In a news cycle dominated by Donald Trump’s tantrum over losing and the kerfuffle over who is to blame for Ben Carson’s problems (CNN, Ted Cruz or, the neurosurgeon’s own incompetent campaign), one storyline got buried in the aftermath of the Iowa Caucus: a breakthrough for Hispanics. The mainstream media has hyped the importance of the Hispanic vote for years and specifically warned the Republican Party not to alienate it in the aftermath of their poor showing in the 2012 presidential election. But after all that, the first victory of a Hispanic in a major party presidential primary or caucus (with yet another Hispanic finishing a strong third) went almost without notice in the first day after the voting. Republican National Committee Chair Reince Preibus complained about it on Fox News saying the milestone achievement for Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio was “a big deal” and deserved more notice.
Responses were not long in coming. On the New York Times op-ed page, academic Roberto Suro pointed out the obvious explanation:
The answer is not that complicated: Neither Mr. Cruz nor Mr. Rubio meets conventional expectations of how Latino politicians are supposed to behave.
Exactly. Because the pair are both conservative Republicans rather than liberal Democrats, they are considered not authentically Hispanic by the media arbiters of their identity, such as Univision’s Jorge Ramos — who considers them “disloyal” because of their opposition to illegal immigration — or the news editors at the Times and other publications and broadcast outlets.
But there’s a reason why neither Cruz nor Rubio are complaining. That’s because although their immigrant stories are part of their appeal — especially in Rubio’s case — they are not running as ethnic candidates. More to the point, the ability of the pair to run as mainstream presidential contenders without abandoning their identities is a tribute to the triumph of the American immigrant experience that we don’t hear much about anymore from liberals. In a media culture where the Hispanic experience in America has become inextricably linked to support for a bogus right to illegal immigration, politicians who stray from that line are effectively stripped of their heritage.
This is a familiar pattern in American politics.
African-American conservatives are treated as pariahs in their own community. Republican Tim Scott, the one African-American member of the U.S. Senate at the time of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington was not invited to participate in the festivities. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been singled out for the sort of opprobrium that would have been unimaginable had he been a typical black liberal. Conservative women get the same treatment if they are Republicans that dissent from the liberal feminist party line about abortion.
Still, as Suro correctly points out, in contrast to African-Americans, Hispanic identity is a complicated concept. Hispanics are not a unified group but a collection of several different groups who come from different countries — Mexico, Puerto, Rico, Cuba (as do Cruz and Rubio’s families) or any number of other Latin or South American nations. In particular, since most Cubans came here as refugees from communism rather than crossing the border solely to seek economic opportunity, their experience is not the same as that of other Hispanics.
Moreover, even if we take into account the legacy of prejudice against them, Hispanics have played a different role in American history than that of blacks. The centrality of slavery and then Jim Crow in the development of American law and sense of justice is why Barack Obama’s election was a unique event that could never be matched by the elevation of any Hispanic to the presidency no matter what his or her politics might be.
But Preibus was still right to think that had a liberal Democrat Hispanic politician won Iowa, it would have been given more play than that of Cruz. In the Washington Post, Callum Borchers tries to argue that similar firsts by a black or a woman were not treated as a big deal. But, as even he admitted, the examples are not comparable. Jesse Jackson’s victory in the Democratic primary in the District of Columbia was notable but his was a fringe, symbolic candidate running in a constituency that was overwhelmingly black. Had he been a serious contender that won a state with a tiny black population — the analogy to Cruz winning Iowa — there’s no doubt it would have been treated as historic. As, indeed, Barack Obama’s win in Iowa was treated in 2008.
Nor can consider Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign that kind of a breakthrough since she was the wife of a former president and the representative of her party’s establishment.
But as much as the unwillingness to give either Cruz or Rubio credit for their achievements is obvious proof of liberal media bias, conservatives and Hispanics, for that matter, shouldn’t waste much time worrying about it. Whether you support their candidacies or not, the rise of both Cruz and Rubio is a testament to the reality of the American dream that the left dismisses as irrelevant to their critique of contemporary American society. Both men come from relatively humble backgrounds and rose on the strength of their own merits and hard work. They are both viable presidential candidates because their beliefs and their biographies resonate with Americans from a variety of backgrounds. They are proof that for all of the flaws and problems in the American system, the opportunity to rise is still primarily the responsibility of the individual, no matter who they are or what challenges they may face.
One would have hoped that the election of our first African-American president might have freed of us of our obsession with race and ethnicity. But the divisive nature of the Obama presidency has exacerbated the lingering remnants of racism and poured salt into the nation’s wounds rather than healing them.
While we don’t know if either Cruz or Rubio will ever live in the White House, we can at least take pride as Americans in the willingness of both to seek that office by avoiding a naked appeal to either ethnicity or white guilt about the past. Both men exemplify the ability of the children of immigrants to rise to the top of American life without dragging along with them the destructive baggage of ethnic entitlement or resentment. Neither man is considered the right type of Hispanic to win the applause of the media. But even if they don’t get their due as trailblazers, let us at least give thanks that they have made it possible for all Americans to take pride in the fact that this country remains one in which every citizen, no matter their origin, can aspire to the presidency.
