3/28/2004 - Comentarios de Bidal

You know, it really upsets me (to put it in nice words) to think that only 1000 people will decide who will be the next Commissioner for OUR precinct in Lubbock. OUR community/precinct gets to elect only four people to officially represent us in Lubbock County. One councilperson, one school board member, one constable and one justice of the peace is all that our community elects. Sure we have Judge Medina and Sheriff Gutierrez but they were not really elected by only our community.
It will probably not only be 1000 persons who elect our next commissioner but those 1000 persons will also elect our next city councilperson and our next school board member. To know that only 1000 persons will make the decision for all 60,000 (30% of 200,000) of us, Raza, that should upset everyone.
For many years now, ever since this newspaper first started publishing and it seems that since snakes could walk, this newspaper has been telling people that “su voto es su voz” - your vote is your voz. Has all this fell on deaf ears. Estan sordos o ciegos. If you are, you better get out of the way porque se los va llevar el tren.
As my friend from across the tracks says. “Que tiene esta gente? No entienden. No les importa? Les faltan canicas?
I know that there is no reason on earth other than a person falling over dead, that a person cannot take 10 minutes out of his or her life in 11.....count them 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11 days to go vote.
“What does it matter? My vote doesn’t count. Why should I vote, they’re all the same.” These are all lame excuses that we hear from people who I think are just lazy or don’t give a damn.
Early voting starts on April 3th. If you don’t have a ride, call me at 763-3841. I’ll go pick you up personally during those 11 days.
Orale Raza - Que no se los lleve el tren!
contact Bidal at eleditor@llano.net
Editorial Page


A Season of Change, Hope, and Peace
By Abel Cruz
In just a few days we will be entering one of the most beautiful seasons of the year. For a period of about 3 months we will be in a period of growth and renewal. It is a time when we will be amazed at the beauty of the new life around us and the subtlety with which it has joined our world.
When I lived in Washington, DC, spring was a time to see the birth of new buds on the trees, on their outstretched branches, as if stretching from a long sleep and somehow reaching up to heaven. It was the time for the Cherry Blossoms and they were always awaited with great anticipation. And when they blossomed in their full glory, in all their pink beauty, they were even more beautiful than one could ever have imagined.
They could definitely take your breath away.
Some people also view this time of the year as a season of personal and spiritual growth. Christians are in a season of Lent, a season of personal renewal as they await the season of the death and resurrection of Christ.
It is during this period that some people examine their own lives, looking inward, from the outside in, wondering if change is needed in their life. For others, it is business as usual and they go about their lives oblivious to all the changes taking place around them.
Lately, the new movie by Mel Gibson, The Passion of the Christ, has been the object of great attention. There has been an enormous amount of interest and controversy surrounding this piece of art. Although I have not had an opportunity to go and see the film, I hear that it is a beautiful film that accurately depicts the passion of the death of Christ. I am left to wonder if the same would have happened if the film would have debuted in the summer. A time when most people are busy with other things such as kids and vacations? Perhaps it generated so much interest because people are looking for anchors in their lives during this time of spiritual renewal? Maybe it is because it’s spring?
Perhaps people are looking for something to hold on to, something to reinforce their belief in their Faith? Perhaps people are just looking at how their lives can be better, how they can grow more in “love and peace”? I hope so...
Unfortunately, in the middle of it all, reality, like a bucket of cold ice water, slaps us in the face, wakes us up, and our thoughts that had been focused on springtime are suddenly blurred by the ugly realities that shape our lives.
Realities like the one that tells us that 3 more American citizens were killed in Iraq today. That close to 600 military personnel has been lost in a “lost cause” war. That over 3,000 people have been injured and countless Iraqis killed and injured. Even as our daily mainstream paper tells us in one of their editorials that the war in Iraq is not the main political issue that Democrats think it is.
I wish the editorialists were the ones charged with the duty of telling the mothers and fathers of those soldier’s that have been killed that it’s not an issue.
Realities like the one that informs us that a young woman’s life has been taken from her parents at the tender age of 19 by a drunken driver, as occurred here this past weekend. The reality that tells us that over 200 innocent people have been killed and over 1,600 wounded in Spain in the name of an Islamic holy war.
The important thing to remember though is that spring gives us an opportunity to reflect on what is important to us in our lives, and allows us to renew our faith in humanity and nature, not only in a physical sense, but in a very spiritual one also.
Lead me from death to life,
from lies to truth
Lead me from despair to hope
from fear to trust
Lead me from hatred to love
from war to peace
Let peace fill our heart, our world
our universe...
Peace...
Prayer for Peace by Mother Teresa
(c)acruz2004 Email: acruztsc@aol.com

Front Page
Democrats, GOP asses Latino Impact
Can Hispanics Swing the National Vote?
By John Helton
Both Republicans and Democrats are courting the Latino vote in this year’s election. And there is the potential that four states with large Latino populations might have an impact on the outcome.
Republicans want to parlay President Bush’s appeal to Latinos into a larger share of the electorate. Last week, the Bush campaign rolled out its first ads — in English and in Spanish.
Democrats say they’ve learned their lesson about taking Latinos for granted and losing votes in the 2000 election. They’ve test-marketed ads in Florida and Nevada that they say changed Latino voters’ opinions.
The New Democrat Network launched its Spanish-language advertising campaign the day after the Bush ads came out.
Hispanics make up the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, and the Latino vote went from 2.5 million in 1980 to nearly 6 million in 2000. The Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, which studies Latino issues, projects 6.7 million Latinos will vote this year, based on Census Bureau data. (Interactive: Charting the growth of the Latino vote)
But experts are split on whether the Latino vote is cohesive enough to sway a national election.
“Every four years, there is this claim that Latinos can swing the election. But if no Latino had voted at all (in the 2000 presidential election), it would have been exactly the same,” Rodolfo de la Garza, a Columbia University professor, told a conference on the Latino vote that the Rivera institute put on at the University of Southern California in February.
“I don’t think that you can say that there’s a ‘Latino vote,’ “ said Angelo Falcon, senior policy executive for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Educational Fund in New York. “There are so many subtleties and differences within the community between national origin and what region they live in.”
The vote on the North American Free Trade agreement in 1996 illustrates differences.
Robert DePosada, president of the Latino Coalition, summed it up this way: Latinos from the Southwest supported NAFTA because of the jobs and trade with Mexico it would bring. Puerto Ricans and Latinos from California opposed the agreement because of their ties with labor. Cuban-Americans initially withheld support but ultimately voted for it.
Two-thirds of U.S. Latinos — 66.9 percent — are from Mexico, 8.6 percent are from Puerto Rico and 3.7 percent from Cuba. Latinos from Central and South American countries make up 14.3 percent of the population, and the other 6.5 percent comes from other Hispanic countries.
The largest blocs of Latino voters are concentrated in two states, Republican-controlled Texas and Democrat-dominated California, and Latinos are not expected to vote any differently from how they did in 2000.
Cuban-Americans used to be the largest Hispanic group in Florida but have over the last decade become overshadowed in sheer numbers by non-Cuban Latinos, and now make up just 31 percent of the Hispanic population there.
But many of the new Florida residents are not citizens or don’t vote, according to Dr. Dario Moreno, who studies Cuban-American issues at Florida International University in Miami. The Cuban-American minority makes up 8 percent of Florida’s electorate, while non-Cuban Latinos, who tend not to vote as often, are 3 percent.
Four key states
Party operatives and academics say Florida, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico are expected to be in play this year.
Between them, the four states hold 47 of the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency. (Interactive: Four key states).
New Mexico has the highest percentage of Latino residents in the country at 42 percent, just 2 percent less than the percentage of whites, and Florida has the fourth-largest Hispanic population, behind California, Texas and New York.
More than a quarter of Arizona’s population and 20 percent of Nevada’s is Latino. Bush won both states in 2000 — Arizona by 6 percentage points and Nevada by 3.
Arizona and Nevada have two of the fastest-growing Latino populations, but they have also seen increases in white-collar jobs, which traditionally vote Republican.
Florida and New Mexico played significant roles in the 2000 election — Florida’s disputed vote gave Bush a narrow margin of victory. And Vice President Al Gore’s 366-vote win in New Mexico made Florida an issue.
Values that connect
Republican operatives say they are making inroads into the Latino vote beyond Bush’s personal appeal.
“There are values that connect,” said San Antonio, Texas, ad executive Frank Guerra, who is part of Bush’s re-election effort and has worked on the Republican campaigns of Bush’s brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
“You drive through these neighborhoods and you see these mom-and-pop businesses — they are so tied to small business — it’s a natural marriage to the GOP,” Guerra said. “They connect on the issues that face small businesses.”
Michael Madrid, who advises campaigns on Latino issues and was political director for the California Republican Party, says younger Hispanic voters are more likely to be in step with the GOP than their parents or grandparents.
“They are increasingly attending and graduating from college, home ownership among them is higher, they are more fiscally conservative,” he said. “They have a vested economic stake in the fabric of this country. That is changing their political attitudes.”
Republicans say Latinos also connect on a shared social conservatism — on what they call family values and religious issues. But others say that doesn’t translate to votes.
“It’s true that Puerto Ricans and Mexicans are likely to be anti-abortion and conservative on some social issues, but that’s not what they’re voting on,” said Lisa Garcia Bedolla, a political scientist in the University of California-Irvine’s Chicano/Latino Studies program.
“What’s driving party identification is economic and educational issues, and so far Democrats seem to have sway in those areas.”
“Republicans have gotten it half right — Latinos are socially conservative, but they are conservative on issues that they believe shouldn’t play a role in a public debate,” said Fernando Guerra, who directs the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University and before that was head of the university’s Chicano studies program. “These are things that should be dealt with in the family or within their religion.”
Bedolla said Latinos have a different understanding of government’s role than the Republican Party does.
“There are real reasons why they’re Democrats — it’s not just random,” she said. “They believe in Social Security, they believe in health care. Ask them the direct question ‘Do you think government should be larger or smaller?’ and they are likely to answer ‘larger.’ That’s a pretty significant policy difference with the Republican Party.”
GOP’s two paths with Latinos
Republicans say Bush has presented them the opportunity to make inroads into a part of the electorate that has traditionally been a Democratic stalwart.
Republicans say Bush has presented them the opportunity to expand the Republican Party’s base among Latinos beyond its dependable Cuban-American supporters.
“Bush’s personality drives a lot of it, his affinity for the community, his history of being from the Southwest,” Madrid said. But for Republicans to build upon the Latino base Bush has built, he said, will take a broader commitment to including Latinos in policy.
“It can’t be a cosmetic approach,” he said. “It can’t be a six-weeks-before-the-end-of-the-election, wrap yourself in a sombrero and say ‘Viva whoever it is’.”
Madrid uses California and Texas to illustrate the two paths Republicans can choose:
“There were radically different tacks in approaching the Hispanic electorate — in Texas you see an embracing and engaging of the community, and 10 years later you see Republicans totally dominating that state.
“California is the exact opposite. Our party leadership chose to demonize and vilify the immigrant whether illegal or legal, and the party virtually disappeared, became pretty much irrelevant.”
Lionel Sosa, who has worked with Madrid and Frank Guerra on Republican campaigns and whose ties to the GOP go back to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, thinks Democrats who don’t see that shifts are occurring are “in denial.”
“If they don’t think anything’s changing, that it’s business as usual, that’s fine with me,” he said.
Hitting the streets and airwaves
Maria Cardona, vice president for media relations and director of the Hispanic Project for the New Democrat Network, said Democrats did treat Latinos as business as usual in 2000 but that they won’t repeat that mistake.
“We sort of assumed it was going to be a cakewalk,” she said. “The economy was still good, economic indicators were good. There wasn’t a compelling reason to think that Gore wouldn’t win.”
For the past two years, Democrats have been preparing from the ground up, Cardona said. Activists on the ground are getting voter lists up to date, registering voters and walking the precincts, she said.
In concert with that, the NDN launched its Spanish-language ad campaign targeting Latino voters.
Ads began airing Friday in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Las Vegas, Nevada and Phoenix, Arizona, and will air in the Florida cities of Orlando, Miami and Tampa on Wednesday, the day after the Florida primary.
“We’re going to tell our story and ensure that they’re on our side,” she said.
The NDN has tested ads with Latinos in key cities like Orlando, Florida, and Las Vegas, Cardona said, and says polling before and after the ads show “they cut into Bush’s numbers significantly.”
The campaign will use television, radio, print and the Internet to spread the message, primarily in Spanish, Cardona said.,
Republicans will also use a multimedia approach aimed at Hispanic voters, Sosa said, but in English as well as Spanish.
The GOP ads aimed at Latino voters that launched last week show Latinos among other Americans to show inclusiveness, Sosa said.


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