“The Hispanic voter—and I want to say this very carefully—has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” —Clinton pollster Sergio Bendixen
http://www.rollingstone.com/nationalaffairs/index.php/2008/01/12/clinton-pollster-latinos-too-racist-to-vote-for-obamaClinton at Root of Racist Stereotyping - Hispanics vs Blackswashingtonpost.com — Where did this come from? "Hispanics traditionally do not like Blacks." Since when?
This is a racist, divisive falsehood that the Clinton Campaign has created and nurtured as a 'historical statement' in an attempt to pit the political arena against Obama. First mentioned by a Hillary pollster and then affirmed by Clinton herself. There is no proof.
http://www.digg.com/2008_us_elections/Clinton_at_Root_of_Racist_Stereotyping_Hispanics_vs_Blacks A few weeks ago, Sergio Bendixen, a Clinton pollster and Hispanic expert, publicly articulated what campaign officials appear to have been whispering for months. In an interview with Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker, Bendixen explained that "the Hispanic voter - and I want to say this very carefully - has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates."
The spin worked. For the last several weeks, it's been on the airwaves (Tucker Carlson, "Hardball," NPR), generally tossed off as if it were conventional wisdom. And it has shown up in sources as far afield as Agence France-Presse and the London Daily Telegraph, which wrote about a "voting bloc traditionally reluctant to support black candidates."
The spin also helped shape the analysis of the Jan. 19 Nevada caucus, in which Clinton won the support of Hispanic voters by a margin of better than 2 to 1. Forget the possibility that Nevada's Hispanic voters may have actually preferred Clinton or, at the very least, had a fondness for her husband; pundits embraced the idea that Hispanic voters simply didn't like the fact that her opponent was black.
But was Bendixen's blanket statement true?
Far from it, and the evidence is overwhelming enough to make you wonder why in the world the Clinton campaign would want to portray Hispanic voters as too unrelentingly racist to vote for Barack Obama.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=713782 ---------------------------