Hispanics for McCain reach out

Seeking to drive a wedge into Democrat Barack Obama's strong support from Hispanic voters and peel off voters in a key demographic, Hispanic organizers for Republican John McCain are quietly mounting a major push on the abortion issue.

With literature, outreach to clergy and events targeting the community, McCain supporters are aggressively spreading the word, seeking to convince this mostly Catholic voting bloc that they have a moral obligation to support McCain, who opposes abortion rights, over Obama, who favors them.

"We are telling them, 'If you are Hispanic and a Christian, you should vote with your principles,'" said Tibi Ellis, a Las Vegas business owner and co-chairwoman of the national Latinas for McCain coalition, which held a gathering in Las Vegas last week. "Our job is to inform Hispanic voters that Senator Obama is against life."

In particular, Ellis said, Hispanic voters she talks to are often shocked to learn about Obama's opposition to a bill in the Illinois state Senate that would have required that medical aid be rendered to babies who survive failed abortions. "That's more extreme than just being for choice," she said.

Opponents of abortion including the National Right to Life Committee say Obama's votes against the measure are tantamount to an admission that he favors allowing babies to be killed. Obama has said he favors no such thing; he says he opposed the bill in question because it wasn't necessary, as doctors were already required to save such fetuses, and because it could have interfered with abortions' availability in his state.

Hispanics are a diverse group, Ellis said, representing many nationalities and income levels, but they agree on values. "Let's come together and celebrate our similarities," she said. "What is important to us is our Christian faith. That resonates in our communities. If you are an executive or a labor worker, we meet together in church on Sundays."

Otto Merida, who chairs McCain's committee of Nevada Hispanic supporters and is also president and CEO of the Las Vegas Latin Chamber of Commerce, said the effort to get Hispanics to be politically engaged is more intensive than any previous election.

There have been biweekly meetings with ministers, he said, urging them to inform their respective flocks about such issues, and volunteer phone-call campaigns. With the election expected to be decided by a razor-thin margin in Nevada, a good turnout of pro-McCain Hispanics "can make the difference in the state of Nevada," Merida said.

Last week's Latinas for McCain event, held at a ballroom called the Palacio Del Sol in the Commercial Center complex on East Sahara Avenue in downtown Las Vegas, was not well-attended. Perhaps 50 people trickled in to a space set up to accommodate 200 or more; tables held displays celebrating different Latin American countries and their cultures, from Colombia to Venezuela to Mexico, and children in brightly colored ponchos and ruffled dresses performed traditional dances.

Almost all the fliers on the front table focused on abortion and other hot-button social issues, from a "Voter's Guide for Serious Catholics" by a group called Catholic Answers Action to a comparison of Obama and McCain by an ostensibly nonpartisan group called Priests for Life.

Postcards on every table touted McCain's "consistent pro-family voting record" and said that as president he would "vigorously defend the right to life."

Fernando Romero, a longtime Nevada Hispanic organizer and a Democrat who crossed party lines to lead McCain's Hispanic outreach effort in the state, said the campaign is "doing a lot of events that have pro-life as the undercurrent. I think people are listening. People are looking at their conscience."

Many Hispanics he talks to, he said, were troubled by Obama's answer, in a forum with both candidates at California's Saddleback Church, to a question about when life begins that he considered such a matter "above my pay grade." (McCain, asked the same question, replied that life begins at conception.)

Polls have shown strong support for Obama in the Hispanic community, which analysts say has soured on the Republican Party since the immigration uproar of 2006, when tens of thousands marched in the streets.

In a poll conducted last month for NDN, formerly the New Democrat Network, 62 percent of Nevada Hispanic voters supported Obama, while just 20 percent supported McCain and 18 percent were undecided.

Polls of Hispanics in this and other Southwestern states where they make up a growing part of the population, and the electorate, have shown similar results.

Although he acknowledges that many Hispanics are strongly committed to the Democratic Party, Romero believes Hispanic support for Obama is relatively tentative and susceptible to persuasion. He predicts McCain can take as much as half of the Hispanic vote here.

Democrats say Hispanic voters are most concerned with bread-and-butter issues, not the divisive social issues that played such a large role in President Bush's campaigns. They see Republican attempts to emphasize "values" over economics as manipulative.

"Hispanic voters are more concerned about bigger, more important issues -- the economy, education, immigration and health care -- before abortion," said Nevada Assemblyman Ruben Kihuen, D-Las Vegas, who is Hispanic. "Being a socially conservative Democrat, I can speak from my own experience. We're socially conservative because we're Catholics, but before we look at that issue we need a job, we need health care, we need education for our children."

If Republicans are seeking to emphasize abortion, he said, "It's an attempt to try to divert from the actual issues affecting everyday, working-class people. My constituents have not brought that up at all. ... That's taking it too far, and I think people will see through it that it's politically driven. If it were an issue people bring up on a day-to-day basis, fine, but I think people are smart enough to see that it's just a way to get votes."

Adam J. Segal, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Hispanic Voter Project of Johns Hopkins University, said targeting the Hispanic community with values-based messages was a hallmark of former Bush adviser Karl Rove's strategy.

"That would be basically replaying the last election, the strategy from the Bush campaign," he said. In 2004, he said, Spanish-language ads for Bush included messages about abortion and gay marriage that weren't in the English-language scripts.

But he questioned whether such an approach would be effective in the changed environment of 2008, when polling indicates that Hispanic voters are more hostile to Republicans and are mostly concerned about the economy and the war in Iraq.

"The fact that Hispanics by more than a two-to-one margin have a strong affinity for the Democratic Party, that's really the main factor" driving the Hispanic vote in this election, Segal said. "All the other election-year politicking plays a part at the margins. But the margins are where elections are won and lost."

Contact reporter Molly Ball at mball @reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2919.