Tim Kaine May Not Be Latinos' Best Amigo
SAN DIEGO -- As a Latino voter, I'm used to being told by cable news pundits and political analysts that I have the awesome power to decide presidential elections.
How cool. Of course, it's nonsense. I don't take any of it seriously because I know the truth: Latino voters have never been more powerless.
As evidence, consider the fact that Hillary Clinton chose Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia to be her running mate.
It's not just that Clinton skipped over three prominent Latinos -- Housing Secretary Julian Castro, Labor Secretary Thomas Perez and California Rep. Xavier Becerra -- whose names her campaign had, for months, mischievously dangled in front of Latino voters despite the fact that they were all considered longshots.
Perhaps the bigger problem is that the Clinton campaign has packaged and pitched Kaine to Latino voters as a kind of honorary Latino. But at first glance, it seems that Kaine -- a career politician and former civil rights lawyer who practiced in the South where the dominant racial paradigm is black and white -- might not be right for the part.
Yes, as the Clinton campaign never tires of reminding Latinos, it's true that Kaine speaks decent Spanish.
But, while he claims to support comprehensive immigration reform along with other Democrats, he doesn't have a history of stepping out in front of the issue in ways that could hurt him politically. This is true even when the refugees in question are coming from the same country where he learned Spanish.
Honduras is so dangerous that it has been called the world's murder capital, and so it's no wonder that tens of thousands of women and children fled the country in 2014 to seek refuge in the United States.
Compared to others, Kaine didn't have much to say about the crisis even as the Obama administration was sending women and children back to Central America and into harm's way.
Other Democrats showed courage. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley stuck his neck out and got targeted by the White House for saying a civilized country doesn't send children back to "certain death."
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