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Democrats Ignore Hispanic Concerns at Their Own Peril
It had to happen. The nation's dominant Spanish-language television network, which wants to devour the No. 1 Spanish-language radio network, makes a fortune from those tacky prime-time soaps. And the Miguel Estrada Story is the perfect telenovela. After being nominated by President Bush to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the Honduran native finds its easier to get out of a Third World country than to get Senate Democrats to treat him like a first-class citizen. He gets grilled on hot-button topics in the hopes that he'll say something Democrats can use against him. He doesn't, and then makes history by becoming the first appellate nominee to be filibustered. All the while, Democrats insist -- with straight faces -- that Estrada's treatment has nothing to do with ethnicity, even while liberal critics blast him as a "Hispanic Clarence Thomas" and others like Rep. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., accuse him of not being "Hispanic enough." When they're not busy trying to kneecap this Hispanic achiever, Democrats are raising a ruckus over the proposal to create the nation's largest Spanish-language radio and television company. Typical are the concerns of Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., who fears that the emerging behemoth would not provide a "balanced perspective or the full range of discourse on issues."Translation: Democrats worry that the merger would give too much power to Univision's billionaire CEO Jerry Perenchio, a registered Republican. Senate heavyweights such as Tom Daschle, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy and Bob Graham sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission in which they argued that the merger would concentrate too much power in non-Hispanic hands. (Perenchio is Italian-American.) Other Democrats claim that the network is biased. And they point to the stories that it has done on Estrada. They say their concerns were given short shrift by Univision and that the nominee was always depicted in the best light.Univision has counterpunched by placing full-page newspaper ads touting pro-merger messages by Hispanic leaders such as former U.S. Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. In all likelihood, the merger will go through. One can't make an argument for holding Hispanic-oriented media companies to a different standard than the Time Warners and AOLs of the world.But what about the standard to which Democrats have held Miguel Estrada? I've lost track of how many non-Hispanic nominees with similar credentials have been confirmed while Estrada has been on ice. One was Jeffrey Sutton, a former Ohio solicitor general, who -- like Estrada -- had never been a judge when he came before the Senate. Well, he's a judge now. He was quickly confirmed for a seat on the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. The big question is whether Democrats will pay a price for their double talk and double standards.They just might. A bilingual poll of 800 Hispanic adults, released this week by the Virginia-based polling firm Opiniones Latinas, found that 88 percent of respondents thought Estrada was entitled to an up-or-down vote. Eighty-seven percent thought Estrada should be approved, and 80 percent said that confirming him was important to the Hispanic community. Within a few hours of the poll's release, Democratic operatives were calling up media outlets to dismiss the figures as suspect. The reason? The polling firm is known to do business with Republican clients. Even so, how does one explain that -- when asked to identify themselves politically -- only 22 percent of the respondents called themselves Republicans? Sixteen percent said they were independents and 47 percent said they were Democrats.These findings could not have come at a worse time for the Democratic National Committee, whose Hispanic caucus chairman recently went public with his frustrations over a "disconnect" between the DNC hierarchy and Hispanic voters. Democrats will have to be much more sensitive to Hispanic concerns if they want to get what they believe they are entitled to in next year's election -- the lion's share of Hispanic votes. Why, they may even have to swallow their pride and purchase campaign ads from the very Spanish-language media company they're now trying to demonize. |
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