Obama can't win Hispanics

Good times, from June 1, 2008:

"[Puerto Rico] was a 100 percent Hispanic primary and it shows that he has a problem with the Latino community," Terry McAuliffe, campaign chairman for Hillary Clinton, told a handful of reporters after polls closed Sunday. "He cannot close in this key core constituency," McAuliffe added [...]

In a conference call with Clinton campaign donors last month, the campaign’s liaison to superdelegates, Harold Ickes, asserted McCain has "very favorable standing with Hispanics because of his position on the immigration bill."

Ickes said "So if Obama is against McCain in states where Hispanics are important, I’ll just tell you: he’s not going to be able to cut the mustard on that, and Hillary will. And she’s shown that in Texas and other states," said Ickes. That will be key, Ickes said, "if we need to bring in some of the Southwestern states or even Florida, where there is a growing population of Puerto Ricans in addition to the Cubans in South Florida as well as older people."

Clinton's Latino community pollster had set the foundation for these stupid arguments:

When I asked Bendixen about the source of Clinton’s strength in the Hispanic community, he mentioned her support for health care, and Hispanic voters’ affinity for the Clinton era. "It’s one group where going back to the past really works," he said. "All you need to say in focus groups is ‘Let’s go back to the nineties.’ " But he was also frank about the fact that the Clintons, long beloved in the black community, are now dependent on a less edifying political dynamic: "The Hispanic voter—and I want to say this very carefully—has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates."

I bring up this bullshit not to reopen old wounds, though I understand this might do that. I do it to hopefully show people what political spin looks like, and to immunize yourself from it as much as possible.

Both McAuliffe and Ickes knew full well that polling at the time showed Obama doing just fine with Latinos. And as we know, Obama performed better among Latinos than any other presidential candidate before him -- a 67-31 ass whooping of McCain. Yet there was Ickes, laying the bullshit on thick, claiming that McCain would do well in Hispanic-heavy states.

Instead, Obama romped in in Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, while making serious inroads into the Cuban American south Florida community en route to his narrow Florida victory.

Wait, there is another reason I bring this up. The assertion made, that Latinos wouldn't vote for an African American, had seriously ugly undertones -- that we Latinos were too racist to vote for a black man. Now I won't sugarcoat my community's problems with race, they run deep (look up "mejorar la raza"), but they weren't so deep that they would override their core economic and social interests. And aside from the policy implications, Latinos by and large understood that the barriers Obama is shattering would also benefit them in the long run. (Having a president named "Barack Obama" makes it a lot more likely we'll someday have President Jesus Sanchez.)

I'm going to spend the next couple of weeks highlighting some of these bullshit primary-era arguments. Because nothing was more infuriating than seeing people confidently claim that a Democrat couldn't win this demographic or that state in the face of contemporary polling, history, and common sense.