SAN DIEGO – Barack Obama is looking for a way to convince Latino voters that he is simpatico. He may have found it, thanks to the cover of the New Yorker.
During the primaries, Obama tried to equate civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and United Farm Workers President Cesar Chavez. Then, in a recent speech to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, Obama insisted that he had worked with local Latino leaders as a young civil rights attorney in Chicago and argued that, in a weak economy, “few have been hit harder than Latinos and African-Americans.”
Finally, while speaking to the National Council of La Raza last week, Obama talked about how many in the Latino community came here “with so little but . . . a thirst to succeed” and said it reminded him of what brought his father here from Kenya “in the hope that, in America, you can make it if you try.”
But what Obama really needs to do is to connect with Latino voters on a more personal level by convincing them that he empathizes with their experience. And, thanks to the New Yorker, he has the means to do so. So what if the magazine’s defenders claim that the cover is satire? Depicting Obama as a Muslim and his wife, Michelle, as a machine-gun-toting militant – with a picture of Osama bin Laden hanging over the fireplace, while an American flag burns in it – is more slanderous than satirical.
The caricature is not really about race, but patriotism. The subtext is that the Obamas are a couple of flag pins short of being real, full-blooded, God-fearing Americans.
Now, where have we heard that before? You got it. In the throes of the immigration debate, it is U.S.-born Latinos who are often hit with the accusation that they are “Americans in name only.” Mexican-Americans, in particular, are routinely accused of having divided loyalties and having left their hearts south of the border. And that’s strange given that many of them were born in the United States and so were their parents.
This kind of ethnic McCarthyism gets old. And it must get downright infuriating for those Latino veterans who risked their lives to serve their country, and perhaps gave up limbs or lost friends, only to have racists and xenophobes – including some who never served in uniform or sacrificed for freedom – accuse them of being a lesser-grade American.
It’s an accusation that is familiar to Enrique Morones. The San Diego-based immigration activist found himself center stage at the NCLR conference. Morones was part of a group of about 15 people who met with Obama before the presumptive Democratic nominee arrived at the podium and one of the few mentioned by the candidate in his speech.
Morones told me that he prefers Obama, in part because he doesn’t trust John McCain to fight for comprehensive immigration reform. He also thinks that, as someone with a diverse background, Obama “represents the future of this country.”
I asked Morones – who was born in the United States – if the Democrat has a kinship with Latinos because both are used to having their Americanness questioned.
“Absolutely,” he said. “Barack understands what it is like to be a person of color. He understands what it is like to be discriminated against because his family is from another land. He understands the racist taunts. Just like we do.”
Morones noted that some Latinos are fourth- or fifth-generation Americans, and yet people assume they just got here and have no real loyalty to the United States.
It’s a story that Barack Obama knows all too well.
“He’s facing it,” Morones said. “Just like we’re facing it. So he knows. So when Lou Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly talk about that stuff, he knows what it feels like because he has lived it too.”
That’s the message Barack Obama should spread to Latino voters every chance he gets. In the present climate, he might be surprised at just how effective it could be.
RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR. is a San Diego Union-Tribune columnist.
