Reply #132: You're both right...

[tomchaps]

Just a quick clarification: while Clinton's strength among Hispanic voters had long been noted, this idea (and the controversy surrounding it) only became a newsworthy campaign issue after a New Yorker article directly quoted a Clinton staffer just after New Hampshire. So, both you and the earlier poster are kinda right.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/01/21/080121fa_fact_lizza?currentPage=1

...is the link to the article, and here is how it ends: "Interestingly, in the final days of the New Hampshire campaign, when defeat looked certain for Clinton, it was Hillary’s aides who started talking privately about racial politics. They argued that on February 5th, when twenty-two states vote, Hillary’s fire wall would be Hispanic voters in the largest states, such as California and New York.

On the morning after Clinton’s victory, I talked to Sergio Bendixen, one of her pollsters, who specializes in the Hispanic vote. “In all honesty, the Hispanic vote is extremely important to the Clinton campaign, and the polls have shown—and today is not a great day to cite polls—that even though she was slipping with women in Iowa and blacks in South Carolina, she was not slipping with Hispanics,” he said. “The fire wall doesn’t apply now, because she is in good shape, but before last night the Hispanic vote was going to be the most important part of her fire wall on February 5th.” The implications of that strategy are not necessarily uplifting.

When I asked Bendixen about the source of Clinton’s strength in the Hispanic community, he mentioned her support for health care, and Hispanic voters’ affinity for the Clinton era. “It’s one group where going back to the past really works,” he said. “All you need to say in focus groups is ‘Let’s go back to the nineties.’ ” But he was also frank about the fact that the Clintons, long beloved in the black community, are now dependent on a less edifying political dynamic: “The Hispanic voter—and I want to say this very carefully—has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.”