Mission Obama: To Fix the Minorities

Reconquer the disappointed youth, convince the Hispanic electorate. The president seeks to reassemble the mosaic of the historic victory of four years ago — at the risk of the votes of the unions.

Michelle Obama’s speech in Charlotte paved the way for the convention in which the president will seek to reassemble the mosaic of the coalition which, four years ago, gave him a historic victory over John McCain. He will have to do it without being able to count on the messianic image which he had at the time, the image of an idealistic outsider, the hopes of revival of wide swaths of disappointed and marginalized voters, and even more importantly, of many who, until then, had been non-voters, because of apathy, diffidence or age limits.

Of the myriad segments into which the American electorate is subdivided, analyzed and classified, the one which Obama wins hands down in every state is the vote of the youth, who will flock to the polling stations in record numbers. It could be the true historic date of the Obama phenomenon, which would make him the candidate and president of the future, also in a purely age-related sense.

The youth base is instinctively progressive on gay marriage, abortion and immigration, the strong points of the fundamentalist right which, as demonstrated by the plan voted in Tampa, now controls the Republican ideological platform. Young people, however, for their proven vocation to apathy, also constitute one of the major potential obstacles to re-election this time around; if they were to return to the absenteeism which traditionally marks them, one of the fundamental tiles of the Obama coalition would be missing. For this reason faces under 30 will be abundant at the Democratic convention, especially compared with the geriatric congress seen in Tampa.

Their color will also be much more varied; indeed, for both parties, electoral politics, beyond the ideological platform, is ultimately a calculation of the sum of the parts. Thus, while the Republicans have consolidated the reactionary base, following the drift of the tea party to which they will seek to add a sufficient number of disappointed and disillusioned, above all among the white voters, the Democrats in Charlotte will have to combine the traditional base of liberals and unions with a “majority of minorities.”

After all, this oxymoron is the one thing that, more than every other, defines the American present, in this case the reality that a growing number of states recognize the end of the white majority. The applicable model is the Californian one where over the last few years whites have become only the largest of a constellation of minorities — less than Asians, blacks and Hispanics combined. And the ethnic balance is the factor from which many dynamics of multicultural society descend.

In California, for example, the grim anti-immigration politics instituted by the last Republican governor, Pete Wilson (in the ‘80s), provoked such a reaction as to condemn the Californian Grand Old Party to the status of permanent minority (Schwarzenegger’s “Hollywoodian” mandate is too anomalous to count on this occasion).

It is not surprising, therefore, that the Hispanics, now the most numerous “minority” in the country and growing rapidly, are also a determining factor in the national strategy of the Democrats. Not by chance, Latinos will be clearly visible on the platform in Charlotte — from desperate housewife and militant Democrat Eva Longoria to Julian Castro, the mayor of San Antonio, the most Hispanic city in America. Another mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, will take up the prestigious role of chairman of the convention.

The 59-year-old Villaraigosa, himself the son of clandestinely immigrated Mexicans, is perhaps the principal beneficiary of the necessity for the party to ingratiate itself to voters of Latin American descent. Four years ago he had bet on Hillary Clinton, who had nominated him co-director of the same electoral campaign; currently he is president of the Association of American Mayors and in the plausible future aspires to become a presidential candidate himself.

Mayor of the country’s second largest city, Villaraigosa is also an emblematic figure of the dynamics of the local “left-wing” administrations, on the one hand taking traditional liberal positions (against the death penalty, for gay marriage), while on the other hand confronting the catastrophic financial crisis by taking part in the demolition of the social network. In a state in which only this summer as many as three cities declared bankruptcy, Villaraigosa implemented harsh cuts to services and reforms to the public pension, rigorous fiscal politics that to him are worth the opposition of those same unions that made his rise possible.

A very similar position to that of the president, who this week will find himself having to balance the reality of the crisis with the demands of the unions, the traditional Democratic base, restricted more and more to battles of hindsight. To them the president will be able to offer the salvation of the automobile industry that, after the intervention of the government, has just registered an incredible 29th consecutive month of growth. But the convention will have to succeed in doing much more — to reactivate the narrative of Obama as champion and defender of the middle classes, at risk of extinction should the radical Tampa plan of economic liberalism be passed.