Obama, McCain woo Hispanics

ORLANDO, Fla. — Like eager but awkward suitors, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain are working hard and sometimes fumbling in their efforts to court Hispanic voters who could swing November’s presidential election.

For the African-American Obama and white Anglo McCain, the problem is less one of language than of trying to understand a group whose own diversity can make it a mystery to others. It’s not a simple matter of saying, “Take me to your leaders.”

But that, in essence, is the ground game the presidential candidates and their campaigns have been playing in pitching to voters who could form decisive constituencies in critical battleground states.

“They just come to me and say, ‘Who are the bosses of the Latin community?”’ said Patrick Manteiga, who runs a family-owned newspaper for Hispanics in Tampa’s historic Cuban neighborhood of Ybor City.

“That’s like coming and asking, ‘Who are the bosses of white America, of the soccer moms?”’

Challenges of courting Hispanic vote

Both candidates are pressing their case in three speeches in as many weeks to Hispanic umbrella groups and working in other ways to make their outreach more sophisticated. Republicans have opened an office in Orlando, where most of the state’s Puerto Ricans live, and Obama opens one this week in Ybor City.

They’ve both got their work cut out for them in appealing to a large and growing segment of the population that has leaned Democratic but has not always been motivated to vote. A recent AP-Yahoo News poll found Obama leading McCain 47 percent to 22 percent among Hispanic voters, with 26 percent undecided.

McCain is respected by many Hispanics for refusing to pander to anti-immigrant sentiment over the years. Yet he is viewed in some Latin quarters as a sequel to the unpopular President Bush, a problem he has with voters at large, too.

Obama’s vitality and soaring oratory appeal to Hispanics just as they do to others. Whoops of approval were heard throughout his speech last week to the League of United Latin American Citizens’ convention.

Yet Obama emerged from Democratic primaries a distant second to rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton among most Hispanic groups. Like voters at large, Latino voters question the one-term senator’s experience. And there are tensions between blacks and Hispanics.

Hispanic voters are hardly monolithic. Some in the West have roots going back more than two centuries, while others were sworn in as citizens last week. Some consider themselves white and some black, and many represent every shade in between.

During the last presidential election, Hispanics in key swing states such as Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Florida represented anywhere from 8 percent to more than 30 percent of voters, according to exit polls, and their numbers are only expected to grow this year.

Battle for Cuban-Americans

The McCain campaign is counting on such voters, hoping they will judge him as an individual and not a fixture of the Republican Party.

But the Republicans are seeing their own defections among Hispanic voters, especially in Florida, where for the first time more are registered as Democrats than Republicans.

McCain remains popular among Cuban-Americans in Miami, who tend to vote Republican and admire his military record and his support for U.S. policy toward Cuba. The campaign unveiled its Florida Hispanic steering committee last week with names of roughly 100 active Hispanic supporters from throughout the state.

But a crowd of nearly 1,000 people, many of them Cuban-Americans, turned out to hear Obama speak at a private luncheon in May.

If talk radio is any measure, Obama is making inroads. Magda Yvette Torres, a two-time Bush supporter and host of a Spanish-language program in central Florida, fielded calls heavily in favor of the Democrat on one recent show.

“Most of my listeners supported Hillary Clinton, and a few months ago, you would have heard a lot of these same people calling in to criticize Obama, more than a few talking about his race,” Torres said.