The Saddest Form of Pandering

San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro addresses the Texas Democratic
Convention in Houston on June 8, 2012. (Pat Sullivan/AP) 



On Tuesday, as Texas voters were turning out in droves to nominate Ted Cruz (R) and Paul Sadler (D) to run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R), Democrats announced that San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro would deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte this year. We have no doubt that some Democrats were livid at the prospect of another youthful, accomplished, erudite, conservative Latino Republican gaining national renown and all but assured of becoming a U.S. Senator next year, and we don't think the timing of this announcement was a coincidence. We can only speculate, however, about the thought process that led the DNC to this choice, so let's do that. 

We do know that both parties consider Hispanics an extremely important voting bloc, and we know that President Obama's campaign team considers them as crucial to their chances of re-election in 2012 as they were to their big victory in 2008, when Obama won roughly twice as many Latino votes as Sen. John McCain. Much hey was made this week of the fact that Castro will be the first Latino to deliver the keynote address at either party's convention, and plenty of Democrats have already touted his utility as a liason between party bosses and the Hispanic community.

So, if outreach to Hispanic voters was at least a factor in the decision to have Castro deliver the keynote address, then why select someone whom the New York Times Magazine called "the post-Hispanic Hispanic politician"? Perhaps it would help to first try and answer the question, why this Hispanic politician? 

Keynote speakers needn't necessarily be high-profile figures prior to the convention. (How many people outside of their respective home states had heard of Barack Obama or Ann Richards prior to their now-infamous keynote speeches?) Sometimes, they need not even be a member of the party whose convention their addressing. (Remember Sen. Zell Miller's (D-GA) rousing keynote address to the Republican National Convention in '04?) Still, if Dems were searching for an established political figure who also happened to be a Latino, then they would have had a pretty short list to choose from. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), the only Hispanic Democrat in the Senate, has been dogged by corruption allegations since taking his seat in 2006 and has not accomplished anything since then to be proud of, except getting elected. Not exactly someone the party would want to showcase with a key speaking role at their national convention. Ditto Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Ca), who can regurgitate Democratic talking points well enough to make an at least marginally effective surrogate on cable news and Sunday morning talk shows but lacks the ability to rev up a crowd and hold their attention that makes for a good keynote speaker. (One wonders why the DNC passed up Rep. Charlie Gonzalez (D-TX), the current chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Perhaps they wanted someone other than a 67-year-old nepotist at the end of his political career.)

We know that today's Democratic party is not a meritocracy like the GOP, which might explain why Federico Peña, a seasoned Democratic officeholder who worked on both Barack Obama's 2008 campaign and his transition team, was passed over for the less experienced Castro, and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had already been tapped to chair the convention this year. So, rather than tapping a seasoned political veteran who also happened to be a Latino, it appears the Democrats opted for a younger, more energetic "rising star" who might parlay the national attention he garners from delivering an important speech into a run for higher office (like another Democrat did not so long ago).

The comparisons to Barack Obama have already begun. "Is Julian Castro the Latino Obama?" was the "burning question" of The Week, according to this page on the magazine's web site. Eleanor Clift, the left-wing talking head whose prolificacy has outlasted her relevance, mused on The Daily Beast this week whether Castro was "the Next Obama." If by the next/Latino Obama, they mean a dynamic, relatively young Harvard-educated lawyer whose most notable achievements as a public official consist of getting elected and not losing his job, then the answer is yes. Time will tell whether Castro's skills/talent extend beyond commanding the attention and enthusiasm of clueless drones. Unlike Barack Obama in 2004 (or 2008, for that matter), Castro already has real leadership experience, having been elected mayor of Texas's second-most populous city in 2009. Like the pre-presidential Obama, however, he has spent his political career in positions whose import greatly exceeds the level of responsibility attached. Prior to his election as mayor, Castro served on the city council, where he did an excellent job making a name for himself and laying the groundwork for a mayoral bid. (His first run for mayor, in 2005, ended in defeat but raised his profile considerably.) Now he is in his second term as mayor of a city with a council-manager form of government, meaning the mayor is essentially a figurehead. Contrast that with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who will be delivering the keynote address at this year's Republican National Convention. Since taking office as governor, Christie has followed the pragmatic, right-of-center course he charted; he kept his promise to balance the state budget without raising taxes, and he was able to win the support of enough Democrats to reform state employee pensions and benefits. He has been so successful that, even in heavily Democratic New Jersey, Democrats have yet to put forth a candidate who could seriously challenge Christie in next year's election. 

Of course, Christie is also a conservative rock star and engaging public speaker, but like past keynote speakers at the Republican National Convention--and unlike Obama and Castro--his résumé is just as impressive as his speaking prowess. If the GOP wanted to have a conservative Latino politician deliver the keynote address at this year's convention, then there's a long list of people (all more accomplished than Castro) to choose from: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.); New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez; Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval; Puerto Rico Gov. Luis Fortuño; former Commerce Secretary and Kellogg Corp. CEO Carlos Gutierrez; Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.); former Sen., RNC Chairman and H.U.D. Secretary Mel Martinez and former Attorney Gen. Alberto Gonzales, to name a bunch. Instead, the powers that be opted for Christie, a bombastic superstar of the right whose ability to navigate the merciless waters of New Jersey politics (and government) vindicate his bravado.

Back to Castro: I'm not comfortable declaring that Democrats were so desperate to find a scandal-free Hispanic politician who could deliver a rousing address that they bestowed such an honor on a neophyte who hasn't accomplished anything on par with Christie's most noteworthy achievements, but that is in fact what they did; I just can't speak to their motivation. If, as is often the case, the simplest explanation is the correct one, then the selection of Castro as keynote speaker should be seen for what it is--a pander to Latinos.

Are Texas Republicans As Smart As Florida Voters?

Left: An image of Marco Rubio from his days as Speaker of the Florida
House of Representatives graced the cover of National Review in
September of 2009. Right: Former Texas Solicitor Gen. Ted Cruz, a
Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, made the cover of National
Review last October. (Composite Photo)

Here's a story: A handsome, young, Cuban-American lawyer makes a long-shot bid for a U.S. Senate seat. He has impeccable conservative credentials and a captivating personal story, being the son of Cuban immigrants, but he doesn't have the name recognition or fundraising machinery of his main competition in the Republican primary, an affable, if slightly dull, power broker who has held elected office continuously for over a decade. Slowly but surely, he cultivates an enthusiastic grassroots base and attracts a lot of out-of-state attention (and money). The media brands him "the TEA Party candidate" in the race, a label he doesn't shy away from. In time, he's the toast of talk radio, the hottest subject in conservative circles and a real threat to the GOP "establishment". He's still an underdog, but not like he once was. Voters across the state latch on to his message of a smaller, more efficient, more responsible government. What was once dismissed as the quixotic quest of a far-right gadfly is soon recognized as the latest dark-horse candidacy in a pivotal election year.
 

In case it's not obvious, I'm talking about Ted Cruz, the former Texas solicitor general who is vying for retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's Senate seat, but the preceding paragraph could have just as easily been written about Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), back when he was Senate candidate Marco Rubio, the underdog in the 2010 Florida Republican primary for U.S. Senator. Given Cruz's heritage, the tenor of his campaign and the dynamics of his primary battle with Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst (R), it's not surprising that he's drawn comparisons to the freshman U.S. Senator who's now being touted as arguably the best choice for vice president on the Republican ticket, and the editors of National Review had to know that the comparisons would only continue after Cruz's visage graced the cover of their magazine last fall.

Last October, National Review gave Ted Cruz the Marco Rubio treatment, making him the subject of the cover story in their October 17 issue. Just over two years earlier, the magazine had done the same with Rubio, who at the time was trailing then-Gov. Charlie Crist in Republican primary polls by double digits.

“I’m not Don Quixote here,” Rubio was quoted as saying in the article. “This campaign embodies everything you’re hearing at the town halls.”

Like Rubio, Cruz thrives at town hall events, revving up the crowd with his enthusiastic prose--heavy on policy and light on pie-in-the-sky campaign pablum--before taking questions from individual attendees. Unlike Rubio, however, he had more than one primary foe to dispatch, and neither Dewhurst nor former Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert had the kind of weaknesses that brought down Crist's campaign. Nonetheless, in the primary on Tuesday, Cruz was able to finish a strong second to Dewhurst, who failed to break the 50% threshold necessary to avoid a runoff.

Cruz is still the underdog; the results of at least one poll conducted before the primary indicated that Dewhurst would prevail over Cruz in a runoff by a wide margin (25 points). Don't expect that to discourage him, however; the 34.2% of the vote he managed to get in the first round of voting exceeded his showing in every poll of the race. There's other things that will work in his favor, too: runoffs tend to favor those candidates with the more excited--i.e., motivated--base. (Cruz's advantage here may be overtold, though. In the primary, Dewhurst fared slightly better and Cruz did slightly worse among early voters, a key indicator of voter enthusiasm.) Cruz also has two whole months from today to campaign, though my sources tell me both candidates' campaign coffers have been depleted, and only one of them has a nine-figure net worth.

The margin between Dewhurst's and Cruz's vote totals--just over ten percentage points--supports multiple inferences. On the one hand, it was a lot smaller than polls had been suggesting. On the other, it means that Dewhurst has a much smaller gap to close than does Cruz. Still, history tells us that the first-place finisher in the primary is by no means a shoo-in in the runoff; in the 2002 U.S. Senate race, Victor Morales edged out Ron Kirk in the Democratic primary, but Kirk won the runoff by twenty percentage points. To use a more recent example from our next-door neighbor, Bobby Jindal finished fifteen points ahead of then-Lt. Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco in the first round of the 2003 Louisiana governor's race, only to lose the runoff to her, 52%-48%, in a shocking upset. (Funny story: Blanco turned out to be such an awful governor that she didn't even run for re-election in 2007, and Jindal handily won the governorship that year without a runoff.)

Of course, the 2010 U.S. Senate election in Florida wasn't decided by the Republican primary, as this race will be; after seeing his double-digit lead lead in the polls turn into a double-digit deficit, Crist made what in retrospect may have been a career-ending blunder: he dropped out of the GOP primary and continued his candidacy as an independent. Florida voters saw this opportunistic stunt for what it was, and Rubio trounced Crist by nineteen points (winning 49% of the vote to Crist's 30%) in the general election. 

In Dewhurst, Cruz does not have a challenger as flawed as Charlie Crist, but he does have a strong message that has resonated with a growing mass of Texas voters. He's also got a nationwide fundraising apparatus and endorsements from just about every influential conservative who's not currently holding public office. This July, Texas voters have a choice: we can settle for the "sufficiently conservative" or "conservative enough" (or whatever Dewhurst's backers consider him) candidate, or we can send a younger, more erudite (and, I would argue, more conservative), passionate advocate to Washington and add to a burgeoning bloc of young, bold congressional Republicans resolved to effect major structural reforms in the near future, if only they could get the reinforcements they need. In 2010, Floridians chose the latter. Will Texans show they have at least as much sense as voters on the other side of the Gulf?

Gingrich Gains in Polls, While Romney Gains Endorsements

I spent three days working on this post before discovering Care2 (a web site I had never heard of before) reporter Robin Marty had scooped me. Think that would cause me to scrap an entire blog post? Not hardly. See, Marty's piece focused on newspaper endorsements, but I've noticed that Romney has been racking up a significant number of endorsements from several high-profile figures in the GOP. No, not Dan Quayle, but that's a good one to have too.

Let's start with the site of the first-in-the-nation primary, New Hampshire. While Newt may have the backing of the state's leading newspaper, Romney has the state's newest political star in his corner. Last month he trotted out the endorsement of Kelly Ayotte, the freshman U.S. Senator and former state attorney general who gained national renown in conservative circles after successfully defending her state's restrictions on abortion before the U.S. Supreme Court five years ago. At 43, Ayotte has plenty of time to make a lasting name for herself in Congress, and her support may provide Romney with a liason to TEA Partiers who have so far been cool to him.

In another early primary state, Florida, Romney can now boast the support of three prominent Latino Republican lawmakers: Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (the first Cuban-American elected to Congress), Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart and Mario's brother, former Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart. All three hail from Havana and should prove invaluable to Romney as he courts Florida voters. The candidate also has the backing of former Florida Senator, RNC Chairman and H.U.D. Secretary Mel Martinez, who chairs his campaign’s National Advisory Council. Of course, the state's most popular pols–U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio and former Gov. Jeb Bush–have yet to make their choices known this cycle.

Even if endorsements don't sway many votes, they're still immensely helpful for two other purposes: organization and fundraising. Few will dispute that both of these are areas in which Romney has the advantage over the latest frontrunner for the Republican nomination.

Speaking of which, there's no denying Newt's surge in the polls. Two months ago, he was at 9.2% in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, fourth behind Romney, Rick Perry and Herman Cain. Now he's at 31%, higher than any of his primary rivals at their peak (except Rick Perry, who spiked at 31.8% in the RCP average the second week of September). He also currently leads by double digits in Iowa, South Carolina, Florida and a host of other primary states. Will his leads hold up? I'm willing to take bets, but doing so would violate my parole. Good night, everybody!