Run-Down on the Presidential Candidates

Is it true that Guiliani has morphed into Tom Tancredo? As a long-time New Yorker, it seems like Rudy would be embarrassed to be confused with Tom T.

As Navarette tells it, Clinton has it mostly sown up with Latino voters. I'm still not so sure. Anything could happen in the next few months.

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Earn Latinos' respect
Ruben Navarrette Jr., San Diego Union-Tribune
Monday, November 12, 2007
Chronicle Sunday Insight

You've probably heard that Republican presidential candidates have blown their chance with Latino voters because of their hard line on immigration and other hardheadedness.

Unfortunately, too much of the conversation has been about the effect of all this on the party - about whether the GOP is condemning itself to years in the electoral wilderness by alienating an influential constituency.

What I haven't heard enough about is how this neglect hurts Latino voters. In politics, the surest path to irrelevance and powerlessness is to be taken for granted by one party and written off by another. That is the road Latinos are on now, thanks to some major blunders by the Republicans running for president.

In June, all but one of the candidates - Duncan Hunter - blew off an invitation to address the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. And in September, a debate on Spanish-language television had to be postponed after all but one of the candidates - John McCain - refused to commit. After taking criticism for the snub, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney have committed to the event, which is now scheduled for Dec. 9 at the University of Miami.
These missteps raised the question of whether Republicans respect Latinos enough to ask for their support. That bothers Republican strategist Leslie Sanchez, who wrote the book "Los Republicanos: Why Hispanics and Republicans Need Each Other." Sanchez is convinced the Latino vote is in play and that every candidate should be vying for it.

"With Hispanics, we don't make connections to parties," she told me. "Hispanics make connections to individual people. Politicians have to earn our respect."

Latinos are big on respect, and the more they move up the ladder, the more they insist on it. So the very Latinos who might be attracted to the GOP because of its economic policies are being turned off by its insensitivity to Latino issues.
A USA Today/Gallup poll found that Latinos identify with Democrats by a margin of nearly 3-1.

One reason is that the Democratic front-runner - Hillary Clinton - is aggressively going after the Hispanic vote by racking up the endorsements of seemingly every Latino officeholder from East Los Angeles to the South Bronx.

Polls show Clinton earning about two-thirds of the Latino vote among Democrats and making up ground lost by the two previous Democratic nominees, John Kerry and Al Gore. Both flunked Hispanic Outreach 101, in part because they had that deadly combination of ignorance and arrogance.

You see something similar in John Edwards, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, who either don't realize they've lost the Latino vote or don't care.

Barack Obama is doing a bit better. He is trying to target younger Latinos. But he discovered this constituency too late and Clinton is already on her way to cornering the market.

Then there is Bill Richardson, who made history by being the first Hispanic to run a credible campaign for the presidency but seems to be losing Latino support, perhaps because he is too preoccupied with trying to prove himself acceptable to non-Latinos.

Among Republicans, Rudy Giuliani has morphed from a champion of immigrants into a Tom Tancredo impersonator. Giuliani even promised that he could end illegal immigration within three years by securing the borders and identifying every noncitizen in the United States. To those of us who live along the border, such talk is a signal that this city slicker doesn't understand the phenomenon he is promising to tackle - and so it'll probably tackle him. Mitt Romney's sin isn't naivete but hypocrisy. Meanwhile, McCain has a history of appealing to Latinos in Arizona and earned more than 70 percent of the Latino vote in his 2004 U.S. Senate re-election bid.

Don't tell me that Latino voters don't have choices in this election. They do. And it's only by exercising them and spreading their support among members of both parties that they'll stay relevant and earn the respect they crave.


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/12/ED9CT9KQP.DTL&hw=immigration&sn=006&sc=498