Monday, February 11th, 2008

2G2K Circus :: I Got 5 On It

Ferentz leads off with a fine, necessary rant against Hillary and Barack over their focus on the fundraising arms race:

McCain and Mike Huckabee both ran their campaigns on shoestring budgets, and neither one is revered by “die hard conservatives.” Their campaign narratives exist in stark contrast to Obama and Clinton’s, which is littered with ostentatious fundraising boasts, ivy-league advisers, and high profile celebrity endorsements. What sense does it make for Obama supporters to pat ourselves on the back for raising 32million, or for Clinton supporters to fire back that they raised 7million in 24hours? How do they think these outrageous fundraising figures sound in light of the fact that 17,000 jobs were eliminated in January?

Ahem. Word. Forget the $400 haircuts.

Despite our pronouncements about free speech, campaign finance case law has firmly established that money is speech. Not even McCain, in his bipartisan work around campaign finance reform, has wanted to touch this third rail of moneyball, this sacred cow of modern politics.

Obama rightly calls attention to the fact that his campaign is based largely on small donors. Call it his “money of the masses” argument. But from the beginning, Obama’s fundraising skill marked him as the best-fit insurgent candidate, in the most Darwinian/Mobb Deep sense. In the long months before Iowa, money defined his competitiveness.

The problem isn’t now–it’s for the long run. Does his campaign actually raise the bar far too high for future insurgent candidates? Will the ridiculous, historic levels of money flowing through this primary season make future insurgencies impossible?

If Obama really wants to change the game, his gamble is a little crazy and not a little foolish: it’s a bet that his success is a leveling event strong enough to overturn the inertia of big money and open the field for a new generation of insurgent candidates. As Spongebob once said to Plankton, good luck with that. On the other hand, as long as the overwhelming majority of elected officials are willing to leave the “money is speech” doctrine unchallenged, he–and we–may not have had and may not now have any other choice but to roll.

posted by @ 12:39 pm | 0 Comments

Monday, February 11th, 2008

Yes Yes Yes!

In case you missed the (thankfully) estrogen-rich Grammys ceremony last night because you were still tripping over “The Wire”…

Is Amy finally healthy and happy? If so, it’s a very good look.

posted by @ 8:29 am | 0 Comments

Monday, February 11th, 2008

2G2K Circus :: Scott Kurashige On "The Multiracial Challenge"

Our man in Detroit, University of Michigan professor Scott Kurashige pens one of the best pieces yet on race and the 2008 elections in today’s Alternet and HuffPo.

Here are some pullquotes…a bit long (especially for all yall anti-intellectuals!) but well worth reading in full:

This is a turning point in U.S. political history: no serious candidate for the presidency from here on out can ignore the mandate to build a multiracial coalition.…

Unfortunately, the pundits have already seized upon an equally divisive and reductionist theme. Interethnic relations are no longer a sideshow, but our understanding of them is severely limited. Everyone following the campaign has now read Clinton pollster Sergio Bendixen’s remark, “The Hispanic voter — and I want to say this very carefully — has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” (JEFF NOTE: That argument is taken apart completely by Gregory Rodriguez right hurrr.) Also surfacing less noticeably in places like online forums was the assertion that racial prejudice inhibits Asian Americans from voting for Blacks.

While prejudice and narrow-mindedness circulates in various forms within sectors of the Latino and Asian populations, crude thinking can blind us to the less sensational but more significant reasons why Clinton prevailed. She had built up a huge lead and enjoyed immense name recognition, which translated into a huge lead in absentee voting. In many places, Obama has overcome these obstacles with an excellent ground game that has attracted and energized new voters. Local observers, however, have remarked that his campaign lacked either the time or proper strategy to develop effective grassroots outreach to Latinos and Asians in California.

But here’s the money point, a thoroughly convincing argument. It gets at why the Clintons are on the wrong side of history, why the old-guard civil rights establishment has disappeared in this election, and why most of the talk about Asian and Latino votes these past two weeks in the commentariat has missed the point entirely:

But if Clinton’s multicultural strategy is unprecedented, Obama’s effort to transcend “minority” politics is historic. Casting Obama as a “colorblind” politician, the pundits and his left skeptics have largely missed the significance of what he represents. Getting “beyond race” today is not about ignoring the problem of racism or moderating ones politics to appease whites. Instead, it means thinking about America as a multiracial nation that dispels old notions of both white normativity and majority/minority identities. Culturally and demographically, millions of Americans — especially youth — already live in a world where that notion of white majority has been displaced by a multiethnic reality. Obama is helping us to envision what a new majority will look like politically.

For this reason, the Obama campaign is the only one with movement building potential and why we all have a stake in its efforts to build a multiracial coalition on new ground. Following the dictates of pollsters and consultants, traditional Democrats carve us all up into “interest groups,” so they can push the hot buttons that reinforce our sense of victimization and vilify the other side. Obama has learned — both from his study of what historian Charles Payne has called the black freedom struggle’s “organizing tradition” and from his experience organizing against the depths of despair in Chicago’s deindustrialized South Side — that such an approach is not only ineffective but also spiritually bankrupt. If you are just a “minority leader,” then you’re not really a leader at all. If you are only fighting for your “fair share” of the riches controlled by those in power, you’ll never address the root causes of oppression. Above all is the sense that none of us can be free in America or face the global crises of our lifetime until we change the whole country. That is why Obama has the “audacity” to think he is the best person to lead the entire nation.

It is clear from the California result that we will now be witness to a paradigm shifting clash between two consciously multiracial organizing strategies. Clinton’s appeal is to give all minorities a seat at the table and a share of the pie. Obama challenges us to see ourselves instead as a collective majority….

posted by @ 8:16 am | 5 Comments

Monday, February 11th, 2008

2G2K :: Ferentz on Ironies of Race and Generation in NYC

Ferentz notes that Hillary’s African American supporters in NYC could end up paying the price for their support of her. Here’s his analysis:

Here’s a rationale: Obama’s victory in central Brooklyn and his ability to record a split in Congressman Charles Rangel’s district in Harlem reiterated a national trend of African American votes steering in his direction. For example, in Brooklyn Obama received an endorsement from Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, who shares the senator’s profile as a charismatic emerging political star. Meanwhile in Harlem, Rangel, the dean of black democrats, older and like his fellow black political patriarch, Andrew Young, failed to deliver a victory for Clinton. Rangel’s failure should not have been a surprise considering Obama’s recent success in South Carolina, but this observation does nothing to replace the political capital that Rangel aggressively extended on Clinton’s behalf even as her support among his Harlem constituents plummeted.

These conclusions may seem trivial to non-New Yorkers, but they can potentially mark a historical breakthrough if Clinton makes it into the White House. A Clinton victory in November coupled with letdowns by Rangel and his Brooklyn counterpart, Yvette Clarke, means that New York is now poised to send a Latino senator to Washington, one who would join Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Ken Salazar of Colorado.

In the view of the establishment, we’re all interchangeable:

Of course, the decision of choosing the senator to replace Clinton rests solely in Governor Eliot Spitzer’s hands, but given New York’s current demographic shifts, most notably the fact that Latinos outnumber African Americans, Spitzer would have very little reason for selecting any of the black democrats who are presumably currently favored for this position.

Need more? Here’s a doomsday scenario from Frank Rich, linking the superdelegate problem with the race problem, as pointed out by our man Paul D. Miller…:

The campaign’s other most potent form of currency remains its thick deck of race cards. This was all too apparent in the Hallmark show. In its carefully calibrated cross section of geographically and demographically diverse cast members — young, old, one gay man, one vet, two union members — African-Americans were reduced to also-rans. One black woman, the former TV correspondent Carole Simpson, was given the servile role of the meeting’s nominal moderator, Ed McMahon to Mrs. Clinton’s top banana. Scattered black faces could be seen in the audience. But in the entire televised hour, there was not a single African-American questioner, whether to toss a softball or ask about the Clintons’ own recent misadventures in racial politics.

The Clinton camp does not leave such matters to chance. This decision was a cold, political cost-benefit calculus. In October, seven months after the two candidates’ dueling church perorations in Selma, USA Today found Hillary Clinton leading Mr. Obama among African-American Democrats by a margin of 62 percent to 34 percent. But once black voters met Mr. Obama and started to gravitate toward him, Bill Clinton and the campaign’s other surrogates stopped caring about what African-Americans thought. In an effort to scare off white voters, Mr. Obama was ghettoized as a cocaine user (by the chief Clinton strategist, Mark Penn, among others), “the black candidate” (as Clinton strategists told the Associated Press) and Jesse Jackson redux (by Mr. Clinton himself).

The result? Black America has largely deserted the Clintons. In her California primary victory, Mrs. Clinton drew only 19 percent of the black vote. The campaign saw this coming and so saw no percentage in bestowing precious minutes of prime-time television on African-American queries.

That time went instead to the Hispanic population that was still in play in Super Tuesday’s voting in the West. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles had a cameo, and one of the satellite meetings was held in the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s smart politics, especially since Mr. Obama has been behind the curve in wooing this constituency.

But the wholesale substitution of Hispanics for blacks on the Hallmark show is tainted by a creepy racial back story. Last month a Hispanic pollster employed by the Clinton campaign pitted the two groups against each other by telling The New Yorker that Hispanic voters have “not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Mrs. Clinton then seconded the motion by telling Tim Russert in a debate that her pollster was “making a historical statement.”

It wasn’t an accurate statement, historical or otherwise. It was a lie, and a bigoted lie at that, given that it branded Hispanics, a group as heterogeneous as any other, as monolithic racists. As the columnist Gregory Rodriguez pointed out in The Los Angeles Times, all three black members of Congress in that city won in heavily Latino districts; black mayors as various as David Dinkins in New York in the 1980s and Ron Kirk in Dallas in the 1990s received more than 70 percent of the Hispanic vote. The real point of the Clinton campaign’s decision to sow misinformation and racial division, Mr. Rodriguez concluded, was to “undermine one of Obama’s central selling points, that he can build bridges and unite Americans of all types.”

If that was the intent, it didn’t work. Mrs. Clinton did pile up her expected large margin among Latino voters in California. But her tight grip on that electorate is loosening. Mr. Obama, who captured only 26 percent of Hispanic voters in Nevada last month, did better than that in every state on Tuesday, reaching 41 percent in Arizona and 53 percent in Connecticut. Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign’s attempt to drive white voters away from Mr. Obama by playing the race card has backfired. His white vote tally rises every week. Though Mrs. Clinton won California by almost 10 percentage points, among whites she beat Mr. Obama by only 3 points.

The question now is how much more racial friction the Clinton campaign will gin up if its Hispanic support starts to erode in Texas, whose March 4 vote it sees as its latest firewall. Clearly it will stop at little…

Last month, two eminent African-American historians who have served in government, Mary Frances Berry (in the Carter and Clinton years) and Roger Wilkins (in the Johnson administration), wrote Howard Dean, the Democrats’ chairman, to warn him of the perils of that credentials fight. Last week, Mr. Dean became sufficiently alarmed to propose brokering an “arrangement” if a clear-cut victory by one candidate hasn’t rendered the issue moot by the spring. But does anyone seriously believe that Howard Dean can deter a Clinton combine so ruthless that it risked shredding three decades of mutual affection with black America to win a primary?

posted by @ 7:17 am | 0 Comments

Friday, February 8th, 2008

Rest In Power :: Tony Silver


The great Tony Silver.

Tony Silver passed last week after a courageous fight against brain cancer.

A few years back Henry Chalfant, Tony, and I went up to Billy Jam’s radio show at KALX to talk about “Style Wars” and its impact. It tells you the kind of person that he is that after the show when the rest of us were wiped out, he was still just getting started. Although I only knew him after he was safely in the AARP target demo, I will always remember him as one of the most youthful people I’ve ever known.

Tony is also for me a model of an engaged aesthete. He always knew great art the instant he saw it, not a little of which he was making himself. And he didn’t sit there smiling with it, he immediately became its champion. He wanted to share it. That’s the way it was with graffiti.

Tony had been working as a director and actor for about a decade when he and Henry Chalfant began planting the seeds of what became “Style Wars”. Graffiti was the scourge of NYC, a public nuisance and embarrassment. Yet he staked his all on the loony idea.

They ran out of money trying to shoot it. More than a few times. But to Tony, the story of hip-hop–esp. graffiti and b-boying–was like an opera . He was convinced graffiti was some of the most important art he’d ever seen–if it could survive heartless politicians, cold municipal bureaucrats, and its own internal beefs, it might change the way people saw the world.

When the movie came out on PBS, people couldn’t believe he and Chalfant had glorified property crime and feckless urban youths. But for a new generation, “Style Wars” became a spark for one of the most vibrant and influential global visual art movements of the last two decades. Tony is a reason that street art lives all around the world, even fetches hundreds of thousands of dollars in rarified auctions. Elitist art historians may not give up the love now, but time will prove Tony was right.

To a man who lived deeply and always saw clearly, this one’s for you, Tony.

A remembrance will be scheduled in New York for Tony on February 16th.

Donations in Tony’s name may be made to the important program (Out)Laws and Justice.

More links:

+ Style Wars website & tributes
+ Jesse Thorn’s Sound of Young America tribute
+ MARE 139’s tribute to Tony
+ Prohiphop’s list of more memorials

posted by @ 11:06 am | 1 Comment

Thursday, February 7th, 2008

2G2K Circus :: More Analysis On Latino/AsAm Vote But By Experts This Time

Today’s SF Chron had good reporting and analysis on the Latino and Asian American votes. You can access the full article here.

Wanted to pull some excerpts. First, some more data, and Barack’s ‘spinion:

Clinton won a majority of Latino votes in several states with high proportions of Latino voters, including New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and – the biggest prize – California, where she beat Obama 2-1 among Latinos, according to an MSNBC exit poll. And she drew votes from about 75 percent of Asian American Democrats in California, who represent about 8 percent of the state’s total Democratic vote, according the MSNBC exit poll.

But Obama did well with Latino voters in his home state of Illinois (JEFF NOTE: CNN’s exit poll, shows he took 58% of 30-44…), as well as in Connecticut, and he took more than 40 percent of Latino votes in Arizona, the exit poll shows.

“We actually made enormous progress last night,” Obama said at a news conference Wednesday in Chicago. “You take a look at a state like Arizona, where we got somewhere in the low 40s with the Latino vote, and it indicates what I suggested earlier after the Nevada contest, which is as Latino voters get to know me, we do better.

“And so it’s just a matter of us getting more information to them, doing the kind of advertising that we had the resources to do leading up to Super Tuesday. When they receive that information, they realize that I’m somebody who’s going to be battling for all people, including the Latino vote.”

Here’s David Ayon, from the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount on the upcoming race in Texas, pertinent also to Cali:

But Ayón doubts Obama will capture the Lone Star state’s Latinos, given Clinton’s advantage.

“It’s a real hard sell. The only advantage he has in Texas is, he’s got money and he’s got time. But he’s unknown,” said Ayón. “The Clintons have really worked this ground. They’re able to stage events, work those networks, get the machinery going. What Obama’s doing everywhere is building an organization from scratch. And that’s a lot harder to do in a large state.”

On the question of time and on-the-ground organizers, I wanted to point out a comment posted below from an old colleague John Delloro, now a union organizer and activist (also check out the comment by Monxo & Libertad):

Because the key to Obama’s campaign success is its ground operation that is based on a grassroots community organizing model (a la Marshall Ganz), any time the campaign treads the traditional top-down and tested electoral campaign approach the Obama campaign falters in that area. I don’t believe the kind of structure that existed in S.Carolina and Iowa existed in AA/PI immigrant L.A. or Latina/o L.A. If SEIU in LA had switched for Obama earlier and hit the ground, that structure would most likely would have existed. the past L.A. Latina/Labor alliance electoral work has proven this to be true. Maria Elena Durazo got involved with the Obama campaign without the usual footsoldiers she has on hand to make things happen. I don’t believe it is just a case of whether a particular community has reached a particular zeitgeist of generational insurgency but the presence or absence of grassroots organization in particular communities.

On the Asian Am vote, some thoughts from one of my mentors, Don Nakanishi, at the Asian American Studies Center, speaking to API emergence:

Clinton also has emphasized her commitment to Asian Americans, locking down several important Asian American politicians, said Don Nakanishi of UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center. Last year, for example, Clinton landed support from Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Sacramento, who chairs Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders for Hillary.

“The vote doesn’t surprise me at all,” Nakanishi said, noting that Clinton has strong roots in the community. “But there was a very active core of young Asian Americans who are very supportive of Obama, trying to raise his visibility.”

Obama, who grew up in Hawai’i and has Asian family members, has made his multi-ethnic roots part of the political campaign. Last week, his Chinese Canadian brother-in-law, Konrad Ng, addressed Asian American voters, telling them that their perspective is important to Obama.

Although small compared to the Latino vote, the Asian American vote is gaining clout. The Asian American Studies Center estimates that between the years 2000 and 2005, the number of Asian Americans eligible to vote in California increased from 2 million to 2.5 million, pushing the Asian American share of the proportion of the state’s voters to 12 percent.

“They also developed this reputation of being the new source of financial contributions, so they are being courted by political campaigns,” Nakanishi said.

BTW Don’s point about Doris Matsui prompts me to realize that the glaring hole in my piece and most of the discourse in the MSM and the blogosphere is that no one has thought to talk about the possibility of a huge gender gap in California’s Latino and Asian American electorates, in turnout and in choice. Anyone care to comment on this or point us in the direction of some commentary?

And finally, this from Rafael Sonenshein, an expert on race and politics in Los Angeles and California who has done pioneering studies on Tom Bradley’s and other campaigns:

“People say Latinos won’t vote for a black candidate. Well, sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. There are existing tensions, but the way to overcome those is through familiarity, through learning something about a candidate that helps you connect.”

posted by @ 10:27 am | 6 Comments

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

2G2K Circus: Latinos And Asian Americans, Part 2

Two guys, two keyboards and the circus continues. Ferentz picks up the thread and notes that although Latinos in NY and NJ reportedly voted overwhelmingly for Clinton (3-1 and 4-1 margins), that many are now wondering what they got for it.

Ferentz, this is actually what I was trying to lay out with the emergent/insurgent idea. I don’t think I developed it all that well.

Candidates treat emergent groups as easy votes. It’s the classic top-down party machine style of organizing–get as much as you can while giving up as little as you can. It’s the old Plunkitt of Tammany Hall bit. The relationship of the voters to the candidates are essentially retail: the potential of patronage seals the deal.

Insurgent groups, by contrast, can be frightening. The votes are coming, but the candidate sometimes knows not where or, more worrisome, why. Strenuous demands are made upon candidates and party leadership. These, of course, also offer the possibility of transformation.

To me, two of the most classic insurgent campaigns were Jesse Jackson ’88 and Harold Washington’s Chicago mayoral run. You could also go back to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. All attempted to organize an in-party insurgency that would bring in new voters and thereby change the direction of politics, with candidacies and parties coming second.

The truth is, we haven’t seen this kind of politicking on the Dem side since Jesse Jackson went home to Chicago and the Rainbow Coalition promptly dissolved. Clinton and the DLC depended on everyone staying in their appointed place, and empowering the demandless middle.

Obama’s campaign is nominally insurgent, but it doesn’t compare to Jackson’s bid because there is no effort to build a long-term mechanism to bring insurgents into the party (the thing the Rainbow Coalition was supposed to be). Clinton’s campaign is all emergent. The DLC may be in its death throes because of the war and Bush and young people, but its method survives.

In this instance, I’ve used the terms “emergent” and “insurgent” referring to the Latino and Asian American electorate on purpose. Although both have been in the party for a long while, Latinos especially are at the point where they can play a crucial role in the party’s fortunes. So “emergent” is pretty descriptive.

I use the terms wishfully as well. I’m hopeful–actually pretty certain over the long run–that both will move from emergent to insurgent, from being used as a passive source of votes to being heard as a force within the party. Perhaps what you’re seeing and hearing in New York and New Jersey Latino communities is that very process in motion.

posted by @ 9:02 pm | 0 Comments

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

2G2K Circus :: Anti-Black Racism and My Alleged Cynicism

For the many of you who are coming to my blog for the first time, welcome! The HuffPost version of my last post has drawn lots of you in to our little neck of the interweb. Stick around if you like.

Normally I don’t feel a great need to respond to objections to most stuff I say–OK, I know, it doesn’t stop me–but there are two themes that are developing that I wanted to comment on.

The first emerges from the piece I did on Clinton, Obama, and Latino and Asian American voters. Many are criticizing me for downplaying or ignoring anti-Black racism amongst Latinos and Asian Americans. Um, let me just say, mercifully: you can spare your bytes trying to lecture me. You might instead use your bandwith searching through this blog for any of the zillion posts and discussions that we’ve had here over the last 4 years on the topic of interracial relations, or as the MSM likes to call it, Black-Brown-Yellow tensions. Shoot, pick up almost anything I’ve written over the past 20 years. (I seem to recall a whole chapter in a book I did once that talked about the issue.)

My post was a reaction to the knee-jerk MSM question asked of Latino and Asian American politicos beginning on NPR this morning–some version of “Well, gee, doesn’t this show that you all are just as racist as whites are?” I think that’s ridiculous. It’s a self-serving question, and much less revealing than it is presumed to be.

I doubt Michelle Obama and the Secret Service worry about Latino or Asian American extremists. I haven’t seen a Latino or Asian American leader or activist pull the race card during this campaign season. Happy to be proven wrong, but I haven’t seen it. Clearly, though, some parts of the press have had no problem pulling the race card. And look how easily we can get caught up in it. It’s the American way.

Let’s turn the question around: did Obama voters vote against Hillary because they’re all misogynists? And has this question been asked by any pundit of any male? Who are these questions serving, hmmm?

I don’t live in hippie la-la land. (Well OK I live in Berkeley but I’m saying you know metaphorically and shit.) There’s more than enough racism, sexism, and discrimination to fight on the daily. So ease up and just let me hold up a simple standard, the kind of standard that one might hope could raise discussions, instead of lowering them: bring on the evidence and then let’s talk. In turn, I’ll remain fully accountable for what I write.

I wrote a piece that offered a theory based on what I can report, what I can show, and what I can prove. Now I’m no diehard empiricist. I realize the blogosphere is a wonderful place for wild speculation, and I’m guilty of it (ex. South Carolina), and I’m staying in the blogosphere. But I’d like to think I can draw the line at becoming a tool for people who get a kick out of seeing folks fight over non-issues. I mean there’s plenty of real issues we’re already fighting about, no?

My point is not and has never been to deny the existence of anti-Black racism, or just as important, to deny the need to fight anti-Black racism in my community or any other. I think I have been consistent and honest and open on this issue. My point is: let’s call it where we actually see it, and let’s fight it on our own terms and our own turf.

The other theme that’s come up here some are angry/sad/disheartened at the thought that after writing a glowing piece about Obama in Vibe, I’ve turned “buzzkill” and “killjoy”. All I can say is that I don’t think this is a game, or mere entertainment. Candidates recognize they turn into used cars when they declare a run for office. Voters are gonna come in and kick the tires. So if I’m a bit moody or excessively sober or allegedly cynical, well, someone’s gotta be. And, uh, I guess I’m the one I’m waiting for.

Thanks for stopping by.

posted by @ 8:02 pm | 10 Comments

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

2G2K Circus :: Why Latinos And Asian Americans Went Hillary

Ferentz called Huckabee right here. I’m going to move to a different topic.

Among Latino and Asian American circles, Super Tuesday brought a sense of giddiness. Thanks to the central importance of California to the primary elections, here was a chance to not just be heard, but to be recognized as a voting bloc right up there with the privileged masses of Iowa or New Hampshire. Boy, did they make some noise.

In California, while Obama took a plurality of white voters (including white males) and the overwhelming majority of African American voters, Hillary won the popular vote by 8 points. So how did Hillary make her 10% margin of victory? A big part of the answer was in the Latino and Asian American votes. A CNN exit poll last night indicated that Latinos in California went for Hillary by a 2-1 margin, and Asian Americans went for her 3-1. Democratic polls showed Hillary winning Latinos by 3-1.

Soon we’ll be hearing a number of crackpot theories as to why this was so. Are Latinos and Asian Americans in fact slightly more conservative on immigration issues than everyone previously thought? Ridiculous. Are Latinos and Asian Americans unwilling to bring themselves to vote for a Black man? Get out of here with that.

The reason Hillary won is because the Latino and Asian American votes remain emergent, not yet insurgent.

Emergent voting blocs respond to leaders in their community. If the candidate wins the leader, she wins her followers. Insurgent voting blocs instead respond to calls for change, and may focus more on single issues or agendas. If a candidate stakes out a good position, she captures the community. Hillary played the politics of emergence.

Early, she locked down important leaders in the Latino and Asian American communities. In Los Angeles, that meant securing Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s support, and the predominantly Latino unions that have supported him. She also landed the support of Fabian Nunez and Dolores Huerta. In San Francisco, that meant seizing on Mayor Gavin Newsom’s popularity amongst Asian Americans. She also captured a who’s who of Asian American elected officials starting with Controller John Chiang and moving on down. Just as important, Hillary’s campaign locked up a huge number of the leading Latino and Asian American party operatives–the people who actually deliver the voters.

All of them–from Villaraigosa to the Asian American precinct captain–were responding to what might be called aspirational politics. The individuals become proxies for the community. You hear them say in their campaigns, “When I win, you win.” Clinton’s main advantage is that she has the access to power and the party structures that deliver promises to officials and operatives. Obama doesn’t. Emergent politics favors individuals seeking power. Think of it this way: Hillary, the woman candidate, is bringing Latino and Asian American leaders into the old-boy’s network.

These leaders, in turn, deliver votes via their community’s structures of power: business groups, labor unions, voter groups, community organizations. Those groups tend to deliver an older voter who is already “in the game”, who can directly benefit from the opening of the old-boy’s network. “Experience” really is a cover for “access”.

Latinos and Asian Americans in California are overwhelmingly Democratic, and will likely remain so for a very long time because of Reep immigration demagoguery. But they also tend to be more mainstream and conservative. Remember that, to the great embarrassment of many Asian Americans, it was the influential Chinese American Democratic Club in San Francisco that sponsored anti-affirmative action attacks on the prestigious Lowell High School. It’s also possible Obama’s call for change is received differently even among dissatisfied immigrants. Who better understands the disruption and dislocation that change can bring?

And finally, one should never underestimate the ability of Democratic party operatives to screw up a good thing. Although Obama is from Hawai’i, has Asian family members, and is beloved there, his largely white campaign staff blew it big time early in the campaign last year. After circulating an anti-outsourcing memo to the media that called Hillary “the Democrat from Punjab”, Obama was forced to apologize and distance himself from his staff. The episode barely rippled outside of the community, barely inside of the community, to be fair. But it had a number of Asian American political insiders and campaign donors bolting for Hillary’s camp.

Emergent groups are highly sensitive to perceived snubs. The so-called 80-20 Initiative, an effort led by former Delaware lieutenant governor S.B. Woo (a Democrat) to unite 80% of the Asian American electorate “defeat Obama”, began when Obama staffers answered a yes-no questionnaire with a “well, yes but…” on a question asking whether he’d promote affirmative action for Asian Americans. Hillary’s campaign, with ample access to Latino and Asian American leaders, never made any of these mistakes.

So Hillary won by old party-style top-down appeals to Latinos and Asian Americans. Dems shouldn’t rest thinking that this strategy will hold for long. Younger Latino and Asian American voters were energized by Obama, and formed a visible and crucial part of his GOTV ground troops. They had an impact. Roberto Lovato notes that Obama was able to bring down Hillary’s overall 4-1 advantage among Latino voters to a 3-2 advantage by Super Tuesday. It could be argued that Obama’s bottom-up machinery hasn’t yet taken full advantage of the pent-up energy amongst young Brown and Yellow voters.

When that power is unleashed, it will be unpredictable. The 1.5 generation, young Latino and Asian Americans from the ages of 16-40 who were born elsewhere but raised multilingual and multicultural in the U.S., represents a massive demographic bulge in those communities only beginning to feel itself. Before long, they will turn their communities’ emergent vote into an insurgent vote. And then the country will really discover not just the necessity of the Latino and Asian American vote, but what it is that they really want.

posted by @ 8:01 am | 11 Comments

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

2G2K Circus :: Run On Ballots In College Precincts Keeps Polls Open

Wow. KRON-4 and KGO Radio have been reporting all night that precincts at Cal and Stanford have had a run on paper ballots due to the huge increase in voter turnout. In addition, many precincts in Berkeley, Hayward, Fremont, and Oakland are reporting similar runs on ballots. This is still a fluid situation. Barbara Lee has just asked people to stay in line to cast their vote.

A judge in Alameda County has apparently ordered polling places stay open to 10pm, 2 hours past the regular time.

At the same time, polls are reporting Clinton ahead of Obama by a 20% margin or over 200k votes. About 15% reporting, though no one knows what the actual precincts are. This one is going mad late folks.

Interesting exit polls too, more in a future post.

UPDATE 9:23 :: Contra Costa and San Mateo County also reporting a run on ballots. Voters have been waiting in Alameda, San Mateo and Santa Clara County precincts on xerox copies of ballots.

UPDATE 9:28 :: CNN is now calling it for Clinton, she’s at a 30% lead. It’s possible, even likely, that Obama will take Alameda, tho probably not San Mateo or Santa Clara. The numbers will likely close later tonight, and the final delegate counts won’t be clear for a few hours, at best. I don’t think we’re looking at a 2000 style missed-call fiasco, but Obama may still have some good news coming from Northern California.

UPDATE 9:38 :: OK, here we go, finally some clarification. KRON reports three judges have issued consecutive orders. The upshot is that voters who were in line at 8pm will be able to vote at any time until 10pm. 14 polling places in Berkeley, Oakland, Hayward, and Fremont reported ballot shortages. Santa Clara was low on ballots because of a large turnout of independents, but voters received xerox ballots. It’s not clear if complaints from the Stanford precincts were adequately handled.

posted by @ 9:12 pm | 0 Comments



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