It’s a wonderful time to be a Sanchez and racist. First, California Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez trashed her Vietnamese-American Republican challenger, Van Tran, by insisting on Spanish-language television that “the Vietnamese and the Republicans are trying to take away this seat” — and adding, without a particle of support, that Tran is “very anti-immigrant and very anti-Latino.” (Not to worry, though; she supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries, which means that Bill Clinton will campaign for her.)
Then, there’s CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, who was just fired by CNN for making anti-Semitic remarks. After calling comedian Jon Stewart (born Jon Leibowitz) a “bigot” who “grew up in a suburban middle class New Jersey home with everything you could ever imagine,” Sanchez sought to describe Jews in “context” (since Jon Stewart, as a Jew, is a minority):
Very powerless people… [snickers] He’s such a minority, I mean, you know — please, what are you kidding? — I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah.
Liberal Hispanics can be racist and stupid! Who knew?! Welcome to the human race. Perhaps we can get beyond the notion that racism is a pathology peculiar to white conservatives. And here’s another reality: not all Hispanics are liberal (or suckers for liberal racist pandering).
Hispanics cannot be taken for granted by Democrats. The Hispanic community has spawned a range of political orientations — conservative, moderate, and liberal.
Certainly the strong lineup of Hispanic Republicans running for office this cycle suggest that Hispanics are an electoral force to be reckoned with — by both parties, and not taken for granted, despite racial pleas from liberal Hispanics. The columnist Carl Rowan wrote a while back, “a minority group has ‘arrived’ only when it has the right to produce some fools and scoundrels without the entire group paying for it.” Very true. To which I would add, a minority group has become an electoral force of consequence when the entire group is not entirely predictable. Only then do politicians speak to them as adults.
Part of the backlash now against President Obama — by tens of thousands of Americans who proudly voted for him and celebrated his victory — has to do with President Obama becoming a predictable liberal. Had he truly been a centrist, and a post-partisan president, as he promised, had he truly been post-racial, as he promised, then much of the animus against him would never have materialized. But President Obama has not governed as a centrist and has yet to seize upon a single moment to be post-racial, despite multiple opportunities.
In short, President Obama has become a predictably liberal African-American politician. Before the shouting begins, let me explain. It used to be that non-black Americans would fairly predictably vote against a black candidate. That is no longer true and has not been for a while. To take only the most recent example: against a white, moderate war hero, Obama won a larger proportion of the white vote than any previous non-incumbent Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Centrist and right-of-center whites voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008 because of a promise. Both candidates were outsiders with little experience who promised to be different and centrist. Jimmy Carter was trounced by Ronald Reagan in 1980. 2012 is a long way away, but Barack Obama is poised to lose a commanding Democratic Party majority in Congress in 2010.
The majority of white people are not liberals. None of these people dislike President Obama because he is black. They dislike him because he is liberal, and he promised not to be. Americans voted in the historic 2008 election believing they had elected an African-American centrist, a man who would vindicate America’s diversity and pragmatism.
But President Obama ended up being predictably liberal — on health care, government spending, labor, labor appointees, the environment, energy, immigration, racial issues, voting rights, Supreme Court nominees, and an awkwardly excessive pro-Islam foreign (and occasionally domestic) policy. Americans might elect an African-American Republican in the near future, but it will be a while before they trust an African-American Democrat — unless, of course, President Obama successfully triangulates against a Republican Congress and recasts himself, convincingly, as the centrist and post-racial president he originally promised to be.
Democrats take African-Americans and Jews for granted. They cannot take Hispanics for granted. Hispanics are much better situated to win non-gerrymandered general elections — because they are not predictably liberal. Because of the Hispanic community’s political diversity, it is possible to be Hispanic, moderate (or conservative), and electable — in either party, but only because Hispanics have credibility in both parties.
I wish racists like Loretta and Rick Sanchez have no political future — but for Marco Rubio, Brian Sandoval, and Susana Martinez, Godspeed.
Kendrick Macdowell is a lawyer and writer in Washington, D.C.