Ah,
Republicans ...
Romney aides told BuzzFeed their polling indicates that Obama's biggest vulnerability among Hispanics is that he's viewed as a "weak leader." In much of Latino culture, they explained, political leaders are expected to demonstrate a macho bravado, and Obama's debate performance last month — with his verbal pauses, downward gaze, and weak defense of his own record — seemed to exacerbate the incumbent's perception problem.
This, coming from the same crowd that cried about Joe Biden being too assertive, mean, and well, "macho", to Mitt Romney's intern Paul Ryan.
President Barack Obama is down with Florida Latinos in some recent polling, yes. In fact, he's down with everyone. That's the legacy of his first debate. The notion that there's a cultural factor at play is ludicrous. Indeed, the broader trends remain: Romney significantly lags with Latinos because he's horrible on the issues they care about:
President Obama slipped from 72% last week to 67% this week, suggesting that his debate performance also led some Latino voters to re-evaluate the President. Those who said they are certain to vote for Romney increased slightly from 20% last week to 23% this week.
Does that mean that Obama can rest easy? Of course not. He needs to use tomorrow's debate to speak to Latinos about the things they care about. But if Obama was culturally unacceptable to Latinos then, well, he'd be sitting at 23 percent of their support.