Obama’s $20M Hispanic outreach program reveals lasting concerns

Democrats are concerned that Barack Obama is struggling to connect with Hispanic voters, and their new $20 million outreach program shows that, one Democratic congressman said.

Rep. José Serrano (D-N.Y.) said Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) success with Hispanic voters during the primary process is something Sen. Obama’s (D-Ill.) presidential campaign is well aware of, just as it knows Hispanic voters are critical to winning key battleground states.

{mosads}Serrano, a Clinton supporter during the nomination fight, told The Hill that there is not as much of a traditional “disconnect” between black politicians and Hispanic voters as many in the media have suggested. If there is, he said, it’s in parts of the West, but even those hold-out areas will coalesce around Obama because they feel unappreciated by the Republican Party.

“That disconnect is out the window,” Serrano said.

Serrano was joined by other Hispanic Democratic leaders and Obama campaign officials at Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters Tuesday morning, where they unveiled an “unprecedented” outreach program, “the size and scope of which has never been undertaken in the history of presidential politics,” according to Frank Sanchez, chairman of Obama’s National Hispanic Leadership Council.

The Democrats in attendance contend that Hispanic voters in states like Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada and Florida will determine the outcome of the election.

One DNC official noted that Obama is already on the air with radio ads in Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Florida, and will soon go up with TV ads in those states.

“Those residents will determine who the next president of the United States is,” Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) said.

Rep. Hilda Solis (D-Calif.) suggested that any disconnect between Obama and the Latino communities and their representatives was rapidly disappearing.

“We get that we have to win the White House,” Solis said.

In past weeks, many members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) who had backed Clinton said their communities could be swayed to support Obama, but that it would not happen automatically.

Asked who came up with the idea for a $20 million outreach effort, Serrano said it was a joint decision.

“When you’re discussing this on a daily basis, you just put two and two together,” he said.

The early conventional wisdom was that Republican candidate Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) was in a better position to win over Hispanics. Coming from a Southwestern state, McCain alienated many in his own party with his support for a bipartisan immigration reform bill that was deemed by many conservatives as offering “amnesty” for illegal immigrants.

But Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) insisted that whatever “inroads” McCain has made with the Hispanic community are “just spin.”

Grijalva said McCain has “backed off tremendously” from his previous support for a guest-worker program and that has cost him with Hispanic voters. McCain said this year that he has listened to Americans who feel that border security should be the priority in dealing with illegal immigration.

But the McCain campaign sounded confident Tuesday in its ability to win over Hispanic voters, alluding to the difficulties Obama experienced in the primaries.

“John McCain has a record of delivering on the issues that are important to Latinos and he doesn’t need an introduction to the Hispanic community like Barack Obama does,” Tucker Bounds, a McCain spokesman, said. “Barack Obama is going down this road to make up for a record that lacks experience, substance and understanding on the issues that matter.”

Leslie Sanchez, a GOP strategist and author of the book Los Republicanos: Why Hispanics and Republicans Need Each Other, said Obama’s approach to the Hispanic community represents a failure to understand the Hispanic voter, a failure she says is typical of most national Democratic approaches to the bloc.

Sanchez said the Obama campaign is tailoring a message for an entire ethnic group and missing the fact that the way to reach Hispanic voters is by a more specific approach, targeting varying Hispanic communities with messages of economic development.

“The Obama campaign is blasting out messages from 30,000 feet,” Sanchez said. “It’s a good way to get media attention, but it’s a bad way to get the Latino vote.”

Sanchez noted that the timing of the Democrats’ rollout comes just after Obama’s return from the Middle East and Europe, and that the Obama campaign seemed to mock McCain’s trip to Mexico and Colombia earlier this year.

“While Obama is a candidate for the world, McCain is a candidate for this hemisphere,” Sanchez said.