Thread: Bush is Fulfilling Campaign Promise to Fox?

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The Latino Factor
THE Hispanic VOTE may hold the key
By Ana Radelat

With an eye on November’s election, President Bush made a campaign swing through New Mexico and Arizona in March to tout the nation’s homeownership statistics.
The issue of homeownership is key to Hispanics, who are less likely to own a home than most other Americans. Bush told cheering crowds in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Phoenix, Arizona he has set a goal of creating 5.5 million new minority homeowners by the end of the decade.
“The role of government is to help people realize a dream, not stand in the way of dreams,” he said.

Earlier that month, Bush invited Mexican President Vicente Fox to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, to stand next to him when the president signaled his willingness to exempt many Mexicans who come to the United States for work or short visits from the requirement that foreigners entering the country be fingerprinted and photographed.

Bush is likely to continue his overtures to Hispanics, and so is his rival for the White House, Sen. John Kerry, (D-MA) because the Hispanic vote becomes more important with each election.

There are two reasons for this. The electorate is nearly evenly split between the Democratic and Republican parties when it comes to choosing presidential candidates, resulting in the surprisingly close Bush-Gore race in 2000, and swing votes are more highly prized than ever.

In addition, Hispanic voters are one of the fastest-growing segments of the electorate. According to the National Council of La Raza, there were just under 5 million Hispanic voters in 1996, about 6 million in 2000 and about 8 million this year.

In 2000, Cuban Americans in South Florida may have given Bush the edge in that hotly contested state and Hispanic votes may have also been decisive in other states, such as New Mexico, which was won by former Vice President Al Gore by a mere 366 votes.

This year, Hispanic voters could make the difference in New Mexico and in four other states that Bush won in 2000 but are considered within Kerry’s grasp: Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and Florida.

Kerry was a competitive challenger in a recent poll in Arizona, where Hispanics make up about 1 in 4 residents. The poll, which had a margin of error of 4.7 percentage points, had Kerry’s support at 46 percent in that state, versus 44 percent for Bush.

Feeling the heat, the Bush-Cheney re-election team unveiled its first nationwide campaign ads in early March, including a couple in Spanish that ran in New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and Florida on the Spanish-language TV networks.

The day after Bush began airing his Spanish-language ads, the New Democrat Network countered with its own spots in the same states that claimed Bush has not kept the promise he made during the 2000 campaign to be a friend of the Hispanic community.

The commercials are part of Demócratas Unidos, a $5 million project designed to help the party reach out to the Hispanic community through September.

“For the first time ever, there’s an air war in Spanish,” says Democratic pollster Sergio Bendixen.

María Cardona, vice president of the New Democrat Network and the director of its Hispanic project, says expectations of a tight Bush-Kerry contest has turned both parties’ attention to the Latino community.

“This is an incredibly divided electorate where every vote counts and the community has increasingly voted independent. They’re up for grabs,” she says. “We can’t take them for granted anymore.”

Adam Segal, director of the Hispanic Voter Project at Johns Hopkins University, has tracked campaign advertising and predicts record spending by the Bush and Kerry campaigns in all states with significant Latino populations, except perhaps three of the largest. Democrats have conceded Texas to Bush and Republicans may not make much of an effort in heavily Democratic California and New York.

Segal also says there are good reasons Kerry tapped the New Democrat Network, an organization of moderate party members formed during the Clinton presidency, to reach out to Hispanics.

The New Democrat Network has hired Hispanic staff to woo Latino voters, he says. And the group has another asset: its middle-of-the-road ideology.

“A moderate centrist message has been the message that has resonated in the Hispanic community among undecideds,” Segal says.

But those moderate and undecided Hispanic voters could also swing Bush’s way. Segal points out that polls show that middle-income Latinos with promising outlooks toward the future are very receptive to the GOP message.
He believes Bush has gained a boost by saying he’d back a proposal to give undocumented workers in the United States temporary legal status. Before that, Hispanic advocacy groups were giving the president low marks, and that was influencing the community.

“Polling showed that there were negative feelings in the Hispanic community when Latinos were asked about Bush’s role in immigration policy and the U.S. relationship with Latin America,” Segal says.

But Bush’s surprising immigration announcement—which has distressed the most conservative members of his party—turned things around, he says. So has his rekindled friendship with Fox.

“There’s no doubt that Bush is going to foster that relationship through November,” Segal says.

Robert Suro, the head of the Pew Hispanic Center, says Bush’s strategy isn’t to win a majority of Hispanic votes, just pick off enough from the Democrats to ensure victory.
“For Republicans, it’s a matter of incremental gains,” he says.

According to exit polls, which have been criticized by some as inaccurate, the president won about 35 percent of the Latino vote in 2000. He’d like to do better this year.
But Rep. Bob Menéndez (D-NJ), a rising star in the Democratic Party who will have a high-profile role at the party’s convention this summer, says Democrats have a three-pronged strategy to keep Latino voters faithful. He says Latinos will be visible “at every level” during the convention and that the party will stress that its “core mission” is better than the GOP’s for the community. Menéndez also said the Democrats will also remind Hispanic voters of “its great history” with Latinos.
Democrats may also roll out another weapon at the convention that will help them win Hispanic votes, especially in the battleground states of New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona and Nevada. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson—who is very popular with Latinos in the West and is a co-chair of the convention—is on Kerry’s short list of vice presidential candidates.

In March, a top Kerry staffer met with Menéndez and other member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to discuss possible vice presidential candidates. The Kerry campaign needed to reach out to the Hispanic caucus. None of its 20 members had endorsed the Massachusetts senator; many of them preferred former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.

“We told him that Bill clearly deserves to be considered,” Menéndez recalls. “I think Bill Richardson could help Kerry win key states. But we have to look at the map; there are others who could help him, too. I don’t have a single choice. I want to win.” Sens. John Edwards of North Carolina and Bob Graham of Florida and Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell are also said to be top choices for the No. 2 spot on the Democratic ticket.

“There’s certainly a lot of strength that Bill Richardson can bring to the ticket,” says Rosalind Gold of the National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO). “He has a history of public service; he’s not just the governor of New Mexico.”

Richardson was a Democratic leader in the U.S. House and, in the Clinton administration, the U.S. representative to the United Nations and energy secretary.

Richardson says Democrats need to appeal to moderate Hispanic voters to win in November. “Let’s not put Hispanics in a box,” he says. “We can’t just use issues like civil rights and Affirmative Action. We have to talk about homeownership, entrepreneurship and education.”

Richardson adds that Kerry needs to “keep Bush at or under 35 percent” of the Hispanic vote to win the White House.

He worries about the president’s special appeal in the community, an appeal that comes from his Texan familiarity with the Latino community and his friendship with Hispanics, many of whom he has placed in top positions in his administration, such as White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. Kerry, in contrast, failed to hire any Spanish-language speakers for the top ranks of his campaign staff and waited until March to ask the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to recommend some candidates.

Still, “the Republican Party has a horrible record on Hispanic issues,” Richardson argues. “The negative side for us is that President Bush has an appeal that needs to be countered.”

Richardson has made the battleground states of Arizona, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico his No. 1 priority. To target Hispanic voters in those states, and possibly Colorado, Richardson has raised about $1 million—and hopes to raise another million—in a special political action committee called Moving America Forward.

He says “it would be very difficult” for him to say yes if Kerry asked him to join the ticket, because he has pledged to finish his term as governor, which expires in January 2007.

“But I don’t anticipate (an offer) happening.”
Hispanic votes will also make a difference in other key races this year.

Like all of their House colleagues, every member of the Hispanic caucus will seek re-election. Most of them are expected to return to Washington, but Rep. Ciro Rodríguez had a very strong Hispanic rival in the primary. At press time, he was battling Democratic challenger Henry Cuéllar in a recount of an election that was expected to be decided by a few hundred votes or less.

Hispanics may also pick up a couple of House seats this year, including one in California, where Democrat Jim Costa is expected to win the seat of retiring fellow Democrat Rep. Cal Dooley.

But the most interesting races may be in Colorado, where Attorney General Ken Salazar is running for the Senate and his brother, John Salazar, is running for the House.
Ken Salazar made the surprise decision to run after Republican Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell announced his retirement because of poor health. “He’s been encouraged to run before,” says campaign chairman Mike Stratton. “But this time he decided the open seat was a unique opportunity.”

Salazar referred to his Hispanic heritage when he announced his candidacy. But Stratton says the race “isn’t about ethnicity, it’s about his desire to serve.”

Brother John Salazar is running for the seat of Republican Rep. Scott McInnis, who is also retiring.

Another race to watch will be the Florida Senate race. Mel Martínez, a Cuban American who was once mayor of Orlando and served as Bush’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, is running as a Republican to replace Bob Graham, who is also retiring. Another Cuban American, Miami Dade Mayor Alex Penelas, is running as a Democrat for the seat. But Florida has not had its primary races yet, and polls say former state Education Commissioner Betty Castor is the most popular Democratic candidate and former Rep. Bill McCollum is the favorite of GOP voters. Still, NALEO’s Gold says Martínez “has strong appeal.”

There hasn’t been a Hispanic U.S. senator since Joseph Montoya of New Mexico left office in 1976.

http://www.yakima-herald.com/page/dis/286142445910145

Money — about $15 billion a year — sent back to Mexico by immigrants working in the United States is the second largest contributor to the country's gross national product, a fact hardly lost on the pro-business Fox, a former Coca-Cola executive with his own agri-business interests.

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