The Atlantic
By Geraldo Cadava
September 1, 2015
For
most Republican candidates, a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border is both a
performance and an education. Donning baseball caps with campaign
slogans, they wish to be
seen as leaders who will roll up their sleeves and solve problems: in
this case, drug smuggling, undocumented immigration, and border control.
For many candidates their recent visits are among the first times
they’ve ever seen the border up close, accumulating
first-hand knowledge of a place, its people, and the challenges they
face.
For
Jeb Bush, this week’s visit to the border city of McAllen, Texas, was a
little bit different. Yes, he gave the same kind of performance as
other candidates. Bush also
sought to make clear his preparation to tackle the region’s problems
and promote its wellbeing. But instead of a first-time education, for
Bush it was more of a review session. Over several decades, Bush has
become unusually well versed in U.S.-Latin American
relations and the interests of Latino communities in the United States.
This is perhaps the main reason he’ll be a more appealing candidate
among conservative Latinos than most others in the field.
Since
his visit, the media has focused on his explanation for using the term
“anchor babies”; namely, that he was primarily talking about “Asian
people” instead of Latin
American immigrants. To many, it seemed like he’d thrown Asian
Americans under the bus in order to placate Latinos. But it would be
dangerous to dismiss Bush as a bumbling fool who’s more similar than
different to Trump and other Republican candidates, as
Hillary Clinton has tried to do. To do so would be to underestimate a
politician who has spent decades honing a message designed to appeal to
voters whose support is widely understood to be critical to winning the
presidency. It would mean being lulled to
sleep by someone whose support among Latinos runs deep.
Unfortunately,
the attention to his opponents’ statements about Mexicans, immigration,
and the border—that America needs to deport all illegals, they’re
murderers and
rapists, the country must end birthright citizenship, Mexico must build
and pay for a 2,000 mile-long wall—has allowed more moderate candidates
like Bush to fly under the radar for weeks. It has also prevented
Americans from engaging in serious debate about
other everyday issues that will affect Latinos and immigrants under the
next president, including educational, economic, and healthcare policy.
On those issues, Bush’s positions may resonate with some elements of
the Latino community, but stand at odds with
much of it.
Read
sympathetically, the details of Jeb’s biography suggest his deep
attachment to Latin American and Latino communities. He is fluent in
Spanish. He received a Master’s
degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at
Austin, the same institution that controversially gave his son George P.
Bush its inaugural Latino Leadership Award. He spent time in Mexico and
Venezuela; married Columba, a Mexican woman from
the state of Guanajuato; and even claimed to be “Hispanic” on a 2009
voter registration application in Miami-Dade County, Florida—mistakenly,
he said.
Spanish-language
media has called him a “Latino” candidate, high praise that Jeb has
cultivated for a long time. In many ways, he has prepared to court the
Latino vote
for decades, as a Texan, a student traveling abroad in the 1970s, a
real-estate developer in the 1980s whose partner was a Cuban immigrant, a
Miami politician in the 1990s, and the governor of Florida—a state that
has one of the largest Latino populations
in the nation—in the 2000s.
Jeb
has also learned from, and was perhaps even responsible for, his
family’s successes and failures among Latin Americans and Latinos. When
his father, George H.W. Bush,
ran for President in 1988, he had his “Spanish-speaking son, Jeb,” who
at the time was Florida’s Commerce Secretary, help him woo Cuban
American and Puerto Rican voters. Even earlier, in 1984, Jeb scored
points for Ronald Reagan, his father’s boss. When one
Puerto Rican was asked why he supported Reagan, he replied, “I believe
he has a great belief in the Hispanic people … Even George Bush’s son …
is married to a Mexican girl.”
Jeb
was also called on to do damage control when things went badly for his
father. In May 1988, when Bush Sr. gaffed on the campaign trail by
waffling on his support for
Puerto Rican statehood—the most important and divisive political issue
on the island—Jeb flew to Puerto Rico to “clear up any confusions,” as
his father’s adviser Andrew Card put it. A few months later, in August,
Bush Sr. infamously introduced his grandchildren
as “Jebby’s kids from Florida, the little brown ones.” Critics,
especially liberal Latinos, he then insisted, had misinterpreted the
“pride and love” he felt for Jeb’s kids.
George
H.W. Bush knew he could rely on Jeb and his grandchildren. He saw them
as assets to his presidential campaign. Rather tone deaf, he said,
“we’re going to unleash
the entire Bush family on this Hispanic, Mexican-American,
Cuban-American, whatever-it-is community and when it’s all over—whether I
win or lose—they’re going to know that I care, care a lot.” He did win,
although he received a lower percentage of the Latino
vote in his unsuccessful campaign for reelection in 1992 than he had in
1988. By contrast, Reagan, Bill Clinton, his son George W. Bush, and
Barack Obama all received higher percentages of the Latino vote during
their reelection campaigns than in their initial
runs, in 1984, 1996, 2004, and 2012.
Jeb
has repeatedly asserted, “I am my own man,” primarily to distance
himself from his brother’s decision to invade Iraq. But in terms of
courting Latino voters, Jeb surely
hopes to emulate his brother’s success. In 2000 and 2004, George W.
Bush won 35 and then 40 percent of the Latino vote, helping him win.
Like his brother, Jeb has adopted the compassionate conservative
moniker, claiming during his successful 1998 campaign
for governor that it was better to adopt a “kinder” and “gentler”
approach to immigration and minority issues in general. Jeb hangs on to
this idea today, claiming that undocumented immigration is an “act of
love,” a risk that parents take so their families
might find better lives.
Make
no mistake, Jeb would be a formidable candidate in the general
election. One might even argue that each Bush has been more successful
than the last in terms of appealing
to Latino voters, and that thought should keep Democrats awake at
night. Jeb’s success among Cubans and Puerto Ricans in Florida may not
translate to a national Latino audience, especially Mexican Americans in
the Southwest, but he will be able to rely on
his brother’s support networks there. He will also have his Mexican
American sons stumping on his behalf; they’ll be more credible
surrogates than Mitt Romney’s son, Craig, who learned Spanish as a
Mormon missionary in Chile. Then there’s Jeb’s own ease with
Spanish compared with most other candidates who can fumble over a
phrase or two.
Still,
Jeb’s compassionate rhetoric and fluent Spanish may not be enough to
outweigh conservative policies that are out of step with what most
Latinos want. He only began
to emphasize the kinder and gentler nature of his policies following
his 1994 loss to the Democratic incumbent Lawton Chiles. Jeb ran on a
conservative agenda that included promoting school vouchers, ending
welfare, restricting abortions, and demanding longer
sentences for criminals. When an African American woman asked him what
he planned to do for blacks in Florida, he replied, “Probably nothing.”
Like many other conservatives, he said he didn’t want to single out any
race for support; he wanted to help all Floridians.
By the same logic, as governor he helped end affirmative action in
Florida.
Do
not mistake his moderate tone, performance of goodwill, or
marketability to Latino voters for an entirely different message than
his cruder primary opponents.
Jeb
has toiled hard, for decades, to cultivate Latino support. But do not
mistake his moderate tone, performance of goodwill, or marketability to
Latino voters for an
entirely different message than his cruder primary opponents. To be
sure, there is a large constituency within the Latino community in favor
of many of the policies he and his party promote. Some reports claim
Latino support for education savings accounts
and private school vouchers runs as high as 70 percent. But, with that
notable exception, support for Bush’s signature positions is more
limited. Depending on the issue—abortion, foreign policy, the
economy—only between 25 and 40 percent of Latinos prefer
the GOP’s approach. If elected, though, Bush would attempt to enact
these policies, which remain unpopular among a great majority of
Latinos.
As
governor, Bush supported tax policies that benefit businesses and
investors more than working-class Floridians, and presided over the
growth of one of the largest margins
of income inequality in the nation. Latinos, whose margin of income
inequality compared with whites has increased in the past several years,
may look askance at that record. He opposed the expansion of affordable
healthcare for groups other than senior citizens.
Latinos, on the other hand, support Obamacare to the tune of 60
percent. Finally, despite recognizing the public utility of
bilingualism—ever hear him on the stump?—he believes that immigrants
must learn and speak English.
Jeb
will never call Mexicans murderers and rapists, so when the circus
leaves town, he may be the candidate still standing. It would be easy to
focus on his credentials
and goodwill, and to neglect the extent to which his policies seem at
odds with the views of the majority of the Latino community. Voters
should cut through the noise, examine his record and his policies, and
draw their own conclusions.
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