Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon News

A peace that's about to explode
As more than 10,000 NATO troops prepare to leave Bosnia, the Clinton administration is simply hoping stability will last until Election Day.
By Laura Rozen
[12/06/99]

Alan Keyes called me a racist
The GOP presidential candidate can cry "racism" all he wants, but it's his own paranoid egoism that threatens his campaign.
By Jake Tapper
[12/06/99]

What made peace possible in Ireland?
A vision of prosperity and inclusion, for North and South, moved both sides beyond violence.
By Margaret Spillane and Bruce Shapiro
[12/06/99]

Crash course in ethics
How accurate are airline crash investigations if the people conducting them have a financial stake in the outcome?
By Michael Alvear
[12/06/99]

Hillary's spokeswoman calls it quits
Marsha Berry leaves the first lady's office in the latest sign that Hillary is becoming a full-time Senate candidate.
By Joan Walsh
[12/03/99]

Complete archives for News

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

While Gore continues to court Latinos by insisting that they are still excluded from the mainstream and therefore deserve protected status through affirmative action programs, Bush has developed a powerful and optimistic message of inclusion and unity. Typically, when speaking to Latino audiences, the Texas governor stresses Latinos' ability to overcome persistent obstacles. In his address to the Latin Business Association, Bush deftly balanced challenges with opportunities. He lauded business leaders for creating "a Latino economic miracle," even as he insisted that America must close the academic-achievement gap between whites and minorities.

Many political analysts and Latino activists have correctly pointed out that Bush's Hispanic appeal is largely symbolic. They are confident that Latino voters will base their votes on policy and not on posturing. But as one examines Bush's success with Latino voters in his gubernatorial reelection campaign in 1998, the power of ethnic symbolism should not be underestimated.

Last year, a combination of his symbolic appeal and Democratic inertia conspired to help Bush win an unprecedented percentage of Latino votes in Texas. His success in his home state serves as a cautionary tale for Democrats across the country. As the GOP first began to emerge as a major force in Texas politics in the late 1970s, Democrats found comfort in the belief that they could rely indefinitely on the traditional loyalty of the state's growing Mexican-American population. Since the 1980s, conventional wisdom has held that in order to win statewide elections, Democrats would have to offset the Republican urban vote by garnering large margins of victory in heavily Latino south Texas. But that did not happen in 1998. Bush received 40 percent of the state's Latino vote, unprecedented for any Anglo Republican statewide candidate.

Pundits have credited Bush's strong showing among Texas Latinos in 1998 either to his message of compassionate conservatism or to his limited Spanish-language skills. While much of Bush's appeal came by default -- both a weak and underfunded Democratic opponent and a strong economy served the incumbent well -- the good will Bush did manage to earn among many Hispanic voters was hard won and had little to do with language, ideology or partisanship

Bush's one-time success in winning 40 percent of the Hispanic vote is specific to the governor and does not presage a Latino political mutiny toward the GOP. However, it does provide an important model of how a strong, ethnically sensitive GOP candidate can capture significant numbers of Hispanic votes.

Undoubtedly thinking ahead to his presidential bid in 2000, Bush made unprecedented -- and electorally unnecessary -- efforts to court voters in traditionally Democratic, heavily Mexican-American counties. He made repeated visits to El Paso, a place statewide Republican candidates routinely write off and which Democratic candidates long have taken for granted. There he tapped into the city's strong sense of isolation from Austin and made compelling arguments about how the future of Texas rests on the well-being of the border region.

"Gov. Bush has given El Paso and the border unprecedented attention," says Mike Acosta, associate director of the Texas Centers for Border Economic Development. Rejecting the old images of the border as a haven for crime, drugs and pollution, Bush has argued that the region was an asset rather than a liability. Because in Texas parlance the border is synonymous with Mexican Americans, this economic message has ethnic implications. "When you say the border is good, you're saying Mexicans are good," says Thomas Longoria, a political science professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. "When you say the border is worth investing in, you're saying that Mexicans are worth investing in."

However, Bush could not point to a substantive policy record when wooing voters along the border. Still grappling with the sometimes destabilizing effects of NAFTA, the Border region -- which includes several of the poorest counties in the United States -- has received no clear political benefits from the popular Republican governor. In fact, at the end of the last legislative session, Bush let die a bipartisan package that would have funded infrastructure improvements along the border.

Nevertheless, many voters felt that Bush's mere attention to the region was enough of a reason to vote for him. Last November, the governor received 39 percent of the Mexican-American vote in El Paso, enough to put him over the top and make him the first Republican gubernatorial candidate ever to win there. Carlos Ramirez, the Democratic mayor of El Paso, who endorsed the governor's reelection campaign, claims that Bush's Hispanic outreach has made the Mexican-American vote more competitive than before. "You can't vote straight ticket anymore," he says. "You have to exercise your political muscle."

Bush has continued that strategy as he takes his campaign national. He continues not only to court black and Latino business groups, but he regularly visits low-income schools and minority neighborhoods. His speeches at these schools vary little from his standard stump speech, and still have more to do with style than substance. How else to explain the campaign's recent unveiling of Spanish-language radio ads in Iowa?

An unintended byproduct of Bush's "Tejano" strategy has been to give the Hispanic electorate more clout, at least for the moment. "One of the real winners [last November] was the Mexican-American voter," says Jerry Polinard, a political scientist at the University of Texas Pan American. "Clearly, they're the vote to be courted. With Republicans making gains among Latino voters, the Democrats can no longer take that vote for granted."

The same can be said for Latinos nationwide. The Bush campaign has forced Gore in particular to campaign hard in places that had been considered Democratic bastions. Whether the strategy will pay off for Bush remains to be seen.

Next page | Corazon conservatism