Well, this is embarrassing:
President Barack Obama has a problem with Florida’s important Puerto Rican voters, and it has little to do with the immigration and deportation issues that dominate so much of the national debate involving Hispanic voters.
Florida’s two biggest Hispanic groups — Puerto Ricans and Cuban Americans — have legal statuses not enjoyed by immigrants from other Latin American countries. This makes illegal immigration a tangential issue for them.
Please tell me that Barack Obama, at least, isn’t stupid enough to think that everybody in this country who speaks Spanish as a core language will have precisely the same likes, dislikes, and base issues. I mean, I’m well aware that the rabiblancos that make up his base team think that, but I’d hate to have to decide that Obama was a bigot, too.
Perhaps if OFA weren’t dominated by Chicagoans, where the major “Hispanic” neighborhoods are dominated by immigrants from Mexico …
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I’d love to say the GOP is free of rabiblancos, but .. bluntly, GOP party outreach has long been hung up on the issues of Cuban-Americans, probably because junkets to Miami are nicer than junkets to Laredo. To the GOPs’ credit, this does appear to be turning around.
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Mew
Actually, the politically active Hispanics in Chicago have usually been split between the PRs and the Mexicans.
Also, the GOP’s ties to the Cuban-Americans have more to do with anti-communism and the mostly upper-middle-class professional makeup of that crowd. Me, I’m the descendant of crypto-Jews, but thanks to my service brat past, I have more in common with the Cubans than I do with any of the other Latino groups.
You are correct, Wombat .. I had forgotten that Chicago keeps electing “the representative from Vieques”. My error.
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Mew