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RSS icon Comments on Bill May Have Been the First "Black" President. But Hillary Could be the First "Latino" President.

1

God, I hate hearing about how Bill Clinton was "black".

Posted by JC | March 5, 2008 2:38 PM
2

Bill was NOT the first Black president, though one could argue he might have been the most sympathetic to issues for people of color. Hillary might be similar on said issues, but it wreaks of White Privilege to claim they get to be honorary President-of-Color by seeking their votes and targeting them for campaigning.

Or, as the great Dick Gregory has to say:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8lK5MG5GSM&eurl=http://andypendence.blogspot.com/

Posted by Andy Niable | March 5, 2008 2:40 PM
3

If Bill was all that, how come he makes racial attacks on Obama now? And if the Clintons were happy to throw gays and blacks under the bus when they needed to, why wouldn't they do the same thing to Hispanics the same way the GOP did?

Posted by elenchos | March 5, 2008 2:44 PM
4

As a black man..., he was not a "black" president. STOP! And Hillary has lost black voters in droves. So, while the Hispanics might flip some states to her, the loss of black voters will cause her to lose Florida, Ohio, and possibly others.

Posted by Fitz | March 5, 2008 2:44 PM
5

And this is why the race needs to continue.

Clinton is slowly getting more effective at on the ground campaigning, and Obama is slowly getting more effective at appealing to Reagan Dems and Latinos.

The more that they work at it, the more prepped H-dawg/O-street will be in November.

Posted by arduous | March 5, 2008 2:46 PM
6
While we’re on the cusp of electing the first black President ... it’s a safe bet that this racist country isn’t going to elect a Latino or Asian President, um, ever.

Nonsense - I'd take that bet. No one saw a feasible black presidential candidate coming in 2003. The fact that the candidates aren't there now doesn't mean they won't be in a few years.

Posted by tsm | March 5, 2008 3:00 PM
7

Aren't a lot of latinos voting Clinton because they won't, under any circumstances, vote for a black person? I desperately want a democrat in the white house, and I think if that means exploiting the racial prejudices of, among others, latinos, then so be it, but that is one terrible path to victory.

Posted by dave | March 5, 2008 3:04 PM
8

@6

Man, tsm, I totally skimmed past that boner about never electing an Asian or Latino president. Josh, you've gone mad with the Hil-rage.

Posted by elenchos | March 5, 2008 3:15 PM
9

Oh yeah, Josh, I did *mean* to comment on this Asian/Latino thing.

One word, Josh:

Jindal

Posted by arduous | March 5, 2008 3:23 PM
10

Hmmm.

Nope.

Posted by Will in Seattle | March 5, 2008 3:25 PM
11

My inside sources have just informed me that Plagiarism Is The New Black Nationalism. Given that, the obvious way for Hils to clinch the Dem nomination would be to plagiarize Grace Slick:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InZS5jQTSvc

Posted by Jeff Stevens | March 5, 2008 3:25 PM
12

biggest problem with that theory of latino voting might is the following;

I havent seen anything in primaries that would say they are a strong enough force as a voting block to put her into the presidency.

Posted by Bellevue Ave | March 5, 2008 3:49 PM
13

How is Hillary speaking to Latinos in the same way that Bill spoke to African Americans? For whatever reason, Latinos prefer Hillary, but I'm not seeing her making an incredibly deep connection with them.

Posted by keshmeshi | March 5, 2008 3:54 PM
14

I think Josh saying Bill was the First Black President is in response to the famous Toni Morrison quote which has since been repeated about a gazillion times and also by just about every major African American leader in the country.

That being said, Hillary is the more 'electable' candidate for 3 reasons";

1. She has much more chance and more game in battleground states that are essential to the Dem's taking back the White House.

2. She can win the Hispanic vote and pull all of those voters who went GW Bush and might vote for McCain if Obama is the D nominee. This voter block is huge and a major swing. Kind of the 'Reagan Democrats" of the 21st Century.

3. She has got a steel jaw in terms of taking it from the Republican machine as the general election showdown goes down.

Posted by Mrs. Y | March 5, 2008 3:58 PM
15

1 Fact: Hillary gets the Latino vote
2. it's a key to Democratic succes w/ Florida (HRC won it) NM (won by Hill) NV (yup she won that, too) .....
Note that FL is very difficult for Obama after saying 2 million D votes should not be counted.

3. as per Josh put her on the ticket. Very modest suggestion, isn't even saying put her on top of ticket.

4. Reactions: Latinos are racist, WLC wasn't black, Josh is wrong we'll never have a Latino president anytime soon, blah blah blah blah ANYTHING to avoid dealing with the obvious logic and reality-based nature of the principal argument made as noted in 1-3 above.

Obama fails to get the Latino vote, and fials to get the white vote in certain states, you can either cry racism all you want (ignoring the obvious fact that the blacks in states he wins are voting on racial lines) but if you want to put together a winning coalition put 'em both on the ticket and let's get the white, black AND latino vote and freaking start fighting republicans not each other.

Entiendes?

Posted by unPC | March 5, 2008 4:03 PM
16

mrs. y, she has more game in battle ground states? wheres the evidence of that? these primaries arent a good basis because there have been almost always a 2:1 ratio between D:R voters in them.

Posted by Bellevue Ave | March 5, 2008 4:08 PM
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@13 -- The Latina's especially love them some Hillary. They are fucking crazy and fanatical for Hillary almost the same way Seattleites are crazy about Obama.

She has been a champion for them. Her comments back in (was it Iowa) debates about understanding why states are passing 'sanctuary' laws may have got all kinds of people riled up way back when...but the Hispanic voters are jumping for joy over her stand and her nuanced and thoughtful answers on issues like immigration.

Hills is also supported by the meat and potatoes working class too. Many Hispanic voters can also relate to those messages from Hills too.

Posted by Chica Maya | March 5, 2008 4:09 PM
18

unPC, do you agree with this analysis;

hillary has the potential to flip more states blue but also lose more states to red?

Posted by Bellevue Ave | March 5, 2008 4:14 PM
19

Most of the chicas I know are for Obama.

Posted by Will in Seattle | March 5, 2008 4:19 PM
20

Yeah, yeah, everyone gets why the Hilbots wish she could win. But do you have data? The polls say no, Hillary doesn't beat McCain in any of those ways.

Lets turn this goofy argument around. Do you think the Democrats are going to win all the states McCain lost to Romney or Huckabee? Are the Democrats going to win all the demographic groups McCain lost to Huckabee or Romney?

That would be silly, right?

Posted by elenchos | March 5, 2008 4:20 PM
21

unPC, losing the black votes in Ohio, Florida & elsewhere will not help in swing states.

Posted by Wake up! | March 5, 2008 4:22 PM
22

@19 - Will, Do you think that's because you live in Seattle where everyone but me, my wife and ECB voted for Obama.

Posted by Mrs. Y | March 5, 2008 4:34 PM
23

@22, read Will's post carefully. He says the ones he knows.

Posted by Reading 101 | March 5, 2008 4:47 PM
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Yeah, I don't get it. How are Latinos and Asians that far away from the presidency,again? There are more than a few Latino and Asian congressmen/governors...more, I would wager, than there are black congressman/governors (I have no stats to back that up...anybody want to second-guess me?).

Knuckle-dragging honkies who can't separate their prejudices from their opinions look at how different (read: how much darker) the candidate's skin is from their own. Hence, if we can elect a man of Obama's African hue president (or even make him the nominee), the relatively lighter flesh tones of Asians and Latinos make them even safer bets, no?

Posted by Matthew | March 5, 2008 4:48 PM
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@22 - most of the ones I know are in Washington, Wash DC, and Cali. Most aren't in Seattle.

I don't purport to know what women I don't know who self-identify as Hispanic are saying. Just the ones I do know, including relatives and friends.

Yes, I counted my Clinton-supporting Hispanic friends.

Posted by Will in Seattle | March 5, 2008 4:58 PM
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@ 23 -- Reading 101

That is exactly my point mister snippy pants...all the chicas he knows...do they (or most) live in Seattle?

Like, if you did a statistical analysis if all the ‘chicas Will knows” would you find that to be collinear with the fact that most people Will knows live in Seattle.

One might argue that the Seattle factor has more weight in the chicas he knows supporting Obama than the fact that they are Hispanic.

Posted by Mrs Y | March 5, 2008 5:08 PM
27

@23, Mr.? Try Ms. But I like the Snippy Pants. ...It's all good.

Posted by Reading 101 | March 5, 2008 5:13 PM
28

Hispanic Voting Myths
Steven Malanga

The GOP has less to fear from a Latino backlash than some claim.

When President Bush’s immigration-reform bill collapsed this past summer, torpedoed largely by objections from within his own party, open-borders advocates and media commentators warned that the GOP would pay a harsh political price for killing the bill. After all, their argument went, Hispanic support had been crucial in electing President Bush, and Hispanic voters represented a rising electoral tide that Republicans ignored at their peril. the gop may erase the gains it’s made with hispanics; hispanic voters flex political muscle—headlines galore blared these and similar messages after the immigration legislation’s defeat.

But such commentary is largely based on an inaccurate picture of the Hispanic voting public that emerged after the 2004 election and persists today. Shortly after the election, for instance, former Clinton pollster Dick Morris declared that Hispanics had elected Bush; they represented 12 percent of the electorate, he reasoned, and 45 percent of them had voted for the president, enough to decide a race that Bush won by about 3 million votes. Most stories since have followed this general theme.

The Hispanic vote for Bush was far from decisive, however, and it may be years before it plays a pivotal role in a national election. For one thing, Hispanics are a small portion of the voting public—far smaller than their percentage of the population—because many are ineligible to vote and even those who do qualify to vote often don’t. Hispanics may represent about 14 percent of the U.S. population, but they actually constituted just 6 percent, not 12 percent, of the 2004 electorate—just 7.5 million voters out of 125 million. According to Census Bureau data, only 34 percent of America’s adult Hispanics registered to vote in 2004, and just 28 percent voted. By contrast, 67 percent of the country’s adult white, non-Hispanic population and 56 percent of its adult black population voted in 2004. Blacks, whom Hispanics have now surpassed as America’s largest minority, outnumbered Hispanic voters nearly two to one in 2004.

The media have also exaggerated Bush’s Hispanic support. Exit polls taken during 2004 showed a wide variation in Bush’s share of the Hispanic vote, ranging from a high of 44 percent in some polls to a low of 33 percent. Most in the media have gone with the higher number. Yet subsequent academic studies have discredited it and have since estimated Bush’s actual level of Hispanic support at somewhere between 35 percent and 37 percent. In this light, the “swing” of Hispanic voters from Bob Dole, the GOP’s 1996 presidential candidate who garnered just 21 percent of their vote, to George W. Bush was hardly historic. Dole’s candidacy represented a modern-day low-water mark for the GOP with Hispanic voters (and lots of other constituencies, too). In 1984, Ronald Reagan captured 37 percent of the Hispanic vote—a performance at least equal to Bush’s. This suggests that the key to winning Hispanic votes may be running good candidates, not pandering. Hispanic voters themselves seem to be saying so: a 2004 Washington Post poll found that immigration was the least important issue among Hispanic voters, with only 3.5 percent placing it at the top of their concerns; 27 percent of the respondents named the economy and 20 percent terrorism as their biggest concern.

But so far, commentators have chosen to ignore historical voting patterns and to see everything in terms of immigration. They claim that the Hispanic backlash against Republicans’ immigration policy began in the 2006 congressional election, because only 30 percent of Latino voters supported GOP candidates. But from 2004 to 2006, the GOP lost support among virtually all constituencies, including union members (down 10 percentage points) and white evangelicals (down 8 percentage points) for reasons that had nothing to do with immigration.

When facing up to the feeble national numbers, most observers claim that the Hispanic vote is still important in swing states where the Hispanic population concentrates, especially in an era of tightly contested national races. Thus, the “Hispanics flexing their political muscles” story presented readers with a list of swing states where the Hispanic population was large, such as Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. But look more closely at the numbers in these states. In Arizona, though Hispanics make up 17 percent of the state’s population (and 28 percent of voting-age adults), they constituted just 13 percent of voters in 2004. Bush, who won the state by 210,700 votes (including 103,700 from Hispanics), would not have lost Arizona even if his opponent, John Kerry, had won every Hispanic vote.

The Arizona vote points to another fallacy about Hispanic political power: namely, that a liberal immigration policy will win voters for the Republican Party, and not cost it any. In fact, polls suggest that Bush’s immigration policy might cost more votes than it gains.

Consider: in 2004, 78 percent of the Arizona electorate (1.74 million voters) told pollsters that immigration should either stay at current levels or decrease. One can only imagine how those voters would have reacted in the summer of 2004 if the president had introduced an immigration-reform bill similar to this summer’s, which offered a path to citizenship for some 12 million illegals along with vastly expanded legal immigration slots in order to clear up the nation’s backlog of visa applications.

Given what the voting numbers show us, it’s unlikely that Hispanics will become an important voting bloc as soon as many predict. And by then, Hispanic citizens might find that an immigration policy based on enforcing borders and increasing the number of better-skilled immigrants, which many Republicans advocate, actually benefits them. For one thing, recent economic studies show that the country’s current levels of immigration are hurting immigrants who are already here—and they hurt native-born Hispanics more than most U.S. residents. A saner immigration flow is likely to boost the average wages of our current Hispanic population and reduce the scramble for resources, such as housing, in heavily Hispanic communities.

But much of the commentary on Hispanic voting power tends to ignore such issues, focusing instead on Hispanic voters’ supposed anger at Republicans and comparing it with black voters’ desertion of the party after key Republicans opposed civil rights legislation in the 1960s. But the analogy hardly stands up. For one thing, American blacks were striving to obtain rights already guaranteed in the Constitution, but denied to them. By contrast, American Hispanics encounter no such widespread and organized discrimination. The current immigration debate is not about denying them anything, but about dealing with those now here illegally and those yet to come.

Steven Malanga is senior editor of City Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is the author of The New New Left, a collection of his City Journal essays.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_sndgs02.html


Just Sayin...

Posted by Reality Check | March 5, 2008 5:22 PM
29

Wow, that was long Reality Check.

And totally wrong.

Just like Mrs Y @26 is also totally wrong.

Posted by Will in Seattle | March 5, 2008 5:55 PM

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