While blacks, who gave Barack Obama 95 percent of their vote on Election Day, prepare to splurge at the January 20 Inaugural, Hispanics, who gave Obama 67 percent of their vote, are focusing instead on obtaining major presidential appointments and other "spoils of war."
Hey, I know what: When we grow up, let’s be Hispanic voters.
A recent story in Scripps News couldn’t have described it better: For black Americans, Barack Obama’s Inauguration is probably the “most important event of their lives.”
That’s scary.
The estimates of people, especially black people, heading for Washington DC for the Inauguration festivities, starts with two million and moves up from there. Even by early estimates, that’s twice as large as the Million Man March. If you don’t have a room reserved by now, you’ll probably be staying at a hotel in Wilmington, Delaware.
You literally can’t go anywhere in the black community, these days, without people asking WHEN you’re planning to arrive in D.C. for the Inaugural, where you’re staying, and how long you’re planning to stay.
Mind you, they don’t ask at all IF you’re planning to attend the Inaugural. That’s a foregone conclusion. That’s what we do. Our candidate wins; we go to the Inaugural.
Hey, I’m happy if they’re happy. But, to tell you the truth, I’m not planning to go at all. Not because I don’t think it’s going to be “historic,” “inspirational,” and “something I can tell my grandchildren one day,” but rather because I still believe that, in politics, candidate elections are just a means to an end and not the end itself. The true objective is having the candidate produce the outcomes voters need.
Only when that finally happens, will I feel like celebrating. For me, the most important day of my life, contrary to Scripps News, will be when we can honestly say that America has eliminated its disgraceful, lingering pattern of black/white disparities in health care, employment, business ownership, home ownership, and quality of public education.
When that happens, I’ll be on the first train to DC. In the meantime, I’ll be counting the hours until January 21, the day the real work is scheduled to begin for the new president.
In many ways, as I’m counting down the hours, I’ll also be asking myself why we as black voters can’t learn to do our politics more like the Hispanics do.
Yeah, I know most black folks have been here longer. We just seem to be slow learners in this whole political arena. For us, politics is still very much about unquestioned party loyalty, about pride in individual candidates rather than in political outcomes, about wearing buttons and tee shirts, and, yes, about going to inaugural balls.
Typically, we declare our political support very early, and we’re careful not to ask embarrassing questions of our favorite candidate. We get caught up in the emotion and euphoria of the campaign, we help our candidates win, but once the election is over, unfortunately, we haven’t quite figured out what to do next. For us, even as late in the day as it is, having our candidate – black or white - win an election seems to be more important than actually having our issues addressed by the candidacy.
As the old folks used to say: “That’s why we’re still in the position we’re in today.”
The Hispanic community, on the other hand, with most of its members having arrived in this country in just the past 50 years or so, has decided early on to play the political game a bit less emotionally, a lot more pragmatically, and with a clear eye on the desired outcome.
As hard as it may be for some of us to believe, they actually make political candidates, and whole parties, compete for their support. Imagine that!
Throughout the presidential campaign, as you’ll recall, no one could say with any certainty where the majority of Hispanic voters would wind up. Early on, they were leaning to Hillary Clinton, and when she lost in the primary there was reasonable speculation that McCain, from heavily Hispanic Arizona, and white like Hillary, might inherit sizable portions of that vote.
Over time, after many months of highly publicized meetings with Hispanic leaders, and even a few campaign spots in which he actually broke down and spoke Spanish, Barack Obama was finally able to attract 67 percent of the Hispanic vote. That means, of course, that one in every three Hispanic voters went McCain. No matter, the Hispanic community, despite joining the Obama Team relatively late in the campaign has been dead on the president-elect’s case to have him deliver exactly what they want from the new administration. According to Diverse Issues in Higher Education magazine’s Karen Branch-Brioso, “Hispanic advocacy groups are pressing hard to get President-Elect Obama to name unprecedented numbers of Hispanics to his administration.”
In fact, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), has recently pointed to the difference Latino voters made in the election and is using that information to gain influence and appointments. Indeed, the organization recently sent the president-elect a list of Hispanic persons it endorsed for inclusion in the administration.
Unlike black folks, the Hispanic community is clearly on a post-election political mission. Even when Hispanic former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson was announced as Obama’s pick for Commerce Secretary, there was carefully orchestrated rumbling from parts of national Hispanic leadership to remind the president-elect that Richardson should have gotten a juicier position and that their community is still not satisfied.
That’s a good thing and a smart thing, and how winning politics has always been done in the “good old U.S.A.” One local beneficiary of all of that, I’m hearing, may very well be my good friend Nelson Diaz, who’s being considered for a senior-level HUD position in the new administration. If Obama’s people are smart, that should happen.
At the same time that all of this has been going on, black folks, who clearly were the earliest, most consistent, most decisive voting bloc for President-elect Obama, (95% of our vote), have been busy picking out the clothes they want to wear to the ball and buying gold Obama commemorative plates to put up on the basement wall or in the dining room breakfront.
Unlike our Hispanic brothers and sisters, we don’t seem to expect much and we’re still pleased to have "made history.” Once again, therefore, we probably won’t get much, or certainly won’t get what we need, from the incoming administration.
In a rapidly deteriorating economy, when municipal, state and federal budgets will be slashed, along with most private sector budgets, we need, more than ever, to organize and flex our political muscle. Now, more than ever, we need to make sure that the voice from the White House will be reminding those with budgetary authority that black communities, black voters, and black businesses should not be disproportionately impacted by the continuing recession.
That should not be an ambiguous message. That should be clearly stated and specific to us. We should make at least as strong a case for that as Hispanics are making for everything else.
It’s about time.
When I grow up…
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