Hispanics: Overlooked in The Republican Primary?

By Neil H. Simon

COLUMBIA, SC -- In the afternoon hours before the recent Republican primary debate here, the leading campaigns were out doing what campaigns do – seeking some free media time in the state that traditionally hosts the first southern state primary every four years.

Young people waived Giuliani signs before any camera that would pan their way, McCain advisers pontificated on the politics of the Palmetto State, and Romney's crew evenly spaced their blue yard signs all across the University of South Carolina grass. Of all those people involved in the campaign work here, spotting a minority among them was like trying to find a voter who knows Ron Paul (the Texas representative running for president was among the candidates debating).

The staff and volunteers involved in this 10-way Republican race (not to mention the candidates themselves) are emblematic of a challenge now facing a divided GOP. It's a party eager to pave the inroads President Bush laid for the party with the Hispanic electorate, but still unsure what role Hispanics should play in their party's official nomination process -- the primaries.

The fact is the traditional first primary and caucus states (Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina) have an average Hispanic population of 3.1 percent. For that reason -- despite their much-touted status as the fastest-growing minority in the country, some Hispanics feel less than welcome to this process of winnowing down the Republican field.

"It is a concern that the first primary states don't have large Latino populations and play an outsized role in selecting the nominee," said Brent Wilkes, the executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens.

Most Republican campaigns acknowledge there is not a major incentive to court Hispanics at this early stage.

"We're just doing a broad outreach to everybody," said Gov. Mike Huckabee's communications director Kirsten Fedewa. Asked if they are doing anything unique to the Hispanic voters: "No, not really yet."

Campaigning in Spanish
Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney appears to have placed the largest premium on reaching the country's fastest growing minority. His presidential campaign was the first to go bilingual online, cut a Spanish language radio ad in March, and created a Latin American policy advisory committee made up largely of Hispanic Americans.

"Communicating and outreaching to Hispanic voters is a national effort, and that's what we're doing," said Alex Burgos, Mr. Romney's director of Specialty Media, who said he is specifically charged with reaching out to Spanish news organizations.

Rudy Giuliani's campaign has a similar staff member to coordinate the candidate's efforts to win Hispanic Republican primary voters. While Sen. John McCain's campaign does not have any formal staff position designed to connect the Arizona senator with the larger Hispanic community, Sen. McCain has already received endorsements that may prove helpful in the heavily Republican Cuban-American precincts of Florida.

"The McCain campaign is building a national grassroots organization that is reaching out to Americans from every walk of life, including Hispanics," said McCain spokesman Danny Diaz, citing endorsements from South Florida Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario and Lincoln Diaz-Balart, among others.

Back in Washington, LULAC executive director Wilkes applauds some of the outreach, but says Republicans need to step it up to match what the Democratic primary field has done.

"They'd be crazy not to," Mr. Wilkes said. "There's enough Hispanic Republicans out there. Democrats come ask us how to get Latino vote, but you haven't seen the Republicans do it yet."

LULAC has invited all presidential candidates to their annual conference in July to help insert Latino voices into the primary process that otherwise may be left silent until after the major party presidential nominees are selected.

Party Politics
In some ways, the Republican Party has shown it is more than up to the task. Sen. Mel Martinez, the first Hispanic to lead any major national political party, recently recorded Spanish press statements in advance of the South Carolina debate. But the party is not eager to move around their primary calendar to make the early states more reflective of minority populations.

"It's the prerogative of states and parties to have primaries. That doesn't mean we are not reaching out to Latinos," said Republican Party spokesperson Hessy Rodriguez. "We make sure every Latino gets the message of what the Republican Party stands for. They should know Republicans and Hispanics share values."

Mr. Rodriguez says the RNC has appointed Hispanic 'team leaders' in various states, but she could not confirm whether any of those leaders were in the critical early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire or South Carolina. Indeed some campaign volunteers laughed when asked if they knew any South Carolina Hispanic Republicans.

"That's unfortunate," Mr. Wilkes said. "There needs to be a change, rather than having mainly white electorates making decisions."

Latino Tuesday
And if the national party won't make the change, some Hispanic heavy states have already said they will. The Florida state legislature has voted to hold their primary on January 29 – trumping South Carolina's famed 'First in the South' status (The Carolinians here in both parties vow to fight to keep their date ahead of Florida's).

Twenty-three other states now plan to vote on February 5, including several states that used to hold summer-time primaries, which amounted to little more than confirming the national front-runner, who had already secured more than enough delegates from earlier primary states to win the nomination.

In 2004, seven states voted on what became dubbed 'Super Tuesday,' now with California, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico all on the same February 5 date, Mr. Wilkes says to expect more Latinos getting involved in the primary process on both sides. "With California moving up, 'Super Tuesday' could be 'Super Latino Tuesday,'" he said.

Just behind fundraising and media, all the candidates are focusing on this continually shifting calendar, and some of them now see just beyond the traditional early states there await the Hispanics waiting to play a larger electoral role.

"In some early states they have small Hispanic voting-age populations, but they're growing rapidly." Romney campaign spokesman Burgos said. "And to us very vote matters."

Monday, April 9 2007

Gonzales, Iglesias Cross Paths in Controversy

By Neil H. Simon

When the Attorney General paid his first visit to U.S. Attorney David Iglesias in Albuquerque in 2005, Mr. Iglesias took his then-boss to El Pinto. At the old Spanish-style restaurant with their New Mexican meals, the similarities between the two Hispanic attorneys would have been obvious.

In one seat was the longtime counsel to the president, the country's highest appointed Hispanic official, Alberto Gonzales. In the other, Mr. Iglesias, the newly minted top prosecutor for New Mexico, hand-picked by the White House to add diversity to the Republican Party's higher-office talent pool.

"Gonzales was a real inspiration," Mr. Iglesias said about the man who helped shape his job as a U.S. attorney. But Mr. Iglesias now knows his inspiration brought on the sweep of firings that cost him and seven other U.S. attorneys their jobs.

Mr. Gonzales first said the prosecutors were fired for performance reasons, but he later defined "performance" to mean whether attorneys were following administration priorities, particularly in prosecuting election fraud. Mr. Gonzales initially said he was not involved in the dismissals, then recounted that he was in White House meetings about them.

While Mr. Gonzales prepares for a more complete defense at his April 17 congressional testimony, which Republican senators have said could ultimately decide whether he has the political support to survive at the Justice Department, his New Mexico colleague has already seen how fast that support can vanish.

SOUTHWEST ROOTS

Both lawyers are the products of public schools. While Mr. Iglesias was finishing at Santa Fe High School in 1976, Mr. Gonzales was just a few hours north at the Air Force Academy. Mr. Gonzales rarely set a goal he did not meet. As a teen, he sold soft drinks at Rice Stadium and later attended the university. After attending Harvard Law School, he became the first minority partner at Houston's prestigious Vinson and Elkins law firm.

Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Iglesias both began their rise in the early 1990s. In 1992, Mr. Iglesias' successful defense of U.S. Marines in a Guantanamo Bay prisoner assault case became the plotline for the movie "A Few Good Men."

The same year, 37-year-old Alberto Gonzales was named the Texas Young Lawyer of the Year.

Mr. Iglesias took his Navy JAG experience to his home state and the city of Albuquerque, where City Attorney David Campbell needed lawyers to defend a growing number of cases being filed against police officers in the wake of the Rodney King beating case in Los Angeles.

"I felt very good about sending him to court with tough cases," Mr. Campbell said. The city attorney liked Iglesias' record of getting charges against military officers reduced. In Albuquerque, that success continued with Mr. Iglesias winning against the odds – even getting a favorable verdict in a high-profile excessive force case involving a wheelchair-bound plaintiff alleging police abuse.

While Mr. Iglesias has spent his whole career in public service, Mr. Gonzales began seeing the public sector as a potential platform for success only in the mid-'90s, when a mutual friend brought him into the inner circle of George W. Bush.

When Mr. Bush became governor in 1995, he brought Mr. Gonzales to Austin to be his general counsel. The same year, Mr. Iglesias was finishing up a prestigious White House Fellowship.

RISING STAR

To look at the personal histories of Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Iglesias is to watch the parallel rise of Hispanic Republicans with diverging loyalties. Mr. Gonzales has shown great allegiance to George W. Bush, and the president has returned the favor. Mr. Bush has raised Mr. Gonzales five times, sending the son of Mexican immigrants from San Antonio's hard south side to the Texas Governor's Office, Texas Supreme Court, White House and now the top of the Justice Department

"He's selfless and soft-spoken," said Tom Phillips, who was Chief Justice when Mr. Gonzales joined the Texas court in 1999. "He's very interested in the end product."

Justice Phillips liked Mr. Gonzales, found him smart and articulate, though the junior judge had little to no experience in appellate law. "I knew that the governor was very fond of him," Justice Phillips said. "But during his time on the court, he and the governor didn't see each other that often."

Mr. Iglesias began receiving similar attention from Republicans in New Mexico. "They were doing a good job of recruiting Hispanic Republicans and cultivating careers, and I thought that's what they had in mind with David," said Ken Zangara, who was the finance chairman for Mr. Iglesias' 1998 bid for state attorney general.

"There was incredible support," Mr. Iglesias remembered. "[Then-Republican Party Chairman John] Dendahl scared off any opposition." Mr. Iglesias lost the general election by just two percentage points, after trailing by 24 points in Labor Day polls.

"There was a time he didn't know an enemy in the Republican Party. I know of no Republican who will stand by him now," Mr. Dendahl said. "He knows he was removed for incompetence and inaction."

Mr. Iglesias, appointed U.S. attorney in 2001, got former New Mexico Treasurer Robert Vigil, a Democrat, convicted of attempted extortion, but lost on 23 other counts connected to a treasurer's office kickback scheme. Republicans grew increasingly impatient with the U.S. Attorney's pace of prosecuting other corruption and election fraud cases around the state.

"The supreme irony is my office prosecuted corruption and that wasn't good enough," Mr. Iglesias said.

With a stack of positive performance reviews calling him a "diverse up-and-comer," "one of our finest," "experienced," and "respected," Mr. Iglesias' fate changed immediately after he declined to announce indictments against Democrats just before the 2006 mid-term elections. Within a month, he became the eighth and final U.S. attorney on the firing list.

Three months after the dismissals, Mr. Gonzales' former Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson regretted it. When asked, under oath, if he would still put Mr. Iglesias on the list, he said, "I would not. I wish that the department hadn't gone down this road at all."

SEPARATE PATHS

Mr. Gonzales' loyalty to President Bush and the Political Affairs Office in the end led to Mr. Iglesias being fired. For Mr. Iglesias, the man who gravitated to public service when he was 15, "The government door is closed shut," he said. He still considers himself a Republican, but "now, I've got no support."

"He's a political appointee to begin with, and if he gets fired for political reasons, that's part of the game. He should be prepared for that." Mr. Zangara said, adding Mr. Iglesias is now making himself too much of a "hot potato" for New Mexico's relatively small legal community.

While Mr. Gonzales goes to Capitol Hill to save his own job this month, Mr. Iglesias, who once aspired to be a congressman or governor, is now looking for private sector work.

He returned recently to that same restaurant amid the cottonwood trees lining Rio Grande. This time it was his own retirement party – an event that he says came at least a year earlier than he planned.

And while few New Mexico Republicans are holding any doors open for Mr. Iglesias, his old boss in Albuquerque said he thinks he'll resurface for political leadership.

"Republicans would be foolish to shun someone with such integrity," Mr. Campbell said. "And the Democrats would be foolish not to embrace someone with his experience."

Neil H. Simon is a journalist and news producer in Washington, D.C. He covered New Mexico politics for five years and can be found online at neilhsimon.com.
Source: HispanicBusiness.com (c) 2007. All rights reserved.