LatinaLista — The Obama campaign wants Latino voters to help re-elect him.
The message has been driven home loud and clear. If not through the President’s recent immigration thinkfest, where he invited various political and business leaders to the White House to discuss the issue or his mention of his plans to pursue immigration reform at his Facebook appearance last week, it has to be through the White House’s recent launch of the site dedicated to Hispanics.
Entitled “Winning the Future: President Obama and the Hispanic Community,” the web site is billed as:
…one-stop shop for what the Obama Administration is doing related to the Hispanic community and is a place where you can see the work of some of the Hispanic appointees across the Obama Administration.
The biggest hint that Obama’s campaign wants Latino voters is that besides launching this page outside of Hispanic Heritage Month is the report displayed on the page: Winning the Future: President Obama’s Agenda and the Hispanic Community.
The report covers nine points that the Obama administration feels are of particular importance to Latinos: the economy, education, immigration reform, home ownership, health care, renewable energy, honoring veterans, cleaning up environmental concerns in Latino neighborhoods and reviewing Puerto Rico’s status.
There’s no doubt that most of these are important issues to the Latino community and, as well, to most other Americans too. Yet, all this outreach and public declarations of wanting to reform immigration aren’t going to inspire this round of Latino voters.
It will take the simplest yet hardest act to reinvigorate a disillusioned Latino constituency — use his executive privilege to stop deporting DREAM Act students or separating families.
Until the Latino youth, who were so instrumental in galvanizing the 2008 Latino vote for Obama, see some concrete action taken to positively address the plight of undocumented immigrants, enthusiasm for this election will remain up for grabs.
