Latinos’ Date With Bush: Underwhelming

When you’re invited to meet the President, it’s hard to say no. So I was not surprised that so many of Southern California’s Latino elite showed up at UCLA last week, on short notice, for a reception in honor of President George Bush.

But I was surprised at how ill-prepared Bush was to deal with an audience that had hoped to hear his opinions on the challenges facing the country’s fastest-growing minority, and maybe even to exchange views with him. As a result, Bush left some pretty important people--an audience that really wanted to like him--very disappointed. And what could have been a triumph for those Republicans who want to attract more Latinos to their party ended up as just another nice social affair with good food and mariachi music.

I’m not suggesting that Bush should have plunged into a controversial issue like bilingual education, or that he’d find the solution to the high dropout rate among Latino students in a few minutes of give-and-take. But he didn’t even acknowledge that these are matters of great concern to Latinos. Indeed, the White House staff didn’t even prepare him to talk about safe Latino issues, like the campaign to correctly count the Latino population in the 1990 census.

In fairness, at least some of the local Latino leaders who helped organize the event did not bill it as anything other than a celebratory “salute” to Bush, and a chance for the President to say gracias for the Latino voter support he got in last year’s election.

“We’ll sit down (with Bush) and discuss policies and issues in the future,” promised Robert Miranda, a Republican businessman who helped put the Bush fiesta together. Like the other Latino Republicans in attendance, including Orange County Supervisor Gaddi Vasquez, Miranda was overjoyed that Bush even included an encounter with Latinos on his itinerary during a three-day visit to the Los Angeles area. During all the time Ronald Reagan spent in Southern California during his eight years as President, he met with Latinos here only once.

Unfortunately, most of the 300 or so Latinos who headed out to Westwood Tuesday afternoon, some from as far away as San Diego, came expecting more than a party.

“He really didn’t say anything,” said a somewhat deflated Steve Soto, executive director of the Mexican-American Grocers Assn., which did most of the spade work on the reception after getting less than 48 hours notice from the White House staff.

Indeed, Bush’s remarks at the main reception were a reprise of the stump speech he delivered to Latino audiences during his campaign --nice platitudes about how he admires Latinos for being patriotic, working hard and having close family ties.

It was the shallowest kind of political speech, the type only a consummate actor like Reagan should try to get away with. Stiffly delivered by Bush, it fell flat. Thus, while the crowd was clearly excited at having the President in their midst, they interrupted his remarks with applause just twice: when he mentioned his two Latino Cabinet appointees, Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos and Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan, and when he introduced Jaime Escalante, the Garfield High School teacher whose achievements were dramatized in the movie “Stand and Deliver.”

Prior to his speech, Bush spent a few minutes with about 40 Latino Republicans and organizational leaders, many of them nationally influential. During the routine session of handshakes and photographs, only a handful of them had an opportunity to raise substantive issues with Bush.

One was Soto, of MAGA, who told the President about his concern that the current wave of mergers in the food industry could harm the small, independent stores that make up most of MAGA’s membership. “He said he’d look into it,” Soto said with a shrug later.

Soto’s subdued reaction was in notable contrast to the assessment of Dionicio Morales, the longtime president of the Mexican-American Opportunity Foundation. Morales said that while the meeting with Bush lacked substance, he still appreciated the President meeting with Latinos so early in his term.

Morales is a veteran poverty-program administrator who remembers when Latino activists got no attention at all from national political leaders, and only a passing nod from even local politicians.

But those days are gone. Soto and the many other Latinos now flirting with the GOP are a new generation, and they’re impatient. They are the people who political strategists like Republican Chairman Lee Atwater must target if the GOP is to change the traditional Democratic loyalty of Latino voters. But these up-and-coming young Latinos expect more than platitudes and photo opportunities. As Jaime Escalante might put it, they want Republicans to “stand and deliver.”