After months of campaigning and barely acknowledging the existence of a Hispanic constituency in Virginia, Jim Webb, democratic candidate for Senate has finally reached out to the Hispanic community four weeks before the November election.
In an email circulated today to registered supporters, the Webb campaign asks:
“Hola! fellow Webb for Senate volunteers…are you interested in Latino voter outreach?”
My answers would be “Are you?, “What took you so long?”, ” and “Why now when we are only four weeks before election day?”.
Webb is a former republican who served as Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan. He recently switched his allegiance to the Democratic Party and is now facing republican incumbent George Allen for a US Senate seat.
It seems like after turning democrat, Webb learned pretty quickly the widespread and mistaken belief of many in his new party that the Hispanic vote can pretty much be taken for granted. If Webb did not know how mistaken this belief is all he has to do is look a Bush’s Hispanic vote numbers in 2000 and 2004.
While other state leaders such as Mark Warner and Governor Tim Kaine are well known for having cultivated links with the Hispanic community of Virginia for a long time before becoming elected officials, Webb gives the impression that he is jumping on the Hispanic voter bandwagon at the very last minute. After all, this is shaping up to be a very tight race for the Senate and it is possible that this election will be decided by only a few votes. So it may also mean that the Webb campaign has finally realized that even a few Hispanic votes may count and make a difference in this election.
A few days ago Hispanic leaders from Northern VA endorsed Webb and announced the formation of “Adelante con Webb” (Come together with Webb), the Hispanics for Webb action committee.
However, Webb’s positions regarding some issues of interest to most Hispanics, particularly immigration, are not known.
His website lists general statements about education and healthcare, such as “It is vital that we take the crucial next steps to improve academic achievement in American schools” and “Jim believes that all Americans deserve access to some form of quality health care”.
These positions are philosophically nice but I would prefer to learn more about how he plans to deal with specific issues such as high Hispanic drop-out rates in high schools, funding of after-school programs and gang prevention efforts, and student loans for Hispanics to attend college, among many other issues that more directly affect Latinos.
On immigration, Webb seems to duck the more immediate issues of what to do about the 11 million undocumented workers (most of them Hispanics) currently living in our country, and the guest worker program, and prefers to focus on the much less controversial and long term issue of securing our borders saying that “Immediate action is needed to stem the flow of illegal border crossings”.
He continues saying “Once the border is secure we can develop a fair solution to other immigration issues”.
Unfortunately, he seems to ignore that while we wait for the border to be secured (a task that may take decades to attain), millions of Hispanics are being exploited, abused and discriminated, and live under constant fear of deportation.
The jury is still out on Webb, we will have to wait and see.
However, for many Hispanics in Virginia, so far it looks like voting against Allen, a self-declared bigot, may be a better reason to go out and vote in November than staying home, or voting for Webb.
