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Hispanics at the Polls 
November 2008 - The Abolitionist Examiner
Alvaro Vargas Llosa

WASHINGTON—Because of the debate over immigration reform, the word “Hispanic” became a stigma in the eyes of many Americans over the last two years. How ironic then that 10 million Hispanic voters played such a crucial role in last week’s presidential election. They voted for Barack Obama by a 2-1 margin, giving him a decisive push in four states—Florida, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico—that he wrested back from the GOP.

Hispanics have tended to side with the Democrats, but never by this large of a margin. According to 2004 exit polls, President Bush obtained 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in his re-election bid. One would think that by almost any measure—upward social mobility, church attendance, marriage patterns—Hispanics would be a dream electoral target for a party that champions enterprise, self-reliance and family values.

But the GOP this year did not seem interested. Even in the wake of the immigration debate, Latinos hardly organized in any meaningful way to fight back—except for those May Day demonstrations in 2006 and 2007. There was nothing predetermined in their support of Obama—as the Democratic primaries clearly showed. And yet, even accounting for the fact that Hispanics, like many other demographic groups, wanted to punish the current administration and were eventually seduced by the candidate who courted them intensely, the shift in their vote is astounding. It is as if the relentless anti-immigration voice on the right managed to turn millions of Hispanics who were not illegal immigrants into a community-conscious force acting in fear of a perceived threat. This fear even produced the irony of California Hispanics voting for the center-left of the political spectrum in the general election while siding with the right on social issues, as shown by their vote against Proposition 8—the anti-gay marriage initiative.

Politicians will now begin to look closely at some important trends among Hispanics. I don’t mean the obvious fact that they represent 15 percent of the population and by the year 2050 will probably make up one-quarter of the nation. Almost 4 million Hispanics—nearly one in 10—are financially well-off, according to the U.S. Census, and about 40 percent are middle class. This is a not a small achievement for people whose beginnings are, for the most part, quite humble. Treating them as alien to the mainstream American experience and culture is an act of political suicide.

This past year took care of some of the myths that emerged during the immigration debate. The number of illegal immigrants coming into the U.S. has dropped by about half, in no small measure due to market conditions -- which is the way immigrant flows usually work. When they are in high demand, they come in flocks. When demand goes down—as has been the case in agriculture, construction and other industries—they stay home. If the welfare state—free public education, access to health care—were the main attraction, the flow would not change so dramatically from one year to the next. Which is not to say that migrants who want to live off the rest of society are not imposing an unacceptable toll on it. But that is ultimately a case for profoundly revising the welfare state, not for stigmatizing all immigrants.

In the last four decades, the anti-immigration cause has gone from being championed by the left to being mostly championed by the right. There used to be a guest-worker program called “bracero” in the United States. It was instituted in 1942 but killed in the 1960s because of labor union objections. That is quite fitting, since unions tend to act as protectionist guilds that fear competition and people whom they do not control. Cesar Chavez, the famed Hispanic union leader, himself opposed that guest-worker program.

It is time to move beyond hysteria and start to look at Hispanics with a more open mind. In a radio address given in 1977, Ronald Reagan mocked “the illegal alien fuss,” asking himself: “Are great numbers of our unemployed really victims of the illegal alien invasion, or are those illegal tourists actually doing work our own people won’t do?” If only in the interest of political survival, those who claim to idolize the Gipper—the same guy who in 1986 legalized almost 3 million Hispanics, many of whom were driven by fear to vote for Obama—should think again.

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The Obama Coalition 
November 2008 - The Multiracial Activist
Alvaro Vargas Llosa

WASHINGTON—The social coalition put together by Barack Obama signifies a political realignment that may well have replaced the one that started with Richard Nixon, reached its zenith with Ronald Reagan and appears to have expired with George W. Bush. Whether Obama’s coalition is long-lasting or ephemeral will depend on how he himself interprets it. The consensus seems to be that Obama’s diverse supporters, as Harold Meyerson recently put it in The Washington Post, expect their leader to “implement a 21st-century version of Franklin Roosevelt’s reforms.” I am not so sure.

The Obama coalition is made up of minorities, white professionals, students and a substantial number of white middle-class voters, especially women.

Minorities backed Obama in staggeringly high numbers. It follows that, in the case of blacks, the coalition includes a significant number of middle-class African-Americans with scant connection to Lyndon Johnson’s minority-oriented welfare programs; in the case of Hispanics, it includes many of those conservative-leaning Latinos who voted for George W. Bush in 2004 but were recently alienated by the GOP’s immigration phobia.

There is no reason to believe that white professionals who voted for Obama are in favor of European-style socialism either. Most of them hold jobs in industries that already are highly regulated and taxed. Theirs is probably a reaction against the anti-intellectual populism of the wing of the Republican Party that dictated government policy in recent years and against the excessive intrusion of religion into politics, particularly regarding social issues.

Finally, that Obama was able to draw such a big portion of the white middle-class vote, particularly “Wal-Mart moms,” indicates that a longing for economic security was a driving force of the Democrat’s success—a sentiment that cuts across all the groups that make up the coalition.

Just like in 1932, when Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover, many of Obama’s voters feel that the government failed to protect them in the face of uncertainty. The instinct for government protection—from competition abroad, from the loss of real estate value and from the perils of old age at a time when the Social Security entitlement seems in peril—is strong in today’s America. But this fear has existed for quite some time, and for many months it was not enough to give Obama a commanding lead against John McCain—until the financial crisis hit home.

Once it did, many new voters seem to have flocked to Obama’s coalition out of a combination of disgust at the Bush administration and fear of the future—all of which made them more comfortable with the Democrat’s proposals that a few weeks earlier were meeting with a great deal of skepticism. It is safe to assume that even among Obama’s voters, then, there is still an undercurrent of healthy distrust in the notion that European-style socialism is a solution to America’s recession and difficult adaptation to today’s global society—a reason, incidentally, why Obama himself kept talking about “better” rather than “bigger” government.

Government has been growing at a rate of over 13 percent a year, the national debt has doubled in the last eight years and the fiscal deficit is approaching $500 billion. Add to those fundamental imbalances the policies of easy money implemented by the Federal Reserve and of encouraging lenders to hand out loans to people who could not pay them and you get a pretty good sense of where the origin of today’s economic problems lies.

Obama will need to bear all of this in mind in the years ahead as he comes under pressure from some factions of the Democratic Party hoping to translate his mandate into a Rooseveltian expansion of government. Such an expansion would severely undermine America’s ability to compete in the global marketplace, and the impressive coalition that he has put together would not last his administration.

During the course of his campaign, Obama was able to win the respect, and in some cases the endorsement, of a number of free-market conservatives who are rebelling against what they see as the populist, insular mentality of the dominant wing of the GOP. Most of them indicated that they saw in Obama’s cool judgment, his self-made success, and his distrust of identity politics someone who would not succumb to the siren song of his own party’s socialist wing. Let us hope that this is so.