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Latinas Hold Key to Clinton's Texas Turnout
By Alison Bowen
Women's eNews
Tuesday 04 March 2008
As Hillary Clinton wages a dead-heat battle for the Texas primary today, Latinas could be a critical voting bloc. While their polling preference is solidly pro-Clinton, the Barack Obama campaign is vying for their favor.
If polling predictions and voting patterns in previous primaries offer any guide, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton may end up owing a major "muchas gracias" to Hispanic women in Texas, which joins Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont in holding primaries today.
About 71 percent of the state's Hispanic women support Clinton, according to a Texas Credit Union League poll of Texas primary voters published Feb. 14.
Hispanic men in Texas also favor Clinton, but to a lesser extent, with 54 percent.
"There are many Hispanic women who feel she is pro-family and pro-children, and that is something that appeals to them," said political science professor Gretchen Ritter, director of the Center for Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Texas' 8.6 million Hispanic residents, who are evenly split between men and women, represent 19 percent of the nation's Hispanics and one-quarter of eligible Texas voters. Only New Mexico has a larger Hispanic share of the electorate, according to a Feb. 20 fact sheet from Washington think tank Pew Hispanic Center. In a Feb. 21 report, Pew projected Latinos would cast at least a third of all votes in the Texas primary.
Texas allows early voting and by Feb. 28, over 512,000 people had cast ballots in the Democratic primary, four times as many as in 2004, according to a Feb. 28 Associated Press report. About 173,000 Republican voters had cast early votes. Voters are also allowed to cross party lines to cast ballots.
Hispanic women backed Clinton in Super Tuesday states by a substantial 35-point margin; 67 percent supported Clinton, 32 percent went for Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. Hispanic men also supported Clinton, but by a more slender 18-point margin of 58 percent to 40 percent.
Dead Heat in Texas
Clinton has seen her double-digit polling advantage in Texas in January give way to a dead heat in the polls as Obama's campaign racked up wins in 11 consecutive primaries after neatly dividing the voting pie on Feb. 5, when 24 states held contests.
A March 1 American Research Group poll shows Clinton leading Obama in Ohio, 51 percent to 44 percent. In Texas, however, it finds Clinton and Obama tied, with 47 percent of the vote apiece.
Among the Republicans, Arizona Sen. John McCain polls with a lead of 61 percent of the state's voters while former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee takes about 26 percent.
One sour note in Clinton's love affair with Latinas is the Feb. 10 staff shakeup that tumbled Patti Solis Doyle from her post as the first Latina to manage a presidential campaign.
In response two Hispanic leaders - New York state legislators Sen. Ruben Diaz and Assemblyman Jose Peralta - fired off an open letter to Clinton warning it would be "very troubling" if Doyle did not resign of her own accord but was forced out.
After the reshuffling Doyle promised to travel with Clinton, particularly to Texas, where she has connections, but news reports offer no sightings of her there.
Ritter said Doyle's exit does not seem to have made many waves, but that Obama has been slicing into her support.
"It is less solid than it was, and it seems that day-to-day base of support is getting a little bit softer," said Ritter.
Clinton's Hispanic Youth Advantage
Young Hispanic voters have shown up in large numbers to support Clinton in earlier contests. On Super Tuesday, 62 percent of Hispanics aged 17 to 29 voted for Clinton. Specifically, young Hispanic women aged 17 to 29 gave her 67 percent of their vote. By contrast, Hispanic men aged 17 to 29 split their vote, 49 percent for each Clinton and Obama.
"There's no question that Hillary Clinton, if she wins here, she will owe that partly to Hispanic voters," Ritter said. "She's won respect and loyalty for her very long history of partnering and working with people in the Hispanic community goes way back."
Clinton began her political career decades ago by working for Democratic presidential hopeful George McGovern in voting drives for Latinos in the Rio Grande Valley, a memory she mentions often in her Texas stump speeches.
Obama spent about $10 million in television advertising in Texas, compared to Clinton's under $4 million, the New York Times reported March 2. Both campaigns are spending about twice as much in Texas as they are in Ohio.
Clinton attracted Dolores Huerta, a co-founder of the United Farm Workers Union, to her Dallas campaign stops. Huerta endorsed Clinton's stance on issues from health care to immigration laws.
Latino Endorsements for Obama
Obama unrolled his own list of Hispanic-friendly endorsements, including from Texas' oldest Hispanic group, the Mexican American Democrats, and Spanish-speaking former Democratic candidate Chris Dodd, the senior senator from Connecticut. Obama has also blogged about his immigration policies on the popular site Latina Lista.
Adriana Maestas, a 31-year-old graduate student in higher education and communications firm consultant who runs Latinopoliticsblog.com out of her home in southern California, has kept an eye on the candidates' outreach to the Latino community.
She said Obama's approach has been consistent with his overall grassroots strategy. His Web site matches Spanish-speaking volunteers to potential Hispanic voters in the state. While Clinton targets other women by mentioning the high-ranking Latinas in her campaign, Obama connects Latina supporters with other Hispanic voters.
Clinton's approach has been to advertise the candidate's high standing among Latinas. Maestas, for instance, said the campaign sent her a link to a Latina magazine candidate profile of Doyle to consider for her Web site. Laura Hernandez is unwaveringly pro-Clinton. She is president of the University Democrats at the University of Texas at Austin and is actively campaigning for a candidate for the first time. She introduced Bill Clinton at a local rally and greeted the senator at the Feb. 21 debate held at her school.
She cites Clinton's plan to make college more affordable and create universal health care as two key issues in her favor. "This is just an exciting, unprecedented time, especially for Texas voters," she said.
For More Information:
Women's eNews Spotlight on 2008 Presidential Election:
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/3410/
Latino Politics Blog:
http://www.latinopoliticsblog.com/
Latina Lista:
http://www.latinalista.net/
Alison Bowen is a New York City-based reporter covering the presidential campaign for Women's eNews. Her work also appears in the New York Daily News.
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Electing a Woman to the White House: Who's on Deck?
By Susan Dominus
The New York Times
Monday 03 March 2008
If not Hillary, who?
Anyone wondering about, say, Oprah's pick for the first female president might detect a hint in the March issue of O magazine.
It was never Hillary, and Oprah has made it abundantly clear that she wouldn't pick herself: She sicced a cease-and-desist letter on an overenthusiastic fan who raised $65,000 for an Oprah-for-president campaign - which is how, Mayor Bloomberg, you say no like you mean it.
At a minimum, Oprah seems to have a media crush on Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, the lone politician profiled in a feature in O's pages on the virtues of female intuition and executive know-how. (The story of Ms. Sebelius's vanquishing of an out-of-state insurance company while serving as insurance commissioner of the state was excerpted from Dee Dee Myers's most recent book, "Why Women Should Rule the World.")
If Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton doesn't win in the Texas and Ohio Democratic primaries on Tuesday, there will surely be supporters all but rending their garments, mourning the loss of this one golden chance for a female president in their lifetime. But there is also a good chance that if Mrs. Clinton falters, the feminist conversation will shift from what went wrong with her campaign to another pressing matter: who's coming down the pipeline.
Expect to hear a lot about Governor Sebelius, a Democrat who campaigned alongside Barack Obama in early contests, providing him an essential white female sidekick. She is on many shortlists as his potential running mate, along with Janet Napolitano, a Democrat who is governor of Arizona. Despite her demurrals and the war in Iraq, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will likely keep turning up, alongside those two women, on lists of potential female presidential candidates down the road.
New York - home to Seneca Falls, Gloria Steinem and millions of female elbows sharpened on Wall Street, in white-shoe law firms and in the dairy aisle at Zabar's - somehow has no obvious names to add to the list.
In some basic, appealing ways, Governors Sebelius and Napolitano have much of Hillary's can-do appeal without the messy back story. Senator Clinton was put in the uncomfortable position of standing by a man accused of sexual harassment. Governor Napolitano's history puts her on the side of Anita Hill, whom she represented during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. The closest Governor Sebelius has come to a family sex scandal occurred when her son released a prison-themed board game called "Don't Drop the Soap."
Like Hillary, Governor Sebelius's name comes preburnished, thanks to her father-in-law, Keith Sebelius, a former veteran member of Congress, and her father, John Gilligan, the former governor of Ohio.
To her credit, Governor Napolitano represents a healthy evolution of female electability, having bypassed any of the old-fashioned ways of gaining political prominence: on the coattails of a doting daddy (see Susan Molinari), a dead husband (see Mary Bono), or a politically dead husband (see Elizabeth Dole).
Like Hillary, both governors won second terms in landslides and have the executive experience that women are supposed to need in triplicate to get elected.
So maybe the pipeline isn't empty. But maybe the pipeline isn't the only way to go, or won't be by the time the next presidential campaign rolls around.
If Barack Obama could come out of nowhere to sweep voters off their feet, maybe the same could be true for some charismatic woman running for president in the not-too-distant future. Two years ago, both Geraldine Ferraro, the first female candidate of a major political party to run for vice president, and Jesse Jackson were quoted as saying that they thought a black man would have a harder time than a white woman getting elected president, a commonplace view at the time. If perceptions of possibility have fluctuated so much in just two years, imagine how much they could turn around again in four or eight.
It's possible that what we've been waiting for is not a woman who has logged years in Senate committees or kissing babies at state fairs, but a dynamic woman with Mr. Obama's combination of dramatic back story and cerebral bona fides. Since most of us had never heard of him before his inspirational speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, consider, just for fun, a woman you may never have heard of: Samantha Power.
Ms. Power is a former war correspondent turned Harvard academic whose book about genocide, "A Problem From Hell," won the Pulitzer Prize and changed national dialogue on the subject. A foreign policy adviser for Mr. Obama, she could very well end up in his cabinet (and she'll be right around his age, 46, eight years from now). She has not mastered Mozart's Piano Concerto in D minor, unlike that other pipeline buster of a female foreign policy expert; but she has also been known to shoot hoops with George Clooney.
Don't go rushing to register Powerforpresident.com, though - she was born in Ireland, and, therefore, can't run. But she has the kind of irresistible profile that could be what it takes. Maybe right now there's some 37-year-old female Iraq vet - fighter pilot would be nice; high ranking, naturally - who's a former Rhodes Scholar, who raised her three siblings on food stamps and who plays a mean bass.
Many of us thought that Hillary, with her name recognition and overflowing war chest, was the one female candidate who was a slam dunk.
Maybe if she'd shot hoops with George Clooney.
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