Can Black Candidate Woo Hispanics?

PHOENIX (By Pauline Arrillaga, AP) February 10, 2008 — His rallying cry echoes the late Cesar Chavez, the Hispanic activist who inspired legions with three simple words, "Si, se puede!" The loose translation "Yes, we can!" has become Barack Obama's call to arms. But now, some are asking: Can he?

After a dismal showing among Hispanics in his Super Tuesday showdown with Hillary Clinton, can Obama entice this key voting bloc? And, if not, what might that say about a color divide that extends beyond black-white in an ever-expanding brown America?

Going forward in a neck-and-neck race, the ability to win Hispanic voters will prove vital in the March 4 primary in Texas, where nearly 25 percent of eligible voters are Hispanic. It could even push a tight race into one camp or the other in places like Maryland and Washington, D.C., where the Hispanic share of eligible voters in this Tuesday's primary hovers at just 3 and 4 percent, respectively.

"Let's face it," said popular Spanish-language radio host Luis Jimenez, "Hispanics will vote for a woman president before voting for someone who is African-American."

While the overall tally of Super Tuesday's string of contests was hardly conclusive in determining the ultimate Democratic presidential nominee, the results among Hispanics spoke volumes: Clinton, exit polls showed, won 63 percent of Hispanic voters, helping propel her to victory in places like Arizona and California, where a whopping 67 percent of Hispanics backed her.

Even in Obama's home state of Illinois, where he soundly beat Clinton, polls showed he merely split the Hispanic vote.

Is this about familiarity, a Johnny-come-lately strategy and a shortage of big-name Hispanic endorsements, or something less tangible and more provocative, a reluctance among Hispanics to support a black candidate?

The suggestion inflames Federico Pena, who served in President Clinton's cabinet and now sits as a national co-chair for the Obama campaign.

"That would say that Hispanics are racist. We are not," he said. "What is really going on here is that Hispanics simply don't know this candidate, and he happens to be African-American and he happens to be named Barack Obama."

Louis DeSipio, a political scientist who chairs the Chicano studies program at the University of California, Irvine, agreed: "It's not a rejection of Sen. Obama. It's an affirmation of their support for Sen. Clinton."

Clearly, Clinton had advantages over Obama that had nothing to do with color.

She is well-known and well-liked among Hispanic voters who remember fondly her husband's presidency and the inclusion of Hispanics such as Pena. She won coveted and early endorsements of prominent Hispanics, including Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who traveled to Iowa and Nevada to campaign for Clinton, and Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers with Chavez.

She also got a jump-start wooing Hispanic voters on the ground and on the airwaves, while Obama's initial underdog status had him focused on early contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. In January, Clinton went door-to-door in a largely Hispanic neighborhood in Las Vegas, and turned up a day later at King Taco on Los Angeles' Cesar Chavez Boulevard with Villaraigosa.

"Hillary Clinton has a long relationship with the Hispanic community ... based on her work but also her husband's presidency, so it's not surprising Hispanics went for her more than Obama," said Susan Minushkin, deputy director of the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center. Minushkin was, in fact, surprised Clinton's numbers among Hispanics weren't even higher.

A December survey by the center found Democratic-leaning Hispanics who were registered voters overwhelmingly supported Clinton. Still, that same survey found Obama drew more support among those voters than New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, himself a Hispanic who speaks Spanish fluently and who lived more than a decade in Mexico City.

A November Pew study found 74 percent of Hispanics who were familiar with Obama regarded him favorably. However, the percentage of those polled saying they had never heard of Obama, or were unable to rate him, was higher among Hispanics than blacks or whites.

Still, others wonder whether such surveys accurately reflect the reality on American streets, where tensions among blacks and Hispanics have increased in past years as Hispanic immigrants pour into inner-city neighborhoods, competing with their black neighbors for jobs, housing, services and a seat at the table on local school boards and town councils.

Hispanics have surpassed blacks as the nation's largest minority, comprising about 15 percent of the U.S. population today.

"We've been fighting in this country for our place and so is every minority," Jimenez said, surmising Hispanics' Super Tuesday snubbing of Obama stems from viewing him as "a competing minority rather than a serious candidate for president."

Mistrust fueled by racial stereotypes that play out in Hollywood and mass media may also contribute, along with prejudices that may have first formed in the class-driven societies of some Hispanics' native lands, where darker-skinned indigenous citizens are sometimes looked down upon by those with lighter skin and a Spanish heritage.

Armando Navarro heard mentions of race when trying to convince friends to vote for Obama. Navarro teaches ethnic studies at the University of California, Riverside, and is coordinator of the National Alliance for Human Rights, a Hispanic activist organization.

Color, he said, while not the factor in the Super Tuesday results was a factor.

"It stems from our own experience as a people," he said, but also competitiveness Jimenez cites, "the fear with a black president, 'they're' really going to be in and 'we're' going to be out."

Consider the view of another voter, Gustavo Sanchez, a Los Angeles painter originally from Mexico.

"Obama is African-American so his support would naturally come more from blacks. And I think he would support blacks more," said Sanchez, who voted for Clinton in the California primary.

Sanchez said tension between blacks and Hispanics wasn't a factor in his choice, but that it likely weighed on some people.

"There is a division between blacks and Hispanics," he said. "There has never been much unity between the two minorities."

Others, especially younger Hispanic voters, dismissed the idea of a divide driving election-time decisions.

"Hispanics who are under 40, we have black friends and we have colleagues," said Miguel Orozco, a thirty something in Los Angeles who launched "Amigos de Obama" last year to help introduce Obama to Hispanic voters. "We don't see that whole friction or divide or whatever. That wouldn't be a reason why folks I know would not support Obama. They just don't know what he's about."

When the nation's largest daily Spanish-language newspaper, Los Angeles-based La Opinion, endorsed Obama as the Democratic choice, letters and phone calls streamed in from readers wanting to know why, said editorial page editor Henrik Rehbinder.

A few readers described "a bad experience" with blacks, or worried a black president wouldn't care as much about Hispanics and their issues. But most complained as Orozco suggested they simply didn't know enough about the senator from Illinois. They weren't aware of his stance in support of giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, or his history as the son of a Kenyan immigrant.

"The question is: 'What did he do?'" said Rehbinder. "When you don't know a person, you operate by stereotypes. That was a big difference ... between a candidate who is very well known and somebody who is a trend now but very new and Hispanics don't really go for it. They need a bit more."

That "comfortability" is especially important to Hispanic voters, said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a black political activist and the author of several books on race and politics, including "The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House" and "The Hispanic Challenge to Black America."

Black candidates such as U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, New York City Mayor David Dinkins and the late Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor, can win the Hispanic vote, but they must be "an ironclad, known quantity," Hutchinson said.

"Hispanics have to be absolutely sure there's no tilt toward African-Americans, that they're going to be a clear advocate and a clear champion for Hispanic interests," he said. "It's pretty difficult, particularly on short notice, to break that down. You've got to spend time on the ground in these communities up close and personal."

Obama and Hispanic advisers such as Pena seem to have grasped that. A few days before the Super Tuesday primaries, the campaign dispatched Sen. Edward M. Kennedy to Hispanic centers in New Mexico. And Obama himself addressed the so-called black-brown divide during an appearance in Los Angeles. "Cynical talk," he called it the kind he hopes to move past.

Pena insisted Obama already is overcoming it.

Look at Colorado, he said, where nearly 12 percent of the electorate is Hispanic. Obama won that state on Tuesday. And New Mexico, where Hispanics account for a third of caucus voters. That race was still too close to call days after the election, with officials counting provisional ballots. Even in Arizona, where Clinton won the Hispanic vote, the tilt was less than it was in California, 55 percent to Obama's 41.

Pena pointed to Obama's own growing list of Hispanic supporters among them Maria Elena Durazo, head of the powerful Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, and U.S. Rep. Linda Sanchez, who represents communities south of Los Angeles and promised more endorsements were on the way. (U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez of Orange County Sanchez's sister has come out for Clinton.)

Obama also will be spending more time with Hispanics in Hispanic communities, Pena said, especially as the Texas contest nears.

"When Barack has the time, and when we have an opportunity to physically present him, he gets very strong support in the Hispanic community," Pena said. "Our race is a race against time."

All of that could go a long way toward overcoming the myriad and complex factors for his lagging Hispanic support, and "maybe a lot of Hispanics will think about electing him," said radio host Jimenez.