues, like jobs, education and health care.They have less reason to care whether candidates eat tamales — or even peppers, as Sen. Hillary Clinton regularly says she does. And like anyone else, a Latino audience may appreciate a musical selection, but that’s a sideshow, as happened when Sen. Ted Kennedy, in full — if not entirely melodious — tenor, sang “Jalisco, No Te Rajes, (Jalisco, Don’t Give Up)” a mariachi standard, at a Texas rally for Sen. Barack Obama. (In fact, there was a real and strong Kennedy connection for Latinos, but it was to Bobby Kennedy, who was with the farmworker leader and hero Cesar Chavez when he broke his fast in California; voters were reminded of that by descendants of both men in campaign ads).Of the two Democratic campaigners, Senator Clinton’s more policy-oriented stump speeches seem to have hit more of the right notes with Hispanic voters. According to an analysis by the Pew Hispanic Center, the results in California, Texas and New Mexico would have been different had Latinos not voted in such large numbers and for the New York senator. Mrs. Clinton won by carrying the Hispanic vote by a margin of about two-to-one against Sen. Barack Obama in all three states. But she lost among non-Hispanics, by a wide margin, in Texas (55 to 44 percent) and New Mexico (56 to 41 percent), and was tied with Mr. Obama in California (both at 46 percent).What was most amazing was the turnout. Latino voters represented 30 percent of those casting ballots in California. Just four years ago, that number in the primary was 16 percent. The Hispanic numbers were also way up in Texas: 32 percent this month, compared to 24 percent in 2004.And while race may have been an issue with some Hispanic voters, it seems to have been no more of a factor than it has been among non-Hispanic voters. Speculation of a black-Latino rift has not been backed up by a lot of data — and it usually ignores the fact that many Latinos are themselves black.
When the subject of Hispanic voting has come up in the past, skeptics have sometimes challenged whether Hispanics really represent a voting bloc. It’s a fair observation, considering the diversity within the category. Mexican-Americans make up the majority of Latinos in the United States, but there are growing numbers with ties to Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Central and South America.
Beyond language and some elements of their cultures, many Hispanics in America share the experience of being regularly dealt out of opportunity. The Hispanic dropout rate approaches 50 percent in some cities. Nearly one-third of Latinos lack health insurance even when they have jobs. In economic hard times, Latinos, who frequently are paid lower wages, can suffer disproportionately.
What seems clear is that if the campaigns want to sing their way into Hispanic hearts this election year, they need to carry a tune of opportunity.
The most interesting development coming out of Texas yesterday was this fact: 1 of every 5 voters was a Latina. “Latina”, not “Latino”. A stunning development that previews the future in other U.S. states whose demographics will start resembling those of Tejas and California. This piece from New America Media goes into greater depth.
Hispanic Women Outvote Men in Texas
New America Media, News Report, Roberto Lovato, Posted: Mar 05, 2008
Editor’s Note: One of every five votes in Texas was cast by a Latina, helping to sway the state toward Clinton, writes NAM contributor Roberto Lovato.
In one of the tightest races in memory, the Texas primary brought Latinos to the polls in record numbers – and many of these were women. One of every five votes in Texas was cast by a Latina; Latino men constituted only 14 percent of those who voted.
The feminization of the Latino vote in Texas benefited Clinton. As in other segments of the electorate, Clinton’s pull among women earned her 66 percent of
Latina votes, compared to the 58 percent she received among Latino men.
The surge in Latina voter participation in Texas was due to several factors, including the on-the-ground efforts of groups like the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project (SVREP), which launched a major nonpartisan campaign to reach thousands of Latina voters though traditional and non-traditional methods including barbecues, church meetings, phone banking, text-messaging and emails.
“It’s clear that (Latina) women voters were a key base vote in the election,” says Lydia Camarillo, SVREP’s vice president who spearheaded their work in Texas. Asked why most Latinas voted for Clinton, El Paso native Camarillo points to the long history of the Clinton family in Texas as well as the possibility of making history by electing the country’s first female president.
“They were voting for a woman,” says Camarillo. “They felt a sense of history with her. The under-30 voters were going for Obama. I saw a lot of people with conflicts up until the very last minute. But, in the end, they seemed to be voting for the person that they knew the best.”
Camarillo credits the Clinton and Obama campaigns with the increase in Latino voter participation. “It’s exciting that Latinos were being targeted so heavily by both campaigns,” she says. “Both understood and invested in the Latino electorate in ways we’ve never seen.”
Close to a million Latinos voted, according to Camarillo, making the Texas primary historic.
In their harried pursuit of Latino votes in previous and in upcoming primaries like that in Texas, candidates Obama and Clinton have added another to the still-growing string of records broken this election year: number of times the phrase “Si se puede” has been used in a U.S. presidential election.
The record is being broken in large part thanks to the powerful, yet deadly combination of the exponential growth in the Latino electorate and the fabulous lack of imagination of campaign strategists. In their efforts to highlight the “intimacy” and “unity” between the candidates and Latinos, rally after rally in Dallas, Houston, El Paso and other urban, suburban and rural parts of Texas has included loud, mantra-like repetitions of the Spanish language phrase, which means “Yes We Can”.
Originally coined in 1972 by my friend, United Farm Workers co-founder, Dolores Huerta, “Si se Puede” became the UFW’s motto ; It then transcended the UFW to become an important slogan for many labor, immigration and other historic struggles involving the country’s largest “minority”.
And now, in what appears to signal another mainstreaming of a Latino trend, many, if not most Clinton or Obama rallies include some mention of the English or Spanish or English and Spanish language political slogan (see New York Times pic above).
While it is true that the mainstreaming of “Si Se Puede” provides us with another signal of how the larger body politic is successfully adjusting to the death of the black-white electorate, this mainstreaming comes at a high cost: the cheapening of “Si Se Puede”. To transform a term rooted historically in the salt of the earth struggles of working class Latinos in the campaigns of candidates who also repeat mantra-like the phrase “middle class” alters and diminishes the political value and movement power of “Si Se Puede”. That my friend, Dolores Huerta, uses the term to promote her favored candidate, Hillary Clinton, saddens me less because I am anti-Clinton than because I was pro-Si Se Puede since my political childhood.
Before the inevitable moment when big corporations start using the term as slogans in ads selling us cars, burgers and tampons arrives, let us put up a big “No Pasaran” (They Shall Not Pass) before the forces of Little Political Imagination: BOYCOTT “SI SE PUEDE” IN ELECTIONS-AND BEYOND. Such a boycott may well free up and force the creative energies to come up with newer, fresher and less-compromised political language.
Though not an endorsement (I’m still working through whether these elections are some sort of grand political theater designed to makes us magically forget Bush broke the still-broken system), this music video from Mo Rocca is muy chistoso. Enjoy (and sorry for those of you who need translation - but get with it, homes!)
The report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was delivered to the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in response to a ” flawed U.S. government report that underreported the state of racial discrimination in the United States.” CERD is a U.N.-sanctioned group of internationally recognized human rights experts that oversees compliance with a 2004 treaty on the elimination of racial discrimination. Since the Clinton Administration ratified the treaty in 1994, the U.S. government has used CERD to denounce racism and other discrimination in other countries.
Among the many”shortcomings” in the Bush Adminstration’s more positive report to CERD are the ACLU says, “the minor mention of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the outright omission of issues including the dramatic increase in anti-immigrant acts and practices, exploitation of migrant workers, the escalating problem of police brutality and racial profiling, and the “school to prison pipeline,” whereby the criminal justice system overzealously funnels students of color out of classrooms and on a path toward prison.”
Witnesses joining the ACLU for testimony before CERD in Geneva will include Akif Rahman, a native-born United States citizen who was detained, questioned and abused by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on five separate occasions as he re-entered the country after business or personal trips abroad.
The importance of such reports cannot be underestimated. One of the largely unwritten chapters of civil rights history is about how more internationalist and left-leaning African Americans like WEB Dubois and Paul Robeson used international forums to shame the U.S. government before its peers about Jim Crow. Declassified documents from numerous national security archives reveal that officials at the highest levels of government were, in fact, concerned about the international embarrassment brought on them by such acts of outing.
The ACLU report also provides a healthy antidote to the dangerous absurdity of the “post-racial” talk on the left and right side the Obamamania wave. For these and other reasons, it’s important for social movements to pressure Obama to use his abundant rhetorical gifts to speak about things in the report.
Exit polls taken by CNN appear to indicate that Illinois Senator Barack Obama swept primaries in Delaware, Washington D.C. and Virginia with by winning the votes of a broad majority of voters, including Latino voters in Virginia. Hillary Clinton appears to have won the majority of Latino votes in Maryland. According to the CNN polls, Obama won the majority of the Latino vote in Virginia a margin of 53% to 47% .
And now for something that deviates from but is directly related to the election mania gripping the country.
This speech given at the Brecht Forum captures well some recent thoughts about the relationship between immigrants and the national security state. Basic idea is that immigrants provide the state with another excuse to put more people with guns in our midst, especially in times of crisis.
The speech goes against the traditional logic around immigration, which tells us that raids, repressive laws, etc. are solely about elections or about controlling low wage undocumented workers needed for corporate and private profits.
While winning elections and keeping a surplus of low wage labor are a part of the immigration equation, these explanations hardly capture the cavernous motives beneath the current immigrant zeitgeist. Stuff in the speech also runs contrary to the rather tired argument that what’s happening around immigration is just about immigrants. It’s also about controlling people like many of you and me, citizens.
To vary on a theme that defined the Clinton era, “It’s the national security state, stupid.”
Lurking beneath the stale arguments of pro and anti-immigrant forces is a nation state, an elite that’s preparing for the social unrest due to the death of the American Dream (if it ever actually existed).
I shared a 2 minute clip of the speech previously, but this link features the speech in its entirety (14 minutes).Hope you like it. I actually think it’s one of the better talks I’ve given in some time. Please do email me or comment if you listen to this as these ideas are a work in progress and I value your thoughts and opinions about it.
And thanks to the Brecht Forum and the folks at Law and Disorder Radio for the opportunity to share these thoughts.
“Upon examination, while Latinos nationally supported Senator Clinton in the Democratic Presidential Primary, their support varied from state to state,” said Antonio Gonzalez, President of the Los Angeles-based William C. Velazquez Institute. “Latinos in California, New York and New Jersey showed stronger support for Senator Clinton, compared to other states like Arizona, Illinois, New Mexico and Connecticut.
Clinton appears to have done better in the larger, more urbanized states with the exception of Obama’s home state of Illinois. Obama , meanwhile, did better in smaller states.
Another interesting finding of the WCVI analysis is that, while Hillary Clinton did in fact win a majority of Latino votes, Barack Obama made significant inroads in the final days of the campaign. Even in California, where he suffered major defeats in the Latino electorate, polls show Obama decreasing Clinton’s lead in the final days of the campaign. As recently as January 26th, Field and other polls show Clinton maintaining a 3 to 1 (59%-19%) advantage among Latinos. Polls taken in California Tuesday show Obama reducing her lead by 10% (69%-29%).
After burning the 3am oil trying to get a grasp on the ultimately ineffable workings of the body politic, I got up at 5:30 am (can you hear the roosters?) to join Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman and guests Bill Fletcher and Frances Fox for an out-of-the-corporate-media box discussion about race, empire and the primaries. Thanks to Amy and fellow panelists, this really turned out to be as probing a discussion about the elections as I’ve had the pleasure of participating in. Check it out!
Asked on Super Duper Tuesday to choose between a black candidate, Barack Obama, and a white candidate, Hillary Clinton, Latinos chose both -and neither.
In a Democratic race in which the issue of race has played a definitive role, racially fluid and ambiguous Latinos delivered a loud and historic message to the candidates and pundits and to the country as a whole: the black-white electorate of yesteryear is dead.
Preliminary results of the most intense primary in recent memory indicate that predictions of a monolithic Latino “firewall” for Clinton have fallen short. The candidates split key Latino states in different parts of the country. Clinton won states like New York and New Jersey while Obama won states like Colorado and Illinois. Exit poll results also demolished widely-held notions that Latinos are unwilling to support a black candidate. Obama succeeded in dropping Clinton’s Latino advantage from 4-1 (68% to 17% according to a CNN poll conducted last week) to 3-2 last night. And in almost every Latino-heavy state that voted Super Tuesday, Obama received more than the 26 percent of the Latino vote he got in Nevada just 2 weeks ago.
Analysis of Latino voting patterns indicates that Latinos did not, as predicted, march monolithically into the voting booths to vote racially black or white. Instead, the Latino vote segmented along other vectors, the most interesting of which is the regional vector.
In what appears to be the development of a Latino voter regionalism, the vote varied depending on what part of the country (and in some cases what part of a state) the vote was cast. For example, while Clinton secured 74% of the Latino vote in her home state of New York, available data also indicates that Obama won 59% of the 30-44 year olds, the largest age bloc, in his home state of Illinois’ Latino electorate.
Obama won important Latino votes - and delegates- in Colorado, Arizona and other states where Clinton was expected to overwhelm him. With the support of New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez and other members of the Latino political machine nurtured by her husband, the former President, Clinton won more than 60% of the Latino electorate in states like New Jersey and New York. And regardless of the final tallies in California, the Latino electorate has already proven to be a powerful, new and greatly misunderstood segment of the no longer solely black and white electorate of the United States.
“Candidates are spending tens of millions of dollars trying to capture the attention of Latino voters, mostly in the Spanish language media” said Maria Teresa Petersen, the Executive Director of Voto Latino, a nonpartisan voter registration organization that also uses technology and pop culture to promote the political participation of new Latino voters. “But what the campaigns haven’t figured out is that 79% of the 18 million eligible Latino voters consume media in English” said Petersen adding, “So, it’s terrific that they’re targeting 21% of the voters with Latino messages, but when will they learn to target us with Latino ads in English?”
Analysts like Petersen, whose organization registered more than 7,500 young voters this past January, agree that the youthfulness of the Latino vote guarantees that this vote will both continue to see great flux. “Exactly 50% of the 18 million voters eligible to vote are under 50 years old. And this is a generation growing up in the era of anti-immigrant politics. This is why they marched and this is why they are voting. Immigration is more than an issue. It’s a great catalyst. The candidate who understands this will win the Latino vote in the future, including the near future.”
As the highly contested Democratic primary rages beyond Super Duper Tuesday states, Latinos will continue to play critical roles, especially in tight races, according to Antonio Gonzalez, the President of the California-based William C. Velasquez Institute.
“The big enchilada will be Texas, followed by mid-sized states where Latinos are about 5% of the vote, states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland and Washington” said Gonzalez. “It’s going to continue to be very interesting” said a smiling Gonzalez. “On the one hand,” he added, “Latinos are clearly trending towards Obama who overcame a 27 point difference nationally. But, on the other hand, Clinton still won several states with (Latino) margins of more than 50%.” If estimates of a 61 to 38 percent Latino advantage for Clinton hold and if the trend, especially the youthful Latino trend, favoring Obama continues, understanding the fluidity of the very racially and ethnically diverse Latino electorate will be mission critical to success well into November’s general election.
Standing outside Public School 24 in Brooklyn’s diverse working class neighborhood of Sunset Park, one sees and hears the political future in the opinions - and votes- of Latino voters like 31 year-old Smithe Celestrin. She and millions of other Latinos made clear to the country how far it has moved beyond the black-white electorate of yesteryear. “The candidates need to understand where Latinos stand” says Celestrin, a dark-skinned Puerto Rican-French-Chinese digital advertising manager whose main issues are the war, the economy and immigration. “This is our country and we will have our say in it.”
After hearing about Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama, my father, Ramon, says it made him think twice about his support for Hillary Clinton. “That (endorsement) matters” he said as he watched Spanish language Obama ads squeezed in between Univision news reports of the Kennedy endorsement, “They (the Kennedy’s) have a lot of history with us”.
That Ramon, who was defensive the last time I asked him about who he’d vote for, is now rethinking his previous support for Clinton previews what may be a big Super Duper Tuesday surprise: Obama cutting into Clinton’s lead among the more than 10 million Latinos eligible to vote this week.
Conventional wisdom tells us that history, political patronage and the much-coveted endorsements from members of most the Latino politirati are driving Latinos voters like Ramon towards Clinton. But Arizona tells us that history may still be in the making-and remaking. While the Kennedy endorsements do bring a new glow to the hallowed velvet pictures of JFK adorning homes and apartments of many older Latinos, Obama’s Arizona advantage can hardly be explained solely in terms of the spirits of our Latino political past.
Obama is also speaking to the present and to the future. Whether or not Obama can cut Clinton’s Latino advantage by Tuesday, his gains in Arizona provide valuable object lessons with regard to Latino politics, object lessons that take us far beyond the now ridiculous ideas about Latinos’ racist refusal to vote for a black person. Principal among the lessons of Arizona is the strategic priority placed on new Latino voters.
“It’s not rocket science” says Cuauhtémoc “Temo” Figueroa, the former union organizer who is the Obama campaign’s National Field Director. “We can’t win without new voters. We need young people, immigrants and other voters traditionally left out of the elections” said Figueroa from the very loud Obama campaign office in Fresno, California adding “New voters were key to victory in Iowa and new voters are key to winning the Latino vote.”
Central to dropping Clinton’s advantage are Obama’s appeals to the more than 2 million immigrants and first and second generation Latinos added to the rolls of eligible voters since 2004. In Arizona, unions like the SEIU and nonprofits like the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project have undertaken massive voter registration campaigns. Such intense focus on new Latino voters comes atop political soil prepared by what huge majorities of these Latinos consider the fertilizer of anti-immigrant politics.
Obama’s efforts in Arizona and across the Latino U.S. are yielding fruit in no small part because he, more than Hillary Clinton, has intensified his organizing around and his stands on immigration, the definitive issue of Latino politics. Though many polls show the economy, education the Iraq war are the top issues for Latino and other voters this election year, massive marches, polls and common sense tell us that immigration is shaping the political consciousness of an entire generation of new voters. Clinton, who has both avoided or flip-flopped around the issue, is counting on history, name recognition and the endorsements she received from the majority of old-line Latino political leaders like Raul Yzaguirre, the former head of the National Council of La Raza or United Farmworkers leader, Dolores Huerta.
To counterbalance pull of the Latino political past, Obama has started more aggressively deploying a browner, more pro-immigrant variant of the future-oriented message that fueled his victories in the largely black and white states of Iowa and South Carolina. Obama’s unswerving support for driver’s licenses for the undocumented and his commitment to deal with immigration reform early in his tenure are being noticed in Latino voter’s homes as well as in editorial offices of newspapers like of the Los Angeles-based La Opinion, which recently endorsed him. Editors at the country’s largest Spanish language newspaper said they were “disappointed with her (Clinton’s) calculated opposition to driver’s licenses for the undocumented, which contrasts markedly from the forceful argument in support made by Obama.”
Endorsements from Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano and Congressman Raul Grijalva have, no doubt, helped the Illinois senator as well. But Obama’s lead in Latino Arizona, one of the centers of anti-immigrant movement in the United States, comes in no small part because his message is accompanied by more serious organizing and investments in the Latino electorate. At the same time, a more nuanced understanding of the Latino electorate as a segmented electorate makes targeted messaging more effective, especially in the younger and newly naturalized segments of the electorate. Many of these voters either don’t know or could care less that my friends Dolores Huerta and former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros are backing Hillary Clinton.
Beyond the simplistic storyline of Latino unwillingness to support a black candidate, explanations of Obama’s recent Latino surge must include the former failures of the black and white leaders of the Obama campaign. Sources close to the Obama camp tell me that the campaign has started shortening a Latino learning curve made steeper by, for example, an operation in which key Obama staffers charged with securing the Latino vote did not, until recently, have direct access to campaign leaders like David Axelrod.
Whether or not the Obama campaign is successful in dropping the Clinton tally among Latinos like my father, Ramon, Super Duper Tuesday will provide more than a few of the object lessons that political strategists and pundits will study long after the general election in November.
My favorite from among the numerous and stunningly simplistic explanations for why, for example, Latino voters appear to be heavily inclined towards Border Wall supporter and driver’s license flip-flopper, Hillary Clinton, actually comes from an elected official - a Latino elected official no less.
“The Hispanic community is very family oriented, and we respect our mothers,” said Ruben Kihuen, an influential Democratic assemblyman from Las Vegas who supported Mrs. Clinton. “A lot of middle-aged women see her as a mother, a head of the household, and they can identify with this. Especially when they see her daughter, Chelsea, with her.”
Despite being left out of the mainstream discussion of the Latino vote, many, more thoughtful Latinos in the blogosphere, alternative and other media and in the body politic generally have seized the political moment to offer insights that anticipate the eventual demise of the Mama’s Chi-chi Theory and other, less-absurd media constructs.
And the collective and relatively new interest of news organizations, pollsters, bloggers, politicos and other interested parties from across the political and geographic spectrum also previews the future sophistication about things Latino. Over the past several months, I have, for example, spoken with and become aware of numerous national and international (and not just Latin American) media outlets planning or actually doing more in-depth reporting on the U.S. Latino vote.
For all its frustrating simplicity, the coverage of and interest in the Latino electorate may well be remembered as one of the most important new developments of this year in media and politics.
We will, for the time being, have to suffer the flatulence and bad taste of the burrito logic informing Kihuen’s Chi-chi Theory. Still, some of the current attention and reporting found in some Spanish language and English language media and other outlets does give one cause for optimism about the new national conversation around Latino and U.S. politics.
check out this interview I did with Laura Flanders on Radio Nation. It goes 20,000 leagues deeper than the silliness that current passes for race reporting in the U.S. Guest Amy Alexander and I take a more serious look at this part of the most racialized election in recent memory. Hope you like it:
Everyone’s an Expert on the Latino Vote, Except Latinos
New America Media, Commentary, Roberto Lovato, Posted: Jan 22, 2008
Editor’s Note: The newly minted experts on the Latino vote are using the old paradigms to explain the Nevada vote results says NAM writer Roberto Lovato.
NEW YORK – The most interesting development out of this weekend’s Nevada caucus votes had little to do with Hillary Clinton winning a large percentage of the Latino vote – that was predictable. More fascinating was the sudden and exponential surge in the number of experts in Latino politics.
It was tragicomic to watch non-Spanish speaking pundits explain the ‘reality’ of the Nevada vote while standing in the artificial light of the casinos during one of the first caucus meetings held entirely in Spanish. Reporters had to wait for translators to tell them what campaign workers were saying before they could report it to us. Understanding the electoral needs of casino, hotel, restaurant and other workers who labor in a new economy – and require new hours for voting – proved very difficult for many in the media to understand.
It was no less difficult having to watch the white, and some African American, political commentators on MSNBC, CNN and other networks tell us that the Latino vote for Clinton reflected “Black-Latino tensions.” The New York Times newspaper had earlier echoed these observations in a story that caused frustration in the Latino blogosphere. In a recent issue of The New Yorker, a publication that has no Latino editorial staff and publishes very few stories a year about the country’s 46 million Latinos, the magazine showed off its newfound expertise in a story which detailed how Latinos are Clinton’s electoral “firewall,” thanks to the “lingering tensions between the Hispanic and black communities.” It’s hard to know how they know this when only one serious polling organization in the country conducts polls in a language other than English.
Yet everybody, it seems, has something to say about Latino politics. Everybody that is, except Latinos.
The awkwardness and simplicity seen and heard in the coverage of the Latino electorate illustrates how ill-equipped the news organizations, the political parties and the society as a whole are to understand and deal with the historic political shift previewed in Nevada: the death of the black-white electorate. Simplistic talk about the Latino vote provides another example of how we live when the ‘experts’ and their organizations are increasingly out of touch with the dynamism and complexity of the electorate and the general populace.
As a result, the growth of the very diverse Latino electorate will likely force the revelation of more inconvenient truths. Principle among them is the media’s conclusion that anti-black racism among Latinos explains why they voted Clinton and not Obama in Nevada. Story after story tries to fit the Latino vote into the procrustean bed of old-school, black v. white politics.
Typical of these conclusions are statements by the liberal New Republic’s John Judis. He explained Latino support for Clinton this way: “Latino immigrants hold negative stereotypical views of blacks and feel that they have more in common with whites than with blacks.” Judis backed his claims with a modicum of academic seriousness as he quoted “experts” like Duke University political scientist Paula D. McClain. McClain told me in an interview that she neither speaks Spanish nor watches the primary source of Latino news and political information, saying: “I don’t watch Univision.” Quoting her makes little practical sense.
It only makes sense when we consider how ever-expanding Latino power in Nevada and across the country is pushing up against people’s fraying sense of nationhood and citizenship. Latino citizens and voters, not undocumented immigrants, are the targets of many liberals. These liberals long for the simpler days of a black-white electorate, a less-globalized country. Like Clinton, Obama and all Republican candidates, they support the political and racial equivalents of the anti-immigrant, anti-Latino border wall.
So instead of considering that Latinos reflect the new complexities of our political age, we should, experts tell us, simply swallow the black-white political logic of the previous era, like the half-moon cookies our grandmothers made. Ignore whatever you think of the Clintons - they have more than 15 years of relationships, name-recognition and history in the Latino electorate. Outside of Chicago, Obama has less than two years. Never mind that Latinos may still be wondering about why Obama did not, until recently, secure the support of most black voters. Never mind about the political amnesia about how the country’s last black candidate of national stature – Jesse Jackson- defied the prevailing racial logic during the Presidential primaries of 1988, when his Rainbow Coalition secured almost 50 percent of the Latino vote in Latino-heavy New Mexico counties like Santa Fe and San Miguel and 36 percent of the Latino vote in the largest Latino state in the country: California.
The Latino experience of the right-of-center Clintons and the left-of-center Jackson, who the Illinois senator did not ask to campaign for him, raises questions about Mr. Obama’s political operation and his political agenda. Time will tell us what was behind the Latino support for Clinton in Nevada. And who knows, maybe the experts telling us about Obama, Clinton and other candidates’ fortunes in upcoming primaries will do so without the black and white lens that has proven obsolete in the face of a new country.
Presidential Candidates Take the ‘Social’ Out of ‘Change’
New America Media, Commentary, Roberto Lovato, Posted: Jan 16, 2008
Editor’s Note: Presidential candidates now clamor for change, and many invoke Martin Luther King, Jr. for their own political benefit, but lost in the debate is the social movement of change, notes NAM contributing editor Roberto Lovato.
The spirit of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. still seems to stir serious controversy among politicians. But, as we’re witnessing with the latest racial politics pushing the primary process, the King icon is also being used to build the fortunes and legacies of these politicians, especially those who would be president.
Despite a racial controversy involving a newsletter bearing Ron Paul’s name that called King a “world-class adulterer” and “pro-communist philanderer,” the Republican candidate plans to launch a new and likely record-breaking multimillion dollar “super Tuesday” fundraising campaign on Jan. 21, Martin Luther King, Jr., day; Mitt Romney mentioned seeing King only to later “clarify” that he never actually saw him; Rudy Giuliani regularly makes references to King in speeches, books and security consulting engagements that earned the former New York mayor the millions of dollars that were, until recently, paying for his campaign. And Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are in the midst of a fierce battle over the MLK legacy to see who deserves to win the black vote.
Lost in the bickering over and celebrations of King as an individual is any notion of the social movement that defined King and an entire generation. Similarly, the mind-numbing mantra of “change” mouthed ad infinitum by all of today’s presidential candidates would have us believe that they, not we, are the arbiters of change. The King anniversary appears to provide candidates an opportunity to remind us that they have a monopoly on “change.”
The most recent electoral banter around King takes place within the collective amnesia about his views, especially his later views focusing on issues dogging us to this day: racism and poverty, prisoners and war. To the detriment of our political process, we forget that King’s views came about at least in part as a response to a black political milieu defined not just by white racism, but by the wealth of spirited action and the intellectual perspective provided by millions of people, thousands of organizations and other, less-requited political stars – Angela Davis, the Black Panthers and their combination of service and calls to militancy; Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam and their own brand of self-determination; Stokely Carmichael and the more militant students of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. These and many others influenced and pressured King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the 1960s.
As the harried run toward this year’s King celebrations and the South Carolina primary continues, the practically propagandistic repetitions and variations of words and phrases like “change,” “hope,” “content of character”, “I have a dream” and other King-isms are coded and distributed for mass consumption like Coca-Cola. Coke is, in fact, the main corporate sponsor of a gigantic new civil rights museum located just a shout from Ebenezer Baptist Church and King’s birthplace in Atlanta.
Nowhere is this denial of the “social” in “change” better exemplified than in statements made by Hillary Clinton, who said last week, “Dr King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.” Few among the pundits noted how Clinton’s framing of the issue deleted the social component of change. Instead, the media, pundits and even community leaders are engaged in a heated discussion about what the candidates believe: whether it was King, the individual, or Johnson, the individual, who “realized” the dream.
This climate has benefited Barack Obama, who speaks more skillfully than any other candidate to a still mostly white electorate that is largely unwilling to deal collectively with issues of race and racism beyond the platitudes one hears during official celebrations of King. Obama’s King-like cadences and charisma give us that semi-religious feeling that goes with being part of a social change movement -only without a social change movement.
In critical ways, the lack of the “social” in our discussions of “change” allows us to gloss over crucial differences between Obama the candidate and King, the leader of the Poor People’s Campaign. When asked how he would like to be remembered after his death, King said, “I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison.”
Like his competitors, Obama spends most of his time making speeches packed with calls for tax cuts and other proposals targeting the crumbling bastion of individualism: the “middle class.” He spends little to no time at rallies dealing with those most devastated by the lack of change: working class people, especially young people like those fueling the Jena Six movement. As he and the other candidates vie to be the inheritors of the King legacy, those who would be King say not a word about forcing “change” in a prison industry that predicts the value of its stock based on the future school performance of black and Latino third graders.
As we decide, during these times of continued crisis, on whom to vote for and what to do beyond the ballot box once they get elected, we might do well to recall the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., social change agent: “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering,
and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.”
