"Obama on wrong side of "Obama on wrong side of Elian Gonzalez saga," proclaims a Politico headline today. I thought Politico prided itself on objectivity toward the presidential race. Now they are the arbiter of the right and wrong side of an eight-year old debate?
Apparently so -- and the "right" side is the side of hardliners in the Cuban American community who opposed Elian's return to his Cuban father -- the man who had been his primary caregiver. They're turned off by Obama, David Paul Kuhn reports, because one of the candidate's advisers was a lawyer who represented Gonzalez père, and another was a deputy attorney general at the time who supported the Justice Department's policy of storming Elian's relatives' Florida home to return the child to his dad. Some Cuban Americans also don't like Obama's promise to meet and negotiate with hostile foreign regimes.
But these Cuban American voters are traditional Republicans -- it's no great surprise they are skeptical of Obama, just as they would have been of Hillary Clinton. That doesn't necessarily mean that Obama will lose Florida, as the piece suggests. He will be able to make inroads among younger Cuban Americans, who are more progressive. And Obama's overall poll numbers in the Latino community continue to rise. Just a few weeks after Clinton's departure from the race, Obama's support among Latinos had already climbed to 60 percent, a number John Kerry never met, and that will likely continue to go up. Latinos are trending more and more Democratic; 78 percent of Latino primary voters this year participated in Democratic primaries, and their turn-out at the polls is up nationwide.
--Dana Goldstein
