In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Senator John McCain promised that if he’s elected, “we’re going to reach out our hand to any willing patriot, make this government start working for you again, and get this country back on the road to prosperity and peace.” During the fall campaign the outreach may not be quite as sweeping, especially when it comes to African-American voters. In an interview with Feet in Two Worlds, Michael Steele, the Chairman of GOPAC and one of the few African Americans to address the GOP convention, said as far as he knows “there is no effort” by the McCain campaign to counterbalance the surge of support for Barack Obama in the black community.

“The reality of it is, you take ten African Americans, nine and a half of them are going to vote for Barack,” said Steele, the former Lt. Governor of Maryland. “That still doesn’t mean you don’t compete for the vote. You still lay out the cause for looking at John McCain. Because as John McCain himself has said, before the NAACP and the Urban League, ‘When I’m your president you will have a seat at my table.’ Not even Barack is saying that.”

GOPAC is a political action committee created in 1979 whose purpose, according to a statement by Steele on the GOPAC web site, is, “recruiting, training, and equipping candidates across the country to establish and maintain a Republican majority.”

According to Steele, when it comes to cultivating African-American voters and candidates, the Republican Party has, “literally dropped the ball.”

“We need to pick it up and move forward with it,” he said.

Yesterday, The Washington Post reported there were just 36 black delegates among the 2,380 at the Republican convention, the lowest number in at least four decades.

Steele’s assessment comes in an election year when black voters, energized by Obama’s candidacy, have already demonstrated their clout at the polls. Heavy turnout by black voters in the South Carolina Democratic primary gave Obama the edge he needed to beat Hillary Clinton and John Edwards.

In July, Mike Baker of the Associated Press wrote, “If Barack Obama’s historic campaign to become the first black president boosts black turnout as drastically as he predicts, he could crack decades of Republican dominance across the South.” Obama has pledged to increase black voter participation by 30 percent this year. If that happens, Baker cites four states that could shift from red to blue in the November election. They include Florida, the mother of all battleground states, Virginia (another important battleground state), Arkansas and Louisiana. In addition, Baker reports that the Obama campaign is focusing on boosting African American voter turnout in six other states -North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi.

Michael Steele maintains that the McCain Campaign is pursuing a “fifty-state strategy” to elect their candidate. But with no pages in the playbook specifically aimed at African-American voters, Republicans may discover they have ceded a critical group of voters to the Democrats in a what many believe will be a very tight election.

Last week, as many of the nation’s Latino Democratic operatives and immigrant rights activists expressed high hopes in Denver for the future of comprehensive immigration reform, the reality of the nation’s current immigration policy was vividly displayed in tiny Laurelton, Mississippi.

Nearly 600 workers were swept up by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in a worksite raid at Howard Industries, an electrical parts manufacturer. The sweep in Laurel, population 18,000, made it the largest immigration raid in US history, eclipsing the raid earlier this summer in Postville, IA (click here to listen to this recent NPR radio update from Postville), which continues to be in the news.

The very day that federal immigration authorities arrested undocumented workers at Howard industries, the Obama campaign removed every mention of immigration reform from a convention speech by Bronx Rep. José Serrano, one of Congress’ most persistent advocates of comprehensive immigration reform.

Despite the high hopes of immigrant rights advocates and legislators that the next president will finally take on and win reforms to federal immigration laws, both McCain and Obama have been all but silent on the issue as the election approaches.

As recently as last year, both candidates supported legislative proposals that would have granted legal status to many of the nation’s roughly 12 million undocumented immigrants–but both start their policy statements today with the need to get tough on undocumented immigrants first.   The candidates have each, at times, supported proposals to strengthen the nation’s southern border fence and to penalize employers who hire undocumented workers. Such law-and-order strategies continue to appear in their platforms today.

On the policy pages of his website, Senator McCain highlights the nation’s notoriously porous southern border and states:

When we have achieved our border security goal, we must enact and implement the other parts of practical, fair and necessary immigration policy.

For his part, Senator Obama’s campaign website outlines his support for

a system that allows undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, learn English, not violate the law, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens.

Despite much-discussed efforts to mobilize Latino voters, Feet in 2 Worlds reporters covering the convention in Denver found few Democratic operatives willing to broach the subject of immigration policy, and then only in conversations far from the convention’s main stage, and usually in the context of encouraging Latino voters to support Senator Obama’s candidacy.

In fact, a form of détente has emerged: both presidential campaigns appear to have decided to broach the immigration subject only in smaller discussions with tailored audiences, such as Latino civil rights activists (at the annual conferences of the National Council of La Raza and the League of United Latin American Citizens), or wealthy Silicon Valley campaign donors.

A FOX News producer detailed a fractious debate within the Republican Party as it tried to finalize its final immigration policy platform last week before its own convention. She wrote that some delegates wanted platform language that rejected all efforts at “comprehensive immigration reform,” because they considered the phrase “a code word for amnesty.”

The recently-released GOP platform devotes a whole one and half pages to immigration policy with a focus on border security, a rejection of “amnesty” and “en masse legalizations,” and a call for English to be the official language of the US. For its part, the Democratic Party platform promises, “tough, practical, and humane immigration reform in the first year of the next administration.” The document also underlines the need to, “require undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, pay taxes, learn English, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens.” Notably, both parties start their platforms by stressing the need for expanded border enforcement.

Obama himself made one mention of immigration policy during his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention last Thursday, but without any prescriptions for change:

Passions fly on immigration, but I don’t know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers.

Despite the high hopes, the current face of the issue is rooted in the Bush administration’s enforcement-only approach. In addition to a series of high-profile, large-scale work site immigration raids, the other standout federal program this year was ‘Operation Scheduled Departure.’ The short-lived effort, which sought to encourage undocumented immigrants to deport themselves, was quietly laid to rest at the end of August after a dismal three-week pilot phase. Only eight immigrants volunteered to return to their home countries through the program.

In Postville, IA, immigrant workers were detained, charged and tried in a matter of days. A majority of the 289 workers swept up in Postville’s raid were put into fast-track deportation proceedings and flown back to their home countries within a month of the raid.

Mississippi immigrant rights advocates, including the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA), reported signs of immigration agents preparing for a large-scale raid in Laurel over the weekend, establishing roadblocks at Wal-Mart parking lots and renting most of the hotel rooms in the small town. MIRA also reported possible preparations for another raid at the Southern Hens poultry plant in Mossell, MS, where ICE agents were reportedly preparing to put the plant under lockdown.

In the midst of an increased federal focus on apprehending undocumented immigrants, many undocumented immigrants reportedly were reluctant to evacuate from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, and opted to stay behind and ride out the recent Hurricane Gustav. Despite assurances from the Department of Homeland Security to the contrary, immigrants were worried federal agents would institute immigration documentation checks on the buses provided to evacuate residents, according to the New Orleans Worker’s Center for Racial Justice.

Mississippi legislators recently passed a new state law that makes it a felony for businesses to employ undocumented immigrants. It is part of a new wave of state-based immigration laws dubbed ‘employer sanctions’ and enacted in states with large immigrant populations. These laws have been decried by business owners, immigrant advocates, and workers’ rights activists as impractical, unfair, and likely to drive immigrant workers further into an underground economy.

In a nation that is increasingly black and brown, and in an election year when one of the major party presidential nominees is the child of an African immigrant, there is still no clarity about what the next administration might do to transform federal immigration law.

Offering a glimpse of Sen. Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at Invesco Field tomorrow in Denver, a top campaign official said Obama will announce an unprecedented effort to enroll new voters before the November election. Obama’s Latino Outreach Director, Temo Figueroa told Feet in 2 Worlds, “You’re going to be hearing tomorrow from Barack Obama the kick-off of the largest voter registration drive ever in a presidential campaign.”

Figueroa’s remarks followed a presentation to the Hispanic Caucus this morning in Denver where he characterized the resources the campaign will put into the program as, “mind boggling.”

[audio:http://www.xrew.com/joceimgs/FI2W/fi2w_temo2_speech.mp3]

“Tomorrow (in his speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination) you are going to hear Sen. Barack Obama talk about voter registration and he’s going to mention some numbers that we’re going to be spending on voter registration through the month of September that will be mind boggling. That’s going to be a focus of his speech at Invesco,” Figueroa promised.

Figueroa also told FI2W that unlike past elections, the campaign will not “contract out” the job of registering voters.

“But we’re doing it in-house. We’re doing it with our own volunteers, with our own staff,” he said.

“We’re already making a dent,” he said. “The numbers are already showing what we’re doing in Virginia, what we’re doing in New Mexico, what we’re doing in Colorado and Nevada. It’s amazing.”

[audio:http://www.xrew.com/joceimgs/FI2W/fi2w_temo1_interview.mp3]

The Obama campaign’s emphasis on voter registration started even before Obama had won the primaries. On May 10th the campaign launched Vote for Change, a 50-state voter registration drive which was intended to lay the groundwork for a general election campaign.

“I believe the only way Barack Obama can win is we have to play in states we normally, as Democrats, never played in, and we have to bring new people in,” Figueroa said.

While Obama’s voter registration drive will target Americans all of backgrounds, the Obama campaign has previously pledged 20 million dollars on Latino outreach efforts including voter registration and paid media. The campaign has 400 Latino organizers and is training hundreds of volunteers to increase turnout among Latinos in key battleground states. In New Mexico alone, where an estimated 40,000 registered Latino voters didn’t got to the polls in 2004, Figueroa said the campaign has 29 field offices staffed by Latinos.

Stressing the point to the delegates at the Hispanic Caucus, Figueroa gave a Power Point presentation – complete with slides, maps and electoral math – that showed that Latinos can even make a difference in battleground states like Virginia if turnout is driven up just among currently registered voters. But he stressed repeatedly that even in Virginia there is a large group of unregistered Latinos that the campaign hopes to tap.

Acknowledging that many Latinos are still not familiar with Obama, Figueroa told the crowd that starting next week the campaign will go on air with Spanish-language ads in New Mexico, Nevada, Florida and Colorado to present Obama’s message and biography to Latino voters.

A pro-Obama political action committee (PAC) just released a raft of television ads in New Mexico,a critical battleground state where one-in-three voters is Latino.

As Feet in 2 Worlds’ Martina Guzmán reported in her recent news feature on WNYC New York Public Radio, the campaigns are increasingly targeting their multimillion dollar Latino voter outreach efforts to ever-smaller slivers of the electorate. Martina’s piece noted that the McCain campaign is wooing older Latino votes, while the Obama campaign is focusing on young Latino voters via social networking sites like Facebook and Mi Gente and ads aired on YouTube and the Spanish-language broadcast giant Univisión.

The latest ad, produced in identical English and Spanish versions, focuses on establishing a connection between the spectrum of mostly young people featured on the screen and Obama, noting, “For Barack Obama, it doesn’t matter if your name is hard to pronounce, or where you’re from… what’s important is working hard and getting a good education….”

The Obama campaign ad running in New Mexico also responds to market research (albeit most of it done by Univisión or its partner Nielsen Media Research) that found 77% of KMEX (Los Angeles’ Univisión outlet) and WXTV (the Univisión outlet in the New York metropolitan area) viewers are bilingual.

Young or old, Univisión clearly feels its viewers are hungry for more election-related information: the network announced yesterday that it will ‘deliver the most extensive multiplatform election coverage in the network’s history’, with special election-related segments and live daily reports from the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

“Millions of Latino voters…are being targeted like never before on the Web, in radio, television and print. Campaigns are hiring strategists, media consultants and recruiting Latinos for the ground war.”

Eleven million Latinos are expected to vote in this year’s presidential election (60% more than in the 2004 elections), and 3 million of them are young voters.

Many media outlets have focused on the emerging Latino vote; but most news coverage has lumped Latino voters of all ages and types together into one category.

In her radio feature that aired on August 18 on WNYC in New York, Feet in 2 Worlds journalist Martina Guzmán examines how the Presidential campaigns are increasingly tailoring their outreach to subsets of Latino voters: a large and diverse electorate that has displayed a spectrum of responses to the candidates’ multi-million dollar ad campaigns.

The Obama campaign has been heavily targeting young Latinos through social networking sites like MiGente – the Latino equivalent of FaceBook. One of the most popular links is a to a video called Podemos Con Obama.  According to the William C. Velasquez institute, 50 thousand young eligible Latinos turn 18 every month, and from 2000 to 2004 Latino youth turnout increased by 13 percent.

Although the numbers are high, some consultants argue that the youth vote is unreliable. “This country is changing and young Latino voters are very excited but historically we don’t know if they turnout,” said Republican strategists Leslie Sanchez. Meanwhile the McCain campaign is reaching out to other segments of the Hispanic community such as Latino military families. They are running a television ad called God’s Children in Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada. That ad pays homage to Latino veterans and soldiers who are currently fighting in Iraq.

Guzmán reports on how the presidential candidates are crafting sophisticated messaging toward Latinos in the 2008 presidential election. Her story aired this morning during Morning Edition on WNYC, New York Public Radio. Click here to listen online.

Do the father of anti-affirmative action initiatives and Sen. Barack Obama have more in common than one would think?

According to Ward Connerly, a former regent of the University of California system and the force behind efforts to dismantle public affirmative action programs, Obama’s position on affirmative action is so nuanced that they agree on almost everything.

“I’ve read Mr. Obama’s statement that he believes his daughters should not receive preferential treatment over a poor white child,” said Connerly in an interview from the Sacramento office of his Civil Rights Institute. “I agree with him. In fact, I agree with a lot of the things he says about affirmative action, except his conclusion on the initiatives.”

The ‘initiatives’ that Connerly is referring to are the ballot initiatives Connerly has helped sponsor in Arizona, Nebraska and Colorado to end affirmative action in public university systems and government contracting.
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Senator Barack Obama can’t seem to shake his “Jewish” problem.

He is perceived by many American Jews and a large part of the pro-Israel non-Jewish community as biased in favor of Palestinians, Iran, Syria, and Hamas. Despite his repeated statements concerning the security of Israel, Obama still has work to do in terms of persuading Israel and its supporters that as President he will not be another Jimmy Carter who believes that Israel is an “apartheid state” that terrorizes and bullies its neighbors.

Obama’s recent trip to the Middle East was in part intended to assuage these fears, but it was just another step down a long road of attempting to appeal to the Jewish community in the United States. Obama has not gained much ground in these efforts because his outreach has been haphazard and marked by missteps that make Obama look like he’s playing politics when he talks about his support of Israel.

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