Today's Stories

June 20, 2008

Robert Oscar Lopez
Brownout in Black Camelot: Obama and Latino Voters

June 19, 2008

Ralph Nader
Why Won't Corporations Take On Big Oil?

Chellis Glendinning
Techno-Fascism: Every Move You Make

Neve Gordon
Learning to Drive in Rafah

Dave Lindorff
Killing the News in Iraq

Sheldon Richman
Habeas Corpus Saved--Barely

George Bisharat
Obama's Missteps

Jackie Corr
Dear Mr. Kilowatt

Farzana Versey
Will Gorkhaland Become a Reality?

Website of the Day
Trouble on the Range

June 18, 2008

Nicole Colson
Hunger and Humiliation in the Belt-Tightening Economy

Rev. William E. Alberts
The "F" Word and the White Press

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Genuflections to the Swing Lobby

Parvez Ahmed
Oil Prices, Market Regulation and the Election

Bob Moss
Judicial Warfare in Boumediene

Dave Lindorff
The Elephant in the Room

David Wilson
Bush in London

June 17, 2008

Conn Hallinan
The Brain Trauma Vets

Wajahat Ali
Chomsky Speaks: On Iran and Iraq

Marjorie Cohn
Reviving Habeas Corpus

Uri Avnery
Two Professors: Mearsheimer and Walt in Israel

David Macaray
Adversarial Relationship

Rannie Amiri
Forgotten Lives in a Forgotten War

Website of the Day
Pentagon Money

June 16, 2008

Uri Avnery
An Apology

Corey D. B. Walker
The Racial Politics of Symbols

Howard Lisnoff
Files Upon Files

Dennis Loo
2008 Elections: Of Whales and Worms

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama and the Fall Into Tyranny

June 13 / 15, 2008

Douglas Valentine
McCain: War Hero or Go-To Collaborator?

Alexander Cockburn
Change, What Change?

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft

Peter Linebaugh
On Wat Tyler Day

Ishmael Reed
The Colossus: Sonny Rollins, Take One

Joe Bageant
Old Dogs and Hard Time

Harry Browne
Ireland Shows the Way!

Andy Worthington
The Supreme Court's Gitmo Decision: What Does It Mean?

Jeff Sharlet
The F-Word

Binoy Kampmark
They Gassed Us: Agent Orange in OZ

Alan Farago
His Little Piece of the Pie

Brian Cloughley
America the Detested: the Pakistan Airstrikes

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
How to Stretch Gasoline

Reza Fiyouzat
Oil and Racism

Patrick Bond /
Richard Kamidza
How Europe Underdevelops Africa

David Yearsley
Music in the Rubble

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Thank You, Dennis Kucinich!

Ronnie Cummins
Don't Panic; Go Organic

Dan Bacher
Bush Tries to Raid Salmon Disaster Funds

Michael Dickinson
Jesus in Megiddo Prison

Seth Sandronsky
My Father's World

Poets' Basement
Tu Fu / Rexroth

Website of the Weekend
Torture and the American Psyche

June 12, 2008

Judith Levine
As Cranes Fall and People Die

Patrick Cockburn
Amid Iraqi Fury, U.S. Offers Concessions on Military Bases

Saul Landau
The Iraq War Becomes Suicidal

Christopher Brauchli
Bush Bling-Bling: Government by Crony

Norman Solomon
Deadly Diplomacy

Helen Redmond
Why Can't We All Get KennedyCare?

Laura Carlsen
No Rest for the Working Poor

Jeremy R. Hammond
Threats Against Iran Escalate

Anne Landman
Pinkwashing: Can Shopping Cure Breast Cancer?

Website of the Day
Fire in Watts

June 11, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Oil Prices Are So High

Ralph Nader
Wall Street Gamblers

Joshua Frank
Why I Can't Support Barack Obama

Clifton Ross
Conversation in Miami: the Neoliberal Left and Socialism

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
Whatever Happened to "Democracy Now?"

Stephen Lendman
Exposing Pentagon and CIA Corruption

Diane Farsetta
Talking Back to Bill O'Reilly

Ron Jacobs
The Sixties Painted Black

Deborah Rich
Hay Belly Nation: the FDA and the O-Word

Hop Wechsler
A Friend of Women? My Bill Clinton ... and Ours

Website of the Day
A New Path to the Waterfall

June 10, 2008

Alan Farago
John McCain and the Company He Keeps

James G. Abourezk
Deadly Fallout From Obama's Groveling Before Israel Lobby

Saree Makdisi
Banned in the U.S.A. (Almost)

Malini Johar Schueller
A Picture From Beirut

John Ross
Killing Foods, Killing People

Wajahat Ali
Rumi and Sufism

Peter Morici
Bernanke Aggravates Recession Risks

Jordan Flaherty
Inside Angola Prison, Louisiana's Last Slave Plantation

Gary Macfarlane
Collaboration on the Clearwater: Is It Legitimate?

Joanne Mariner
The Gitmo Trials: an Inglorious Start

Website of the Day
The End of the Clinton Machine?

June 9, 2008

Uri Avnery
No, I Can't: Obama, Israel and AIPAC

Nikolas Kozloff
McCain & the Republican Insitute: Promoting Iraqi Occupation for "a Million Years"

Allan Nairn
Drawing Your Last Breath Hungry

Dennis Loo
Threats on Iran and the "Batterer's Defense"

Harry Browne
Irish Euro Vote Comes Down to the Wire

C. Hand
U. S. Bid to Hike Iran's Gas Prices Seems Doomed

Peter Morici
An Unsustainable Trade Deficit

Kenneth Couesbouc
A Ripe Time for Inflation

Martha Rosenberg
The Inconvenient Senator Grassley

James L. Secor
Chinese Superstition or Unconscious Oracle?

Website of the Day
Pay Bo Diddley!

June 7 / 8, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Obama Goes Over the Top

Ishmael Reed
How Miles Davis Changed My Life

Jeffrey St. Clair
What a Miner's Life is Worth

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet the King the Beers: John McCain and Latin America

Dave Lindorff
The High Cost of a Single War-Like Remark: Oil Prices, Israel, Iran and the U.S.

Robert Fantina
When Truth is the Casualty

Conn Hallinan
Iran and Rumors of War

Neve Gordon
The Occupation and the Politics of Death

Tom Barry
The Deterrence Strategy of Homeland Security

Patrick Irelan
Raiding the Packing House

Tim Wise
Your Whiteness is Showing

David Ker Thomson
The Hard Question

Joshua Frank
"Socialist" Wins Republican Nomination in Montana

David Yearsley
Disaster Music

James T. Phillips
1968: Year of the Rat

Joe Allen
The Real Bobby Kennedy

P. Sainath
Making Life Brighter in Kondapur

David Macaray
Should Unions be More Democratic?

B.R. Gowani
Experience and the Two-for-One

Fred Gardner
What Happened (at the DA's Office)

Peter Harley
Technology to the Rescue? Kurzweil and the Human Machines

Michael Dickinson
Surrender the Bones of Geronimo!

Jen Roesch
Where are the Real Women in Sex and the City?

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Landau, and Buknatski

Website of the Day
Partying with the Waltons

June 6, 2008

Frank Barat
An Interview with Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky on the Future of Israel / Palestine

Patrick Cockburn
U.S. Extorts Iraq to Approve Military Deal

Gary Leupp
Cheney Enrages Iraqis Over Security Deal

James Abourezk
Name That Terrorist

Peter Morici
Recession Grips the Jobs Market

Faheem Hussain
What is NATO Doing in Afghanistan?

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo's Britons Go on Hunger Strike

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
How Will Musharraf Go? Impeachment or Safe Exit?

Dave Lindorff
Congress Needs to Defend Itself

Website of the Day
Backstage with Bo Diddley

June 5, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Bush's Secret Deal Would Ensure Permanent U.S. Occupation of Iraq

Sharon Smith
Hillary's Wreckage

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Electoral Dilemma: Latinos or Reagan Democrats?

Linn Washington, Jr.
Police Brutality and Cover-Up in Philly

Omar Barghouti
60 Years of Nakba, 41 Years of Occupation ...

Scott Pellegrino
Jim Crow Radio: Bob Grant's Lifetime Achievement Award

John Walsh
Obama Woos AIPAC

Dan Bacher
The Parching of California

DC Larson
Nazi Rockers ... F-Off

Robert Jensen
Masculine, Feminine or Human?

Website of the Day
Ohio Cops Attack Long Walkers

June 4, 2008

Eric Walberg
Princess Patricia and the Taliban

Gary Leupp
Iran and EFPs: Chronology of a Lie

Ralph Nader
Disenfranchised Youth

Dave Lindorff
Of Whiners and Poor Losers

George Wuerthner
Farm Economics

Victor M. Rodriguez
The Puzzle of Race and Politics

Remi Kanazi
Why a Cultural Boycott of Israel is Needed

Stephane Luçon
Renault's Romanian Fairyland Suspended

Farzana Versey
The Tablighi Jamaat Movement

Laray Polk
The Militarization of Space

Website of the Day
Red State Rebels

June 3, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts /
Lawrence M. Stratton
Legislating Tyranny

Mike Whitney
The Withering Economy

Steve Early
San Juan Showdown

Manuel Otero
Why Hillary Won Puerto Rico: the View from the Colony

George Bisharat
The Hope of a Victimized People

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's VP Quandry

Dan Bacher
Death on the Salmon Highway

Website of the Day
Censoring Bill Knott?

June 2, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Olmert Scandal

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Latino Problem Getting Worse

Allan J. Lichtman
Revisionist History: Bush, Borah and Hitler

Malini Johar Schueller
The Color of Randomness: Returning to the US From Beirut Via Syria

Robert Weissman
What's Driving Skyrocketing Oil Prices?

Peter Morici
Bailing Out Wall Street

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Don't Get Burned: How to Protect Yourself From Raytheon's Pain Gun

John Ross
Celebrating Catholic Fanaticism in Mexico

Ahmad Al-Akhras
Encounters with the Watch List

Website of the Day
Man on Earth

May 31 / June 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Worst is Yet to Come

Jeffrey St. Clair
Arkansas Bloodsuckers

Gary Leupp
How McClellan Prettifies Bush

Stan Cox
Broken Agriculture

Rannie Amiri
Lebanon: the Domino That Wouldn't Fall

P. Sainath
A Guaranteed Day's Work--in the Fields, at 110 Degrees, for $2 a Day

Binoy Kampmark
Going Bankrupt in Vallejo

Robert Fantina
Bush, Rice and McClellan

Seth Sandronsky
Will There be Water Riots, as Sacramento Goes Dry?

Corporate Crime Reporter
Death Penalty for Bush?

Anthony DiMaggio
Gaming the Ghetto: Grand Theft Auto IV, Racist Media and the Concrete Jungle

Karl Grossman
A Half-Trillion for Nukes

Matt Reichel
From Vegas to the Heartland and Back Again

Paul Myron Hillier
Of Gas and God

Andy Worthington
Suicide at Guantánamo

David Yearsley
And the Winner is ... Wayne Shorter

Daniel Cassidy
Free Lunch

Charles Thomson
If Hitler Had Been a Hippy ...

Gary Corseri
A Dream Deferred: Activism and the Arts

Wajahat Ali
Sex and the City Through a Man's Eyes

Ron Jacobs
Robins Weep

Poets' Basement
McNeill and Davies

Website of the Day
Last Charge of the Light Horse

May 30, 2008

Bassam Aramin
Here's the Truth You've Been Running From

Andrew Cockburn
Petraeus' Iran Obsession

Saul Landau
How We Got Into This Mess

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet South America's New Secessionists

Robert Sandels
Turning Back the Clock on Cuba

Dave Lindorff
Talk is Cheap

Martha Rosenberg
Raiding Big Meat; Arresting the Wrong People

Harvey Wasserman
Lieberman & McCain: Linking Internet Censorship and Atomic Reactor Terror

Doug Giebel
A Plague on Both Your Houses (of Congress)

Shaun Harkin
The Trial of the Raytheon 9

Website of the Day
The Once and Future Environmental Movement

May 29, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Bill Clinton and the Rich Women

Nikolas Kozloff
Puerto Rico, Obama and the Politics of Race

Col. Dan Smith
Deceiving the Dead

Karl Grossman
The Most Lucrative Incentive for Nuclear Power in the History of the United States

William S. Lind
Inside the Washington Game

Robert Weissman
What to do About the Price of Oil

Dave Lindorff
Why Puerto Rico Won't Matter

David Macaray
A Union Fable

Chris Genovali
Fear and Loathing in the Northern Rockies

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Battle Over Oil

Website of the Day
Support Antiwar.com

May 28, 2008

Wajahat Ali
The Libertarian Dark Horse: An Exclusive Interview with Ron Paul

Ralph Nader
What's Really Driving the High Price of Oil?

Brian McKenna
Why I Want to Teach Anthropology at the Army War College

Corporate Crime Reporter
Why Vincent Bugliosi Wants to Prosecute George W. Bush for Murder

Brian Cloughley
The Attack on Damadola

Eric Walberg
Opium for the Masses from Afghanistan

Michael Dickinson
Raytheon's Pain Ray: Coming to a Protest Near You

Ijaz Khan
Opening Windows in Pakistan

Website of the Day
Older Than America

May 27, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Her Mind She's Killed Before: the Plot to Assassinate Ralph Nader

Greg Kafoury
Is Obama Turning (Further) Right?

Jean Bricmont
Western Delusions

Tim Wise
Farrakhan is not the Problem

Ricardo Alarcón
Puerto Rico's Turn

Stephen Soldz
APA Supports Psychologist Engagement in Bush Regime Interrogations

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo 16

Alan Singer
Vapid, Stupid and Insulting: Chuck Schumer Speaks to the Graduates

Richard Neville
Storm in an A-Cup

Susie Day
Gone with the W

May 26, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Syrian Option

Bill Quigley
War Immemorial Day

Col. Dan Smith
Retreating from Hell: a Different Memorial Day

Cindy Sheehan
Why Memorial Day is a Double-Whammy for Me

Marjorie Cohn
Hillary's Assassination Politics: Her Last Shot?

Fred Gardner
Does the VA Care?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Pain Pays: Getting Rich at NY Presbyterian Hospital

Harvey Wasserman
Mugging the Election System

Moncia Benderman
Truth Matters

David Rovics
In Praise of Utah Phillips

Website of the Day
Fox News Jokes About "Knocking Off" Osama and Obama

May 24 / 25, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

Jeffrey St. Clair
Yellowstone: How Sununu Shrank the Ecosystem

Barbara Rose Johnston
Dam Legacies, Damned Futures

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Fourth Fleet in Venezuelan Waters

Adriana Kojeve
The Environment and the 2008 Elections

Robert Fantina
Justice Department's Revelations on Torture

Dave Lindorff
Bush's War on Children in Iraq

David Yearsley
The War on Kitsch

Nelson P. Valdés
The Buying of "Democracy" Agents in Cuba

Kathleen M. Barry
Celebrating Ethnic Cleansing

John Ross
Mexico's Narco Opera Reaches for High Point

Allison Kilkenny
Apathy Doesn't Live in Bronx

Fred Gardner
Orangeburg, 1968

Elizabeth Schulte
Can the Whole World be Fed?

Daniel Gross
Remembering the Wendy's Massacre: the Dangerous Side of Retail Work

Christopher Brauchli
The Search for a Token Right-winger

Richard Rhames
A Nation of Sheep

Daniel Cassidy
My Mother

Poets' Basement
Davies, Klipschutz and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Happy Birthday, Bob

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

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Obama and Latino Voters

Brownout in Black Camelot

By ROBERT OSCAR LOPEZ

Barack Obama’s candidacy has changed America’s cultural compass; nobody can deny it after coming across the JFK comparisons and the term “black Camelot.” A new paroxysm is spreading: the “obamagasm,” definable as a rush of delight in imagining Barack rather than George as our leader. But our fearless man of color may be headed for a brownout in a race against McCain. Latino voters will be a tough battleground.

Gore and Kerry won a majority of the brown vote, and Obama will likely beat McCain among Latinos. The problem is that “winning” among Latinos is not enough to win. Since we are the largest minority, Democrats have to win big with us to offset the Republican advantage among white males. As far as I can tell, Latinos have a Democratic appetite these days, especially in light of immigration debates. But the brown folks I know are lukewarm on Obama.

Obama needs to pull farther ahead to protect himself from unexpected fluctuations to the right. If McCain unveils a more moderate stance on immigration or proposes a compromise plan on amnesty, Obama’s lead with the brown vote would disappear. Let us suppose Obama smears McCain as anti-immigrant, but McCain offers centrists a better energy plan or a tax-break scheme that makes Obama look like a financial risk. Black Camelot would be in danger depending on how many white Independents turn out for McCain (as of yesterday’s CNN poll, Independents are currently split 45-45 with 10% undecided.)

Welcome to the impossible-to-dichotimize, statistically illegible world of Latino politics. We’re here, we’re unclear, get used to it.

Latinos are not a captive constituency like African Americans on the left, or white evangelicals on the right. We usually split 60/40 between Democrats and Republicans with a significant subset amenable to switching sides. The split is partly related to the differences among Central Americans and Cubans, who can lean Republican, and Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, who tend to lean Democratic. But we have a collective identity, as evidenced by the solvency of pan-Latino media companies (Univision in Spanish or SiTV in English). We feel a commonality even if we can never articulate what exactly makes us all Latino, so in spite of our diversity, we aren’t Balkanized. No umbrella group is so unpredictable and yet so culturally cohesive. If a party gets lost in the mixed signals, it can pay the price at election time; just ask Ken Mehlman. In 2006, when Republicans appeared nastier than Democrats on immigration, Latino support for the GOP dropped to around 28%, and the Democrats stormed Congress. Not soon after that, Jewish Mehlman was out of the RNC chairmanship, and Mel Martínez was in.

Gore and Kerry fell short; in both elections over 40% of Latinos voted for Bush. In Latino-heavy New Mexico, for instance, Bush beat Kerry by fewer than 6,000 votes. In Iowa, which experienced a spike of Hispanic immigration, Kerry lost by only 10,000. In two states with enormous Hispanic populations, Texas and Florida, a combined edge of two million votes dunked Kerry’s head under water.

None of this bodes well for Obama four years later. Hillary Clinton’s broad sweep among Latinos in states where Obama won among white Democrats (California, Texas) points to a general disconnect between him and the Latino zeitgeist. Where exit polls counted Latinos, Clinton won against Obama every time: 72% of Latino votes in New Jersey, for instance, and 63% of “all other races” beside black and white in New York. Latino populations have grown significantly in battleground states like Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, New Jersey, and Ohio.

At a recent meeting with professors in Latino Studies, one colleague from California suggested that Latinos would go full-force for Obama, despite the Hillary blip. She thought the shift toward the Democrats in 2006 signaled an irreversible brown disgust with conservatives.

“The polls bear it out,” she said. “Obama’s leading McCain by a spread of seven points.”

I promised to forward her my July 2004 article, “A Nine-Day Search for Bush’s America,” in which I responded to similarly rosy assumptions from Kerry supporters. Back then, Kerry had a snug lead of five percentage points. Fahrenheit 9/11 was selling out in movie theaters deep in the red states. The word on the street was that even Bush’s staunchest supporters were fed up. But I dug deeper that summer, driving through nine states in the South and prodding notoriously circumspect Southerners to talk politics with me: Yes, they were in fact fed up with Bush. But, as I said in the piece, “You don’t have to like Bush to vote for him.” Between Bush’s sorrow and Kerry’s nothing, they chose Bush’s sorrow.

When it comes to Obama’s supposed silver bullet, the agony of the middle class, caveat emptor. Latinos don’t completely fit the narrative about Bush’s disastrousness. In 1996, 1.4 million Latinos had a college degree, while in 2006, the figure had risen to 3.1 million.

The growth of a Latinorati both helps and weakens Obama. It means there are more Hispanics who went to college and absorbed the liberal beliefs that give people obamagasms. It also means the community as a whole, seeing brown success stories, won’t be as likely to agree that the economy is totally going down the tube. More Latinos have studied US history and understand the importance of the first black man getting nominated. More of them are also afflicted by a petit-bourgeois practicality, of the Thatcherian and Nixonian kind, which makes it hard for brown office managers and mechanics to elect an untested pretty boy who looks like he’s never put in a hard day’s work. The most lethal scenario is this: Latinos celebrate that Obama made it this far, and then decide that it’s far enough.

The community’s multifarious changes on US soil mirror the rapid changes in our home countries. I’m not going to proclaim that a Bolivarian utopia has taken hold, but if you haven’t noticed, a wave of popular leaders in Latin America has reversed centuries of lopsided paternalism. The fact that many of the new Latin American “demagogues” are antagonistic toward Bush does not negate that their rise, and the rise of a more muscular Latin American economy, coincided with Bush’s presidency.

Perhaps Iraq’s intractability resulted in Bush lacking the time or spare manpower to push our home countries around. But at any rate the Western Hemisphere is better off without a bully/victim or benefactor/charge psychology between Anglos and Hispanics. Thoughtful Latinos get nervous when Democrats lambaste Bush for losing the United States’ “moral authority” in Latin America. That sounds like code for pulling the Marines out of Iraq and sending them to Ecuador in search of new babies for Angelina Jolie to adopt.

The bottom line is that Hispanics are not necessarily going to view the Bush years as a catastrophe. Among those who do see it that way, it is not universal to see Democratic policies as salvation. It is true people are losing their homes and healthcare is flawed, but most Latinos can go back two or three generations and remember our families existing in far direr conditions: civil wars, disasters with no rescue crews, and unsanitary hospitals that carried out torture for the continent’s copious Cold War dictatorships. Last year my aunt Calixta Torres published Melania, a collection of short stories charting our family history from the early 1800s; it reads like a prosaic Inferno. You pass through slavery, then drought, then decades of itinerant poverty peppered with unspeakable violence. At one point my great-great-grandmother, a freed slave, beats her daughter unconscious after finding out she’s gotten pregnant out of wedlock. Things get marginally better by the late 1930s, when my mother is born under a plantain tree and her midwife drops her on her head.

A part of me is understandably grateful that I live in a country where emergency rooms are legally bound to treat you, even if you may end up going bankrupt afterwards. If someone harps too much on the Sicko segment featuring a man who lost a finger, I might eventually feel offended. Consider my childhood memories of a hunched and disabled uncle in Rio Piedras who lived with my cousins, or my grandmother’s toothless and scarred sisters rocking on the porch in Caguas. Lots of Latinos have grown up with disfigurement and injury around us; rather than express horror our instincts are usually to utter a noncommittal “ay bendito” and then make disfigured or injured people a part of our daily routine. Overuse of such images borders on hygienic imperialism, another instance of Anglos telling us the way we do things is disgusting.

When I delivered a speech at the Veterans Affairs for Hispanic Heritage Month, I had the chance to listen to some Latino vets’ opinions on Sicko. Their take was simple and unabashed: “Everyone can get free healthcare in America by signing up for the military.” This statement may infuriate an Obama supporter, but the important thing is to understand where it is coming from, and respond without making a Hispanic even warier of what Obama is proposing.

The pitfall here is not the message put forward by people like Michael Moore, but rather the unspoken assumptions that are supposed to frame the message. In the assumptions, well-intended liberals often lose Latinos and fail to edit out their own fallacies. A narrative about the disastrous effects of Bush’s presidency is a sure bet if you are talking to middle-class white families who attained and lost the American dream and now long for the heady idealism of the 1960s. It helps if your listeners consider that Kennedy and Johnson created prosperity by launching social programs, which later Republicans evilly dismantled. But such a collective memory cannot be taken for granted when the crowd is brown.

To understand the hazardous divide between Anglo and Latino pathos, take a moment to reflect on an instant classic, one that is popular in pro-Obama circles: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed from 2001. Imagine what the following passage sounds like if you are an unsung Latino wage-earner, someone treated like furniture by many Anglos in your immediate environment. In the final chapter, Ehrenreich offers these thoughts about the nature of democracy and minimum-wage work:

"[I]f low-wage workers do not always behave in an economically rational way, that is, as free agents within a capitalist democracy, it is because they dwell in a place that is neither free nor in any way democratic. When you enter the low-wage workplace […] you check your civil liberties at the door, leave America and all it supposedly stands for behind, and learn to zip your lips for the duration of the shift. We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world’s preeminent democracy, after all, if large amounts of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship."

Ehrenreich’s book was incredibly inspiring to many liberals; in some places it has been turned into a play. It might be tempting to liberals, at this juncture, to draw from Ehrenreich’s style as a way to rally multiracial support behind Barack Obama. But reassess this line of argumentation, imagining that you are a Latino no more than one or two generations from the struggles of the Third World.

If your family survived an actual dictatorship, someone like Trujillo or Castro, it might seem presumptuous for Ehrenreich to compare a snooping boss to serious human-rights abuses. And if the low-paying job is what motivated your family to cross rivers and brave armed border guards to come to America (which you knew was imperfect rather than the world’s “preeminent democracy”), then you start to zone out at the lines about leaving “America and all it supposedly stands for.” At some point Ehrenreich’s pathos backfires, because you feel like she is caricaturing a life that is, as far as you can tell, the only life you have and a life that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats can save you from. Eventually Ehrenreich cannot veil her contempt for the people whose lives she is trying to redeem, when she writes, “I was amazed and sometimes saddened by the pride people took in jobs that rewarded them so meagerly, either in wages or in recognition.”

It seems prima facie that Barbara Ehrenreich hopes to save you by revealing that you exist. But where does it all lead? Conservatives devalue you because you aren’t rich. Liberals hate you because you “cling to your guns and religion,” to paraphrase Obama, as a way to anchor yourself in a heartless world. Liberals also hate you because the same moral code that moors you makes it hard to understand why teenagers need to get their nipples pierced or how gay marriage became a concept, let alone a phenomenon. Unions hate you because you are the cheap labor that drives down the wages they wish to prop up. Ehrenreich’s readers probably hate you, on a subliminal level, because you keep coming to work and enabling the system she finds abhorrent to continue. And the publishers who catapulted Barbara Ehrenreich to fame have no interest in talking to you. You start saying to yourself: What does Barbara want me to do? Quit? Join a union? Go on strike and put this place out of business? Run away somewhere else?

Nickel and Dimed may make you feel vindicated as an unacknowledged worker. But for you it will not vindicate Barbara Ehrenreich or liberals, because if you are that Latino, you know your version of Nickel and Dimed is entirely different. Working at diners, nursing homes, motel suites, and Wal-mart isn’t a shocking tour of the grotesque. It’s banal; it’s the life you lead and one you know you can survive. The managers aren’t evil masterminds, but rather people you maintain a cautious but cordial relationship with, because you need them and you hope one day to become them. And instead of ending the story by escaping a double life and returning to a world of bestselling books and press junkets, you do what millions of Latinos have done to get ahead in America: You pay your dues, do the backbreaking work for a few years, and wait for your lucky break. You don’t accuse the vague forces of corporate business of some grave injustice; rather, you mind your budget, patiently move up the pay scale, and break into management one day so you get a break from the dirty work.

As poor Latinos scrape their way up this unglamorous ladder, many of them unwittingly vindicate the Republican maxim so many liberals like to debunk: Hard work and individual effort pay off in America, as long as you can keep the government and Barbara Ehrenreich out of your hair. A sizable chunk of the Latino community drinks this Republican Kool-Aid at election time. Many agree with the opposing view from mainline Democrats, which is that the government owes its citizens a boost. But for lots of brown people who give up on the red tape of social agencies, the Democratic narrative feels hollow and deceitful. Many of the new bourgeois Latinos are precisely what Garry Wills decried in Nixon Agonistes as the insidious beast of American politics: the ungenerous “self-made man.” They do not feel indebted to liberal social policies. They feel minimal gratitude to the War on Poverty or the civil rights movement, since they weren’t in the United States when these things happened, or they were in the United States back then and got nothing out of such upheavals.

No sane Latino would deny that our community is struggling. Our poverty rate is still much higher than that of whites. In many places we are dropping out of school at disturbing rates. While HIV infection rates have gone down in almost all demographics, they have gone up among Latino men who have sex with men. The Washington Post dealt a huge blow to our ego with new figures indicating, on June 4, that Latinos are “more likely to engage in risky health behaviors, including drug use and attempted suicide, than white or black teens.”

Under the numbers, the story is of course more complicated.

Take the poverty rate. As I pointed out earlier, the number of college-educated Latinos more than doubled in the United States between 1996 and 2006, so there is a new bourgeoisie gaining in critical mass. As a community we are more likely to live in multigenerational homes; hence the stereotype of the typical Hispanic household where infants, grandparents, prodigal sons, and an endless parade of family friends share their domestic space with varying levels of transience. One of my favorite books by a Puerto Rican author, Nilda by Nicholasa Mohr, includes an unforgettable death speech by the protagonist’s mother. In her dying hours she confesses to her young daughter Nilda that her life was unfulfilling (“Nothing ever belonged to me … Nothing was every truly mine”) because as a Puerto Rican woman in her middle age, she was expected to take care of anyone who needed a place to sleep.

Readers of Nilda are left with a mix of admiration and grief. Latinos place tremendous burdens on mothers yet revere them as our anchor; this increases a tendency to see uplift and social transcendence as a family affair, the domain of “madres fuertes” and not the business of an unaffectionate force like the government. Some Hispanic families have assimilated and gotten comfortable with North American ways, like putting the elderly in nursing homes or shutting their doors to siblings who won’t shape up, but a large cross-section of us still approach family in the same way that Nicholasa Mohr noticed sixty years ago. Depending on what the political situation was in our home countries, we are likely to beware state institutions and instead count on a system of karmic reciprocity (i.e., you can sleep on my couch when you get a 72-hour notice, and then I can sleep on yours when my wife kicks me out.) As recently as 2006, my immediate household included my widowed father, my wife, my daughter, my divorced sister, and my niece. This raised no eyebrows in my family.

The Latino family’s elastic domestic sphere means that many who are poor according to the statistics, can still count on some help from people who are being counted as middle class. If you double the number of middle class people, even if the percentage increase seems small, many others feel a significant change for the better. The reverse is always true too: If one middle-class person loses a job, a large network of people feels the strain. This web of social reliance diffuses anxiety, so our despair is not necessarily as acute as Democratic rhetoricians might presume during economic downturns.

Pro-Obama people can’t just harp on economic sob stories, and if they want to help their man this November, they will study Michael Moore and Barbara Ehrenreich to learn how not to talk to Latino voters. The secret to beating McCain, I would answer, lies in studying how Hillary Clinton worked. More than any other politician in recent years, including her husband, this woman truly had our community in the palm of her hand.

Hillary Clinton was reviled by the liberal wing of the Democratic Party for the same reasons that Asians and Latinos fell in love with her. She came across as more conservative, more accessible yet tougher, less of a bleeding heart and more of a strict mother, all things that middle-class-bound Latinos admired. She weathered the attacks against her husband in the 1990s and had the guts to fight for a Senate seat twice. Her husband slashed welfare, signed NAFTA, and acted like a Republican a lot of the time, which alienated white liberals but appealed to success-mongering Latinos focused on self-improvement.

Superficial aspects of Clinton’s gender hurt her in Anglo terms but helped her among Latinos. In her canary-yellow pantsuit, she looked less like a socialite and more like one of our dyed-blonde, discount-happy moms unaware that one doesn’t wear tropical colors in North America; our moms who put up with our unappreciative dads and found a small dose of pride in the fluorescent-lit offices that Anglos see as the hallmarks of dead-end jobs.

I found it fascinating that so many people in the press failed to understand the appeal of Hillary Clinton to a proud but struggling community like ours. For better or worse, lots of Latinos hang our hopes on clumsy middle-aged mothers moonlighting as real-estate agents, administrative assistants, dental hygienists, and clerical workers. If you have just one such woman wired into a familial network of eighteen people, her paycheck is a fragile lifeline keeping the whole clan afloat: the older folks living on disability, the hot-tempered dads who quit their jobs over an insulting comment from the boss, the semi-grateful kids who enroll in community college, hoping to transfer to a state college and swearing they’ll buy Mami a new car before she develops carpal tunnel syndrome. Hillary Clinton tugged at these heartstrings without insulting us or making us feel like our lives were anything to be ashamed of.

As blue-eyed and WASPy as she is, Hillary Clinton reminds me of Latina mothers I know, squirreling away cookbooks and proudly selling tickets for the parish brunch next Sunday. This is The Latina Mother who puts up with a cheating husband because she wants more than anything else to keep up appearances and hold the family together. Those of us who grew up under such a maternal regime are both thankful for the stability she gave us, and embarrassed she had so little self-respect. We have struggled at times not to judge her for looking desperate by the standards of white feminism. Such resonances cut both ways in political psychology, since for years I’ve projected onto Hillary all my unresolved anger at my Puerto Rican mother’s hypocrisy (comemierdería, as a Latino might say, or trying too hard to be what one is not). I backed Obama and said horrible things about Clinton this spring. But when all is said and done, I cannot deny the irony: Hillary is the whitest of white women yet she still looks like one of us. Michelle and Barack do not.

Clinton’s comment about “hard-working Americans” got her in hot water with the press but Latinos are receptive to many of the cheap shots, à la Geraldine Ferraro, that Barack Obama got lucky. Rather than cry bigotry one has to concede that their candidate’s rise was a bit hurried for people with meritocratic tastes. There might be a tinge of racism involved, because Obama’s status as a golden boy awakens latent Hispanic resentment. One of my closest family friends, whom I will call José, summarizes racial politics this way: “when black people cry, America listens, but when Latinos cry, America tells you to shut up and get back to vacuum cleaning.”

If a default bias leads Hispanics to see American blacks as overindulged and underworked, it does not help that the Democrats’ first black nominee received a plethora of money and positive coverage after a rousing speech and a short time in Congress. Expect more than a few grumblings from Latinos who have been treated like invisible serfs for years.

Which brings us, at last, to the big elephant: race. Only a year ago there was a torrent of media punditry about Don Imus’ “nappy-headed ho’s.” At precisely the same time, nightly tirades against immigration bordered on calls for ethnic cleansing on other channels. The lack of a nationwide mea culpa over immigrant-bashing would seem to deepen the already suspicious attitudes held by people like José. José won’t say it to many people, but he thinks black people take up too much space in the nation’s cottage industry of guilt and sensitivity. And he has a point. Isn’t calling someone a nappy-headed ho less serious than arguing that twelve million illegal aliens should be rounded up and thrown into detention camps through brute force, which Lou Dobbs has said on several occasions? It’s as though blacks and Latinos live in a sealed and unventilated chamber and Latinos can’t get a word in edgewise, because African Americans are sucking up all the oxygen.

When Hillary Clinton said Jeremiah Wright “wouldn’t be my pastor,” some Democrats like Michael Moore jumped on her and accused her of race-baiting. Latinos read the whole melodrama quite differently. We come from a continent where mulattos and mestizos far outnumber anybody who’s racially “pure,” so the incessant tête-à-tête between whites and blacks can feel bewildering at times and at other times tiresome. Obama’s now famous speech about race, delivered on March 18, stirred many white Democrats to tears and consolidated his base of support. Some Latinos liked it too, but others felt bored, even annoyed.

The Latino community’s race-weariness should be put into context. We are sustaining a daily barrage of hate on the immigration issue. Within both parties the new populism has unleashed an indomitable xenophobia. Both Martínez on the GOP side and Menéndez on the Democratic side have spoken up against immigrant-bashing, but coverage is overwhelmingly unsympathetic. With so few people in power willing to speak in our defense, many people in the Hispanic community simply tune out. Rather than find new reasons to classify Lou Dobbs as a rectal wart, I’d rather just turn off CNN when he’s on and enjoy dinner. Lots of us are determined to focus on our jobs and family, confident we can build a life in America without asking for another group to rescue or shield us. Coming from this survivalist modality, we are bound to bristle when famous African Americans ask for more discussion about racial tensions that don’t reflect the way we define our identities anyway. Obama’s disquisition on the Wright controversy convinced many educated white liberals that he was better than Hillary Clinton, but the whole episode made lots of Latinos even more desperate to push her to victory, so we wouldn’t have to listen to racial tedium all the way to November or, God forbid, all the way to January 2017.

Clinton pushed the Latino community’s buttons in a good way, rather than in a bad way: She presented herself as someone of the old caudillo or “strong-man” tradition. Caudillos waste no time on self-pity or grandiose philosophical claims; instead they circulate, strike deals, and win people’s loyalty with tangible offerings. In “Nuestra América” José Martí railed against the parochialism of a boss-centered politics, because Martí felt it fostered leaders who focused on atomized promises and town-by-town negotiating; Martí wanted to usher an age of grand narratives. Martí died young. The caudillo system went on. Hillary Clinton is everything Martí hated but the Latin American spirit relishes nonetheless: She wins us over because she knows big and important people, she’s got guts, she brings the lechón to the spit roast, and she’s not afraid to muddy her ideals with the inescapable minutiae of this world.

Obama’s oratory energizes educated whites largely because of what it draws from a black spiritual tradition. In Afrocentric Idea, Molefi Kete-Asante asserts that the key dynamic in African American discourse is the “messianic” mode. Other theorists have coined different terms: “bearing witness” according to Frances Smith Foster, “signifying” according to Henry Louis Gates, “the blues ideology” according to Houston Baker. All such terms point to deeply felt reverence for inspiring language and a magnetism toward leaders who speak exceptionally well, sometimes but not always religious men like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Combining a uniquely African love of performed language with Protestant eschatology, the greatest African American bellwethers evince a verbal mastery and visualize a future salvation. Hence “hope,” Obama’s buzzword, appeals to African Americans and also mystifies whites.

The messianic mode carries much less cachet among Latinos. Latin America debunked its own religious claims in the sixteenth century, long before the Puritans arrived at Plymouth. In the 1540s, a Dominican priest named Bartolomé de las Casas wrote a long and scathing letter called An Account Much Abbreviated of the Destruction of the Indies, in which he detailed in gory detail the genocide of Indians by men claiming to be Christians. This missive, mailed to the Spanish monarch, was later published all over Europe complete with illustrations by a Dutch engraver. Here, perhaps, lies the beginning of Latino history; we may be religious but we are not hardwired to find ecstasy in utopian preaching. Before Winthrop immortalized the Biblical phrase “city on a hill” in Massachusetts, Latinos had a dystopic origin narrative that would be impossible to erase. You can consider us unsophisticated for siding with Hillary Clinton’s Machiavellianism, but if you want to keep us from defecting to McCain then you’ve got to avoid misty sermons, histrionics on the economy, and dilatory meditations on black/white relations.

By April 23, 2008, Maureen Dowd scoffed when Hillary Clinton said, “How come Obama can’t close the deal?” The term “close the deal” sounded embarrassingly sleazy to Dowd. Beside the picture of Dowd’s red-headed elegance and smug smile, the column continues:

Her message is unapologetically emasculating: If he does not have the gumption to put me in my place, when superdelegates are deserting me, money is drying up, he’s outspending me 2-to-1 on TV ads, my husband’s going crackers and party leaders are sick of me, how can he be trusted to totally obliterate Iran and stop Osama?

What Maureen Dowd saw as Hillary Clinton at her most pathetic was, in fact, a persona resonant with a community bred on caudillos rather than messiahs. Latinos have had decades of the Times covering Latin America with a hegemonic-liberal satisfaction, so we were bound to feel some glee in the way Clinton responded. Rather than quaver before accusations of gaucherie from a WASP establishment, Clinton got even more shameless, heightening her philippic tone and finally saying “f- you” to the Democratic whiners who gave us John Kerry and now hoped to shove Obama’s vague promises of redemption and recycled racial platitudes down our throats. On Clinton went to pummel Obama in Puerto Rico, which can only be glossed as a gigantic SCREW OBAMA the day after the Democratic Party halved the Florida and Michigan delegates, thereby rendering it numerically impossible for Hillary to win. There is much to be learned from the breadth of Clinton’s Hispanic appeal. We’ll have to watch the campaign trail closely and see if Obama can learn a trick or two from her.

Robert Oscar Lopez, a regular contributor to Buffalo Report, is an English and Classics scholar at California State University at Northridge. His website is http://www.bronzepage.com .

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