Preckwinkle to put Garcia’s political influence to the test on Election Day

Rep. Jesus Garcia, D-Ill., would like to think he’s the predominant Latino politico in Chicago, and the upcoming run-off election for mayor will be a significant test.

GARCIA: Cook County grudges come to life

For Garcia, formerly a member of the Cook County Board before being elected to Congress, has come out publicly in favor of the mayoral campaign of Lori Lightfoot.

OR ACTUALLY, IT’S more like he’s come out as being opposed to the mayoral aspirations of Toni Preckwinkle – who was his county board colleague as county board president.

Meaning this is about political payback. He doesn’t want Preckwinkle to prevail. He’d like for her to go down to a shameful defeat come April 2.

Part of it is because back in 2015 when Garcia wound up running against Rahm Emanuel for mayor, Preckwinkle managed to fail to support Chuy’s mayoral aspirations back then. So he doesn’t feel compelled to offer her any support.

There’s also the fact that when the county assessor’s post was most recently open in the 2018 election cycle, the two were split – with Preckwinkle backing Joe Berrios’ bid for re-election while Garcia came out in favor of Fritz Kaegi.

ALSO PLAYING INTO this is the fact that when Garcia gave up his county board post to run for the seat in Congress, he wanted to hand-pick his replacement – Alma Anaya. But Preckwinkle offered only the most tepid of support for her.

All in all, it means Garcia has his reasons to not be inclined to want to see Preckwinkle succeed. And if, by chance, there turns out to be evidence that the Latino vote in Chicago this coming election swings heavily in favor of Lightfoot for mayor, I have no doubt that Garcia will be more than eager to take credit for it.

He’ll gladly take it as a feather in his cap that he personally deprived Preckwinkle of a significant (and growing) share of the electorate, and it will further bolster his desire to see himself as Chicago’s most politically powerful elected official of Latino ethnic origins.

Will Toni defeat redeem for Garcia … 

Similar to how in last year’s elections, he was more than eager to take credit for the fact that Dan Burke lost his seat in the Illinois House of Representatives – saying he turned out the significant Latino vote in that Southwest Side legislative district in order to bolster the Latino caucus within the General Assembly.

BUT FOR ALL that accomplishment might mean, there’s also evidence that there are limits to Garcia’s political influence. Such as the Feb. 26 election when Garcia made it known he was targeting the aldermanic re-election bid of Burke’s brother, Ed – as in the long-time Finance chairman who liked to think he was the almighty powerbroker of City Hall.

Despite the growing Latino population of that ward (about 80 percent), Burke solidly won re-election. He got the remaining white voters to turn out in force to generate some 53 percent of the vote – meaning he didn’t even have to endure a run-off election.

And he overcame all the hostile rhetoric that has been spewed about Burke on account of the fact that federal prosecutors were slinging toward Ed. As in if there ever was a time when Ed Burke should have been politically vulnerable, this was it.

If anything, Ed Burke’s victory showed the limits of Garcia’s influence over Latino Chicago. It puts thoughts into peoples’ minds that maybe Chuy isn’t as almighty as he’d like us to think he is.

BY THAT STANDARD, being able to claim he “took down” Preckwinkle’s mayoral aspirations would be face-saving, to a degree.

… his failure to beat Burke?

Of course, there was the fact that in the Feb. 26 election, the Latino segments of Chicago were the ones where the mayoral race was seen as a political battle between Susana Mendoza and William Daley, with some extra votes for Gery Chico.

Preckwinkle and Lightfoot really didn’t factor into the equation. Making some wonder if come the run-off, the Latino voter turnout will be tepid, at best. Will Garcia be able to get the Spanish-speaking enclaves of Chicago to care at all about who the next mayor will be?

That will be the real test – as we will learn whether anybody ought to be paying any significant attention to Garcia and his thoughts in future elections.

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EXTRA: ‘Mayor Chuy’ after all?

It seems we’re likely to get yet more evidence of the “superiority” of Chicago municipal government, at least in the mindset of those who are a part of it.

GARCIA: Give up Congress for mayor?

For it seems that soon-to-be retired Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., has let it be known he does NOT want to be the next mayor of Chicago. Yet he definitely wants to have a hand in deciding who will succeed Rahm Emanuel.

HIS CHOICE? NONE other than Jesus Garcia, the Cook County Board member who already is on the ballot for the Nov. 6 election to move up to the seat in Congress that Gutierrez held for 16 years. Which was Chuy's way of handling the fact that he lost his bid for the mayor's post when he challenged Rahm Emanuel back in 2015

Also the post that Gutierrez was able to use to make himself one of the most significant Latino elected officials in government.

Gutierrez on Wednesday, in saying he’s not going to seek the mayor’s office himself, says he will undertake the effort to get Garcia on the ballot for the Feb. 26 municipal elections for mayor (with a possible run-off come April 2, if necessary).

As though Garcia ought to be all-too-eager to jump for the chance to become mayor of Chicago that he’d gladly give up a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

GUTIERREZ: The voice behind the mayor?

I’M SURE THAT to people outside of Chicago, such a move makes no sense. Being a part of Congress and the national scene might well seem more important and ego-satisfying than getting tangled up in the mess that is our local political scene.

Then again, many Chicagoans have such a local fixation that we believe our officials and our problems are far more significant than anything those clowns in D.C. are contending with. Particularly since it would mean having to deal up-close and personal with the people leading this Age of Trump we’re now engaged in.

In Garcia’s case, he’d be the Mexican-born official serving in the U.S. federal government. I don’t doubt that the people enthralled with The Donald as president would likely view him as some sort of foreign subversive.

WASHINGTON: Made a similar shift in '83

Perhaps they’d try to have him deported in ways similar to the harassment they’re dishing out to people born in South Texas whom they want to believe aren’t really U.S. citizens and are trying to have their citizenship status revoked.

OF COURSE, AS mayor of Chicago, Garcia would come under fire from those same ideological nit-wits for being the leader of what they insist has to be a corrupt city.

But as mayor, Garcia would have some of the perks of being able to defend himself, rather than being just another anonymous member in the mass that is Congress.

So would Garcia gladly give up a chance to be a part of Congress to make a run for mayor? We’ll have to wait and see, particularly in the period between the Nov. 6 Election Day and early December, which is when he’d have to file nominating petitions to get on the ballot for the mayoral election.

It wouldn’t be the most unusual move. Harold Washington himself gave up a seat in Congress to become mayor.

IF ANYTHING, THE real question might well be why won’t Gutierrez run for the mayor’s post himself?

EMANUEL: Now, he'll be able to relax

Some might think he just doesn’t want to endure Chicago-style weather any longer; what with his talk about how he wants to move to Puerto Rico (where his ethnic origins lie) and be a part of the island’s rebuilding following last year’s Hurricane Maria.

Or it could be a much simpler explanation; he likes the idea of being the guy who can tell the mayor of Chicago what he should do.

In some ways, a much easier task with power and influence – without having to deal with the stress of actually having to do the job. Just look at Emanuel these days.

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Immigration detention center project won’t die; just going further south

It seems the powers that be who want to build a jail-like facility for people awaiting hearings on immigration violations (and possible deportation from the United States) are not about to give up.

Will these types of activists express their objections ...

Their plans to build such a facility somewhere in the Chicago metropolitan area to accommodate immigration violators in the Midwestern U.S. are cropping up again.

ONLY NOW, THEY’VE moved not only across the state line to Indiana, but south to Newton County – a place so far south that I’m sure the locals who live there would seriously resent any claim that they’re part of the Chicago area (Wikipedia says they are).

It’s a fairly isolated place with lots of open space, which means it might be possible to build the desired facility in a place where it would have little interaction with the real world – just like more conventional prison facilities.

Perhaps this is what the project’s backers feel is necessary to get away from the objections that have constantly arisen all the other opportunities that this has come up for discussion.

Personally, I remember back when the powers-that-be wanted to build such a facility just outside of Joliet. When locals objected, talks shifted toward building it just south of Crete (which is roughly the southernmost suburb of Chicago) not far from the now-defunct Balmoral Racecourse.

ALL THE HOSTILITY toward the project caused Crete officials to back away, which caused the project’s supporters to shift over the state line into Indiana and there was some consideration to building it in Gary not far from the Gary/Chicago International Airport.

Concerns about the airport’s flight patterns being a potential security risk for a detention facility, along with the outspoken immigration activists who have followed this project everywhere it has gone, caused Gary municipal officials to give up their support for the idea.

... so far distant from Chicago?

Now, it seems the supporters of a detention center have found a place about 65 miles away from Chicago (about as far south as Kankakee) where they hope there will be a lack of opposition to the idea of locking up people who may only be caught up in the immigration bureaucracy because they got pulled over for a traffic violation – and some eager cop was willing to notify immigration to “take ‘em away.”

As the talks proceed toward whether to build such a facility in Newton County -- a place whose total population (just under 14,000) is less than most suburbs. I’ll be curious to see how many of the activist-types will continue to follow this project.

BECAUSE SOME OF the objectors are people with an interest in our nation’s immigration policy, and they have followed it from municipality to municipality.

From Joliet to Crete to Gary, Ind., will they now show up in Kentland (the county seat) to let their objections be known. Or will they figure they’ve pushed this proposed facility far out enough into the “middle of nowhere” that they can live with its existence “somewhere else.”

I’ve heard the arguments on all sides, with the objectors hating the idea of detaining people while the immigration violations are pending. While supporters either aren’t bothered with their incarceration, or they’ll argue that these facilities aren’t really prisons.

Some may even argue that the current status of these violators would improve if they weren’t held in traditional jail conditions (many are sent to the McHenry County Jail in Woodstock, which has a contract with the federal government to detain such people).

PERSONALLY, I’M MOST concerned with the fact that these detention facilities are run by private companies, rather than by a government entity like the federal Bureau of Prisons. Meaning many of the regulations meant to protect the rights of inmates in the federal system do not apply. This particular facility would be built by GEO Group of Boca Raton, Fla.

I don’t doubt that in this Age of Trump that we’re now in, there are some who aren’t bothered by that thought. But we should be. Our “rights” are only as safe as the most vulnerable in our society.

And it may well be that among the most vulnerable are those people whose immigration status is unclear – particularly since there are those who enjoy being able to harass such individuals to make up for the short-comings in their own lives.

So has this project moved far enough away from Chicago that the locals will be willing to tell its objections to “stuff it!” or will the objectors (a combination of religious folks and Latino activists) continue to push to where it eventually becomes an Indianapolis issue, rather than Chicago?

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Is Kennedy for governor campaign trying to follow family history?

One of the big disappointments of the upcoming election cycle – at least as far as some political observers are concerned – is just how weak and pathetic has been the campaign of Chris Kennedy for Illinois governor.

Jesus Garcia offers his support to Chris Kennedy's gubernatorial dreams. Will that make a difference?

There were those people who went into this campaigning thinking that Election ’18 would be a brawl between the big family money of J.B. Pritzker, versus the Kennedy family legacy backing Chris – who is the Chicago-area’s Kennedy connection (for years, he ran the family-owned Merchandise Mart).

BUT KENNEDY’S CAMPAIGNING has been weak, particularly in the area of raising finances. Kennedy has name recognition (sort of), but it would seem that unless Chris can get a jolt in coming weeks, it will be the other fringe political challengers who will offer the Pritzker people their political fight.

Just where that jolt could come from got political people to speculating that it could be the growing Latino population (29.7 percent of Chicago’s populace, and now larger than the city’s African-American population) that could be what revives the chances of Chris Kennedy becoming the first Kennedy to get elected in Illinois (his cousins have been elected to office in various other states).

Could the Latino people of Illinois seriously wind up banding together to give Chris Kennedy enough political support to win the Democratic primary to be held March 20?

Bobby Kennedy and Cesar Chavez, back in the day

Such talk got goosed up last week when Jesus Garcia, the one-time alderman and state senator who now serves on the Cook County Board and who unsuccessfully challenged Rahm Emanuel for mayor two years ago, endorsed Chris Kennedy for governor.

SPECULATION AMONGST SOME is that Garcia has enough influence amongst the Mexican-American community in Chicago, along with other Latino ethnicities, that they will turn out for Kennedy.

Which would give the Kennedy campaign at least one group willing to publicly support him. When one considers the half-dozen or so Democratic gubernatorial dreamers, it is likely the primary winner will NOT top 50 percent. It won’t be a majority, but last year’s political victory by Donald J. Trump showed us a majority isn’t required to win.

JFK seeks Mexican-American votes back in '60 bid

Could Latino backing be enough to win a primary?

Could it cause the Latino public officials (including Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza) who have already come out in favor of J.B. Pritzker to think they have to figure out a way to change sides, or else wind up looking like a vendido – selling out the interests of their community?

WHAT IS INTRIGUING is that if such a strategy works, it would merely mean that Kennedy followed in the family tradition. Chris is the son of one-time Attorney General, senator and presidential dreamer Bobby Kennedy, and the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy AND former Sen. Ted Kennedy – the long-time senator from Massachusetts.

All of whom had their own sense of Latino ties to bolster their chances of winning, with some using the label of “first Latino senator” to describe his Uncle Teddy.

A younger Jesus Garcia supportive of Harold Washington and Teddy Kennedy

Chris Kennedy himself, in announcing the Garcia endorsement, made a point of reminding people of his father’s ties to United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez. Bobby Kennedy included in his own presidential campaigning appearances with Chavez. Chris himself once joined with Chavez back in 1988 and fasted with him for three days when Cesar did a 36-day fast to highlight the impact of pesticides on the farm hands working the fields.

Could Chris Kennedy have 21st Century take on Viva ?

But if you go back to 1960 presidential campaign, the one that Mayor Richard J. Daley allegedly stole for JFK right here in Chicago, one could also make an argument that it was victories in California and Texas that put Kennedy in the White House.

MUCH OF THOSE state victories were due to the “Viva Kennedy” Club efforts – by which Mexican-American people were a focus on the Kennedy campaign, and their 10-1 voter support for JFK over Richard Nixon were considered significant elements of those victories.

Those “Viva Kennedy” club efforts were one of the first ever by a national political campaign to reach out to Latino voters – previously, such voters were ignored.

In Illinois, Chris Kennedy has developed a reputation as a guy who likes to talk about running for office, but doesn’t have the political will to follow through a campaign to its finish. Some political observers are convinced that Chris still doesn’t have what it takes, and will drop out before the primary.

Could it be that the lesson for Kennedy to figure how to get through an entire political campaign is to follow the examples of “Dad” and “Uncle Jack” and reach out to the group in Chicago that actually is on the rise? Although I doubt anybody will someday do songs in tribute to Chris the way Chicano activist/singer Lalo Guerrero did for his dad, Bobby.

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How times change; Rahm now our ally in upcoming political fight w/ Trump

I can remember a time not all that long ago when Rahm Emanuel was an enemigo of Latino activists with an interest in reforming the nation’s immigration policy.
 

EMANUEL: Face-to-face w/ Trump!

Back then, Emanuel was the chief of staff for President Barack Obama, and the perception was that a significant part of why Obama was so slow on the draw to do anything to push for reform was that Rahm was holding him back.

EMANUEL SAW A long, drawn-out political fight and didn’t want to expand capital to take the partisan actions that would have been required to actually win such a fight. He didn’t want to make the enemies that would arise at the very mention of creating a sensible, rather than nativist, policy for immigration.

Yet now, it seems that Emanuel is being put into a position where he has to take the lead in trying to push for sensible policy. Or more actually, to not have blatantly xenophobic policies take over.

Emanuel of Chicago was one of several mayors from across the nation who sent a letter to President-elect Donald J. Trump asking him to not revoke the executive order that Obama signed off on a couple of years ago that created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy.

That is the one that says people who came to this country as children without a valid visa would not face deportation.

IT IS AN order that was never popular with the conservative ideologues of our nation, particularly those who define immigration reform as an increase in deportations of people they find less than desirable.

And for some people, particularly many of those who were inclined to support Trump’s presidential campaign, it is Priority Number One that the executive order be revoked.

If possible, as Trump’s first act as president on the very day that he takes office next month.

 

TRUMP: Will he care what Rahm thinks?

Asking Trump to leave the executive order in place is most definitely asking him for something he won’t want to give. Particularly since it would be seen by his backers as a violation of everything they wanted to believe “the Donald” stood for!

IT WON’T MAKE any difference that all Emanuel and the mayors want is for the order to be left in place until Congress itself can enact something resembling a long-term reform policy of immigration laws.

Considering that the incoming Congress will be solidly Republican in leaning and filled with people who are looking to Trump to reinforce their own standing in Washington, it’s not like any long-term policy is going to be favorable to the many people who have spent years dreaming of the day when we have a sensible policy dictating who, and how, people from other countries can choose to have lives here.

The letter was signed by mayors from across the country, including Bill diBlasio of New York, where Trump lives. Yet it was Emanuel who on Wednesday made the trip to Manhattan and had roughly a 45-minute-long meeting to discuss various issues – including immigration.

Now I don’t know if Trump will pay one bit of attention to anything that Rahm said. After all, there are many people of petty and offensive moral leanings (a.k.a., the deplorables) who are counting on him to tell Rahm and others like him where they can stuff it.

BUT AS ONE who has long had a particular interest in the immigration issue, I find it ironic that the very activists who have long decried Rahm Emanuel are now in a position where they’re going to have to put their faith in him as someone tough enough to stand up to Donald Trump. Our amigos have the ability to change at a moment's notice.

 

OBAMA: What will be left of his policies?

The one thing I can say is that I’m fairly sure Emanuel isn’t intimidated by Trump; largely because they’re both capable of matching each other when it comes to egotistical blowhard behavior

It will be interesting to see if our city’s mayor can have any influence on this issue – because perhaps Rahm is just one of those guys who was meant for the national scene and not the municipal level of dealing with parking meters and trash cans.

“In Rahm, We Trust.” A thought that many of us people of a certain progressive sensibility are going to have to adopt – no matter how much the very thought makes us shudder.

  -30-

Donald Trump spared humiliation of being dumped on by Latino vote

In the end, Donald Trump was very much a typical Republican running for U.S. president, with regards to gaining not-that-much support from the nation’s growing Latino population.
 

Likely to be smashed en masse for 4 years

The outrage felt at Trump who used Latinos as a political punching bag to gain the voter support of white people with ethnic hang-ups wound up not biting him in the culo like was originally thought.

THERE WAS THAT study by Latino Decisions, a Miami-based group that analyzes issues of Latino political empowerment, that estimated Trump could wind up taking as little as 18 percent of the Latino vote. That would have been a record-low, if it had happened.

Instead, it seems that Trump got 29 percent support from the Latino electorate that bothered to cast ballot.

Which means Hillary Clinton, according to the same studies by Edison Research, took 65 percent of Latinos – meaning two of every three people with ethnic origins to a Latin American country gave their support for her.

That is very typical for a Democratic presidential candidate.

JUST AS IS that 29 percent for a Republican. It’s kind of how few Latinos feel the need to be a part of the Party of Reagan. For whatever reason, those individuals don’t want to be identified with the Latino masses, so they wind up siding with political people who verbally express their contempt – and go out of their way to convince themselves that the GOP isn’t really talking about them specifically.

So I really didn’t think it all that significant early Wednesday when I saw on the television broadcasts of Trump’s victory celebration a couple of people waving about signs reading “Hispanics for Trump.” It was bound to happen.

Trump topped Mitt Romney (barely) for Latino votes

Although I have to say I find it interesting that the candidate who kicked off his whole political process more than a year ago by labelling Mexican-Americans as “rapists” and “drug dealers” is somehow more acceptable than the candidate who, four years ago, came up with that “self-deportation” nonsense.

For it’s true. Trump’s 29 percent level of Latino support is better than the 27 percent that Mitt Romney took when he challenged Barack Obama’s re-election.

Hillary couldn't match her esposo for Latino votes

IT’S ALSO BETTER than the 21 percent that Republican Bob Dole took in 1996 when he ran against Bill Clinton’s re-election. Hillary’s husband got what is generally regarded as the record-high Latino support level of 72 percent.

Hillary had been expected to get as high as 79 percent, but wound up falling short. I can’t help but wonder how a stronger turnout would have changed that percentage – because I suspect many people of Latino ethnic origins just didn’t bother to vote.

Although I’m not about to say that Hillary Clinton would have won if she had maximized every single Latino capable of casting a ballot to actually do so. I doubt it would have mattered in North Carolina or changed much in Wisconsin.

It might have made a difference in Florida. Then again, I wonder if only white people had voted in that state if Florida would have rivaled Indiana for the right to say it was the first state to fall into the Trump column on Election Night.

PEOPLE ARE GOING to be spending coming days, weeks and months crunching the numbers (which have yet to be made official in any state) to try to find out where exactly votes could have been changed to affect the outcome. Although I stick by my premise that if every person who had been insulted by Trump had turned out to vote, he would have lost – regardless of the quirks of the Electoral College.

Take my home city of Chicago, where there was roughly a 75 percent voter turnout on Tuesday and where Trump only got 12.5 percent of the vote.

On paper, Clinton took 85 percent of votes cast in the 12^th Ward, overseen by Alderman George Cardenas and is one of the most-heavily Mexican parts of Chicago. Yet the Chicago Reader pointed out that voter turnout in that ward was only 58 percent. I expect to learn that level of turnout was typical across the country; It’s hard to get outraged on behalf of people who couldn’t even bother themselves to vote.

 

Not same vengeance and anger for Latinos

Which makes me wonder if the great beneficiary of the Trump electoral victory is the piñata-making “industry” – since the majority of Latinos disgusted with his win will have to resort to smashing their Trump-shaped containers of candy and other treats with “great vengeance and furious anger” (remember actor Samuel L. Jackson in “Pulp Fiction?”) to release their tensions over the many inane actions likely to occur during the next four years!

  -30-

¿Did Donald do himself in politically with his habla on Mexicaños?

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has been one of hitting hard and often several groups of people he figures were never going to support him anyway; but it was notable that his political trash talk began with Mexicans.
 

Will Latinos turn Trump into electoral piñata?

You remember? His spiel that Mexicans were rapists and drug dealers, and that erecting that barricade along the U.S./Mexico border would be a significant boost to the national security?

TRUMP AND HIS operatives always figured it couldn’t hurt them to talk like that because there just wouldn’t be enough Mexican-Americans to cast ballots. And such talk likely would inspire the nativist element of society that Trump is counting on to prevent him from electoral embarrassment come Tuesday night.

Now I don’t doubt that the xenophobes amongst us will be motivated to turn out and vote. Heck, I don’t doubt that in the isolated parts of the country, they will be dominant and will create political maps with large swaths of red.

Tainted, in the ideologues’ minds, by those pimples of blue that represent the urban areas where people (including voters) actually live.

But the complicating factor from the Trump perspective is the Latino vote – which has been on the rise but also shows signs of significant numbers of Latino voters can be apathetic.

WHICH IS WHAT makes the Miami-based Latino Decisions group intriguing. It shows an anticipated record-high Latino vote for the 2016 election cycle. As many as 14.7 million Latinos casting ballots in the Tuesday elections.

With some 79 percent of those anticipated to vote for Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid. Another 3 percent are expected to be amongst the contrarians voting for Libertarian or Green candidates.

Trump may well have motivated people with their ethnic origins in the rest of the Americas to think of Hillary as their friend. We laughed sarcastically when she tried comparing herself to a friendly abuelita, but we clearly see Trump as that Yankee imperialist whose view of Latinos is one of how he can exploit us by building his garish hotels in our neighborhoods, and get some of us to work for as close to minimum wage as he can get away with.

Kind of like the way our organized crime interests tried turning Havana into their hotel/casino paradise – which motivated certain people to give power to a tyrant like Fidel Castro.

IT DOES SEEM like Trump will have no one else to blame but himself if he does not prevail. If he had kept his mouth shut and been the least bit respectful, perhaps he wouldn’t have people already turning out at early voting centers to ensure they cast their ballots against him.

Then again, a Trump that is respectful would not really be Donald Trump. His brash bluster and arrogance is what makes him (and he alone) think he is fit to be president.

Of course, if a strong Latino vote really does turn out to block Trump’s presidential aspirations, THAT is what will be perceived by the ideologues as the “rigged” element of this year’s election cycle.

Because as they probably see it, only people like themselves ought to be allowed to vote – just like in the old days, which weren’t nearly as great as some would like to believe they were.

PERSONALLY, I’LL BE watching for all the bits of evidence that crop up to indicate just how strong a Latino vote will turn out to be – because it could be the evidence of the growing strength of the Latino electorate.

As in Trump may have opened up the can of worms, so to speak, that his ideologue-types would have preferred remained sealed shut.

Because as the Latino vote (which back in 1992 when Bill Clinton became president only accounted for some 4.3 million votes) continues to grow (a record-high 11.2 million in 2012 that will be shattered again this time around), it will only be more difficult for the xenophobes amongst us to prevail.

Which means that in the end, those of us with an interest in growing Latino political empowerment may wind up thanking Trump for being the guy who made the masses realize how stupid his attitudes truly are!

  -30-

EDITOR’S NOTE: A website for those who want to view pictures of people smashing piñatas in the image of Donald Trump. Or, you can just wait until Election Day and see how severely we vote against him.

Will ’15 run-off be a boost for Latino political empowerment in Chicago?

Mayor Rahm Emanuel deserves one bit of credit as he begins campaigning for re-election in the run-off election to be held April 7 – he seems to have a clue as to what the political challenge is before him.

He needs to appeal to Latino voters, and on Election Night Rahm used Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., to introduce him – a Latino face talking up Rahm, and even reverting to the Spanish language for part of it.

A REMINDER TO those Latinos who voted for Emanuel in Tuesday’s municipal elections who are now going to face pressure to vote in the run-off for Jesus “Chuy” Garcia.

Who is going to try, amongst other tactics, to make this the chance for the roughly 30 percent of Chicagoans who are of Latin American ethnic origins to assert ourselves politically and elect “one of our own” to the mayor’s post!

I believe that if Garcia hadn’t have done as well as he did in the first part of this election cycle (34 percent of the vote, when many polls had him finishing with somewhere between 17 and 24 percent political support), we wouldn’t have heard from Gutierrez.

It was, after all, an odd match-up – the fact that Gutierrez backed Emanuel’s re-election was more a statement that he thought none of the challengers had what it took to be mayor.

LET’S NOT FORGET that when Emanuel served as chief of staff to President Barack Obama, he was the one that was the brunt of Gutierrez’ constant attacks on Obama’s failure to address immigration reform.

The perception amongst many Latino activists is that it was Emanuel not wanting to be bothered with the politically divisive issue – and that he was willing to let a significant Latino concern (many perceive opposition to the issue as a sign of disrespect in general toward the Latino segment of our society) be continually put on the backburner to try to appease conservative ideologues.

Emanuel as mayor has had to address Latino concerns and try to win over those in Chicago who are primarily of Mexican and Puerto Rican ethnic origins.

Now, Emanuel is going to have to run for re-election against a progressive-minded Democrat (the mayor is more centrist, no matter what the conservative ideologues want to believe about him) born in Mexico and raised in the ethnic Pilsen and Little Village enclaves.

ALL OF THAT is going to come into play during the next six weeks until the final municipal election. That is why Gutierrez got trotted out to be Emanuel’s face!

Gutierrez should be acknowledged for a bit of honesty Tuesday night – he admitted that back in 2011, he was amongst Emanuel’s opponents and was among the roughly 60 percent of Chicago Latinos who voted for one of the two Latino candidates (Gery Chico and Miguel del Valle) who were seeking the post.

Now, he’s going to be amongst the people trying to persuade his constituents to take Rahm seriously. It makes sense for him to be a key player in coming weeks.

Because when one looks at maps of Chicago showing which mayoral candidate prevailed in each of the city’s 50 wards, it becomes clear that Emanuel was the winner across the city EXCEPT for those Southwest Side Mexican-oriented wards and the Northwest Side Puerto Rican-based wards.

THEY ALMOST MATCH up perfectly with the parts of Chicago that are within the weird-shaped congressional district that makes Gutierrez the chief political representative for Latino people.

There are a couple of exceptions – Garcia also prevailed in the 49^th Ward of the Rogers Park neighborhood and the 10^th Ward at the far southeast corner of Chicago that contains some of the city’s oldest Spanish-speaking enclaves.

In that latter ward, there also was a run-off resulting from the aldermanic election – 10^th Ward Ald. John Pope will have to face off against Susan Sadlowski Garza, a career educator and official within the Chicago Teachers Union.

Pope is either praised or criticized within the ward for being an Emanuel backer (a 100 percent voting record of supporting the mayor), while Garza follows the lead of union President Karen Lewis in backing Garcia.

I MENTION THAT ward because it seems Garcia took a slim margin in the mayoral race (48 percent, to 38 percent for Emanuel), while in the aldermanic race Pope prevailed with 44 percent of the vote, compared to 24 percent for Garza.

That would make it seem that there were at least a few (the ward is 63 percent Latino) people who cast their ballots for both Garcia and Pope. Could it be that at least a few of those Latinos will wind up finding it within themselves to back Emanuel come April 7.

City-wide, Emanuel took about 37 percent of the Latino support, compared to just over 52 percent for Garcia. If Emanuel can’t gain a good portion of the remaining 11 percent Latino vote, then he is destined to be a mayoral one-termer just like Michael Bilandic or Jane Byrne.

While Chicagoans at-large will have to endure at least four years of stupid Star Wars-themed jokes about our new mayor’s nickname.

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Will anybody be pleased with presidential action on immigration?

President Barack Obama will be in Las Vegas Thursday, where he is to make public his proposal to implement at least partial immigration reform despite the hostile objections of ideologue-inclined Republicans.


As one who has an interest in the issue of our nation’s immigration policies, I’ll be waiting to see what the president has to say tonight.

BUT WHILE MANY political pundits and observers are getting all worked up over what they’re claiming will be a grotesque abuse of political power on behalf of people they’d sooner see removed from the nation, I’m wondering if the result of what we get is going to be something so weak and miniscule that “lame” would be the most accurate way to describe it.

Of course, doing anything at all will offend the ideologues. So to be honest, I don’t care what they have to say later Thursday and in coming days and weeks. They’ve been upset ever since the day Obama first considered running for president. There’s no pleasing them.

Thus far, Obama has refused during his presidency to push for serious immigration reform. Republicans in Congress have made their opposition known, and Obama has been willing to defer to them.

That is why the growing Latino population in this country is becoming less and less supportive of the president. Although to be honest, it should be said that the strong shares of the Latino electorate that Obama took in 2008 and 2012 election cycles were more about showing contempt for the Republican challengers than any real support for Obama.

I WON’T BE surprised if any GOP response to what Obama does Thursday night will wind up offending Latino voters to the extent that they will back whomever Democrats nominate for president over any Republican candidate!

But what will the president do? I honestly believe he’s still going to try to cater to the opposition’s hostility by crafting a proposal that will be miniscule and impact as few individuals as possible.

Thus far, Obama used his “executive order” powers to protect from the threat of deportation young people who were born elsewhere, but have lived the bulk of their lives in the United States. I have heard one theory that he could extend such protection to their parents.

Which is nice; it’s cute. But it’s still far short of fixing the bureaucratic mess that is our immigration policy. There will still be many millions of people being impacted negatively. All because some people want federal law to reinforce their own personal ethnic and racial hang-ups, rather than serve the nation’s needs.

THE COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION reform measure that has been discussed in Congress for years is the way to go because it would resolve the mess in one shot – rather than piecemeal. Having congressional action and presidential approval would be best for a permanent solution.

The flaw of an executive order is that any future president can repeal it at his or her whim. And you just know there will be an ideologically-inclined future occupant of the White House who will make it Priority One to do so.

Which would put a few million people in an even more precarious position than they are already in! That would be the ‘negative’ that the Latino electorate would be inclined to hold against the Obama administration’s legacy.

Admittedly, it is better to see Obama take some sort of action on Thursday rather than do nothing – which is the advice way too many conservative-oriented political observers want him to follow because it means their interests prevail.

BUT DEPENDING ON how wide-ranging his latest action will be will determine whether or not the president is doing the right thing.

Because the last thing anybody in our society needs is some sort of presidential action meant to create a political talking point that allows Obama to say he did something on immigration reform – without actually creating a policy that benefitted anybody.

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Could Obama have hurt himself more by pushing for immigration reform early? Could Chuy bring Latinos back?

President Barack Obama let it be known quickly after Election Day that he will take some sort of action meant to push the nation’s immigration policy closer to the state of reform that is desperately needed.

Of course, there were those who wondered why Obama didn’t act earlier, much earlier. As in several months in advance of Tuesday’s federal election cycle..

THE REASONING BEHIND the delay was that Obama feared that action prior to the elections would irritate the ideologues to the point that he’d bolster the opposition votes against his interests.

Although when one looks at the election results across the country, how much worse could he have done? If anything, I wonder if taking some sort of action might have bolstered the Latino segment of the electorate to back Democrats – who are starting to wonder if Dems are too cowardly to stand up to the ideologues.

As in those whose idea of a national immigration policy is to bolster the number of deportations from the United States – particularly those whose national origins come from other parts of the Americas.

Obama has said he is inclined to use his ‘executive order’ powers to create a policy that will reduce the deportation total while federal officials try to figure out a long-term solution to the bureaucratic mess that is an immigration policy.

WHICH IS SOMETHING that most definitely will not happen now that a Republican majority exists in both the Senate and House of Representatives. If anything, the people most openly hostile toward immigration reform are now going to dominate the debate on Capitol Hill.

All the more reason Obama should have acted a long time ago to push this issue forward.

Because when Obama does use his executive order powers, it will merely infuriate the ideologues even more.

There is speculation that Republicans may self-moderate themselves out of a desire to show during the next two years they are capable of governing – and not just obstruction. But that underestimates the political will of the ideologues who have their own close-minded ideals of what this nation ought to represent.

ONE ASPECT SORT of caught my attention – a Washington Post report that implied some Latinos are shifting toward the Republican Party in the most recent election cycle.

It seems that some states where Republicans did well had as many as 40 percent of Latino voters back the GOP candidates rather than Democrats. Although it also seems that those were states such as Texas or Georgia where the Republican Party was already dominant.

Which most likely means Latino voters were choosing to be part of the establishment in their home states. Latinos living in places where Democrats dominate continued to back that political party.

We’ll also get a strong test locally of Latino backing for Democrats, along with how strongly other people will want to regard Latinos as part of the political party.

FOR WE’RE GOING to have Jesus “Chuy” Garcia in the running for mayor in the Feb. 24 municipal elections.

Anyone who decides to challenge Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his ample campaign fund is going to be a long-shot. But the Chicago Teachers Union’s house of delegates officially endorsed Garcia on Wednesday, which could help him come up with some of the financial muscle any challenger is going to need to avoid running a political campaign that is nothing more than a waste of time.

If anything, it’s going to take local actions like Garcia’s involvement to keep the Latino electorate from becoming totally disconnected to the political process.

A large part of which was caused by the unwillingness of Obama to challenge the segment of voters that was never going to take him seriously to begin with.

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