Will Obama throw Latinos a bone?
By Tony Castro, Voxxi
But they may have been disappointed that the rest of his address mentioned virtually nothing about Latin America.
Add to that the bewilderment among some Hispanics at the end of the week when The New York Times reported that President Obama is moving toward accepting an immigration reform law that doesn’t include a path to citizenship.
A week that had begun with the intoxicating high of Latinos cheering on the president for vowing to finally go all out to pass the immigration reform he promised in 2008 ended with the sobering drum beat the same president is now indicating he will accept less than what most immigrant advocates thought they would get.
Some might call this the politics of compromise.
Some might call it politics as usual for President Obama in his relationship with Latinos.
Starting the sixth year of the Obama presidency, Hispanics in America are still waiting for an immigration reform law promised in his first campaign for the White House, which was made possible in large part by historic Latino voting.
Immigration reform was a big campaign promise in 2008. The president hasn’t delivered. In fact, it can be argued that immigration reform was sacrificed for the fight on Obamacare, which some might bet that in future years is likely to be scaled back and quietly retired to the same bin of well-intentioned but discarded laws where some of the Roosevelt presidency social programs now rest.
And although Latinos had been expected to be the biggest participants and beneficiaries of Obamacare, that hasn’t happened in California, where the program is overwhelmed with righting embarrassing problems with enrollment of Hispanics.
Just as importantly, in the last six years, Obama has been slow in naming Latinos to the Cabinets of both his administrations, with the number never rising above the Hispanic representation under President Bill Clinton. In fact, only last month did Obama finally name the second Latino Cabinet member of his second administration.
In Texas, California and the Southwest, there has also been quiet grumbling over feeling left out of the Obama spoils.
There, they are aware that the majority of Obama’s Latino appointees have been non-Californians and non-Texans — and many of the important ones have been Ivy Leaguers — like Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor — who are Puerto Rican or Cuban and do not share the Southwest Latino experience.
In fact, an argument can be made by some Latinos that Obama has had no clue about Latinos in America. His biographies fail to mention any close Latino friends prior to his public life, and he had not traveled south of the border before his election as president.
Even as president, for all his travels to California for fund-raising purposes – and there have been more trips than Clinton ever made – the only Latinos he is known to have met with have been celebrities, among them Antonio Banderas, who unless there’s been an unknown change isn’t even a U.S. citizen or voter, and Eva Longoria.
The president’s defenders undoubtedly can argue that Latinos might not be any better of had either John McCain or Mitt Romney been elected president, but the issue doesn’t resolve the questions surrounding Obama’s fulfillment of promises to Latinos, based on his record and his experience.
Understandably, there is a lot of sympathy and support of Obama. A lot of it is based on the same connection that Latinos have historically had with Democrats and the Democratic Party.
But you have to ask: What have some of these Democratic administrations done for Hispanics that wouldn’t have been done anyway?
For Democrats know that Latinos may complain but aren’t going to bolt the party nationally or in most regions. Understandably, it’s human nature that there would be some taking for granted as a consequence.
Sadly, it’s a conundrum of our time as Latinos. Sticking with someone we want to believe in — and whom many do believe in — when all rational argument says it’s not going to do you any good in the long run.
Realistically, it may be that we, as Latinos, haven’t truly reached that point of genuine political independence.
Perhaps we haven’t really arrived at that stage in our political development to fully appreciate what the country’s forefathers meant when they could state so eloquently, that:
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
And it may be that perhaps the reason Latinos are so attached to the Democratic Party and afraid to seriously consider Republicanism, except in minority numbers, is that few Hispanics have any direct connection to the America at the time when those men wrote the Declaration of Independence.
Instead perhaps it’s worth noting that historically the political experience for many American Latinos was largely formed by fidelity to a corrupt single party in Mexico and the equally and more ruthlessly corrupt strongman dictatorships of so many other Latin countries.
Can it be any wonder then that so many Latinos have been so reticent to become part of a political process in America that offers incredible choices and especially promises that seem too good to be true?
Maybe the truth is they know something the rest of us don’t.
This article was originally published in Voxxi.
