Thread: Politics Behind California’s Primary

Newsmax.com


Politics Behind California’s Primary
Tuesday, February 5, 2008 8:05 AM

By: Lowell Ponte

California, the biggest prize in Super Tuesday’s primaries — and home to Hollywood, Haight-Ashbury, and Berkeley — is a peculiar state.


Reading the entrails of how Golden State voters cast their ballots can reveal a great deal about America’s present and future politics.


On Sunday, California’s prestigious Field Poll reported that Democratic Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and fast-rising Barack Obama of Illinois were statistically tied here, 36-34, in a poll with a 4.6 percent margin of error.


National news made much of this poll’s finding that Barack Obama has the support of 55 percent of California blacks. This sounds impressive unless you know that African-Americans are now less than 6 percent of this state’s population.


Approximately 11 percent of Californians are Asian-Americans.


The Caucasian minority is less than 47 percent of California’s ethnic salad bowl.


Wise Californians are teaching their children Spanish and their grandchildren Chinese.


California’s fastest-growing community, Latinos, comprises more than 32 percent of the state’s population. Approximately 52 percent of California Hispanics, the Field Poll reported, support Hillary Clinton.


But this poll was partly taken prior to Kennedy family members with close ties to the Hispanic community giving endorsements in this race. Sen. Edward Kennedy threw his considerable weight behind Obama, and ambitious trial lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is backing Clinton.


Hispanic voter turnout in the past has been as low as 6 percent. Distrust of government, 52 percent of Hispanic-American adults without a high school diploma, and large numbers of non-citizens fearful of scrutiny are reasons why relatively few Latinos have voted.


Approximately 22 percent of both black and Latino families in California live below the official government poverty level, and at this lowest end of the economic ladder blacks and Hispanics compete for housing, jobs and power.


Election analysts will make much of how many, and in which neighborhoods, Hispanics turn out to vote on Super Tuesday.


Latinos have more to vote for on Tuesday than presidential candidates.


The California ballot also contains Proposition 93, a measure that would ease term limits that threaten the power of today’s entrenched state lawmakers.


The real reason California moved its traditional June presidential primary election to Feb. 5 this year was to pass Proposition 93.


Proposition 93’s foremost beneficiary could be the powerful Hispanic speaker of the Assembly, the lower house in California’s Democrat-dominated legislature.


Speaker Fabian — as in Fabian Socialist — Nunez will soon be removed by voter-imposed term limits unless Proposition 93 passes, in which case Nunez will continue for another six years to impose more of the confiscatory taxation and runaway government spending that have been killing this state that laid golden eggs.


Who is Fabian Nunez?


Born in late December 1966 in a San Diego hospital, Nunez is the son of a Mexican gardener and a maid who entered California so that he, one of 12 children, would be born here and therefore be a U.S. citizen.


Nunez lived in Tijuana, Mexico, until age 8, when his family moved to the tough Logan Heights neighborhood east of downtown San Diego.


Admitted to the University of California San Diego, Nunez became a political organizer before dropping out. He soon had children and a wife with cancer, but his passion for radical immigrant activism produced little income, a 1994 bankruptcy, and divorce.


Soon thereafter he became a protégé of Miguel Contreras, boss of the powerful Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, who hired Nunez in 1996 as its political director.


In 2000, Nunez became a lobbyist for the Los Angeles Unified School District, and soon thereafter became protégé to then-Assemblyman Gil Cedillo. When Cedillo ran for state Senate in 2001, he anointed Nunez as his successor in the Assembly.


Cedillo is best known for relentlessly demanding that illegal aliens be given California driver's licenses identical to those citizens use to register to vote.


Contreras and Cedillo used their considerable political muscle to make Nunez the Assembly speaker by 2004.


Like Cedillo and the best man at Nunez’s second wedding, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Nunez seems eager to restore California to Mexican cultural and political control.


At a 1995 speech to a “Latino Summitâ€

Originally Posted by jimpasz

Like Cedillo and the best man at Nunez’s second wedding, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Nunez seems eager to restore California to Mexican cultural and political control.

The last time California was under Mexican control there was anarchy and the place was going to ruin. That's exactly what happened to the local Spanish Mission near my house. The same thing is happening this time, and it will accelerate if Villar becomes Governor. The thing is this time Americans in the other 49 states will have to support all the Mexican living here!

Now wait - I was going to vote yes on props 94-97, but if Nunez wants me to - then forget it! I thought Native Americans weren't crazy about illegal immigration and all the Azatlan talk, so I wanted to help move business their way. I don't even gamble (beyond getting out of bed, filling out job apps, etc). Guess I was wrong and I'm glad I saw the relationship before I voted.

Hispanic voter turnout in the past has been as low as 6 percent. Distrust of government, 52 percent of Hispanic-American adults without a high school diploma, and large numbers of non-citizens fearful of scrutiny are reasons why relatively few Latinos have voted.

HELLO?!?!?! Noncitizens are FORBIDDEN from voting. Increased scrutiny is the idea!