Ricardo J Gonzalez for a Better America

I was watching the news this morning and I saw a headline that caught my eye. "DNC Delegate Sells his Vote for $20 million", or something of that nature. While at first I expected some sort of interesting controversy about an idiot superdelegate trying to profit from the highly contested primary, what I found out was actually quite different, and quite interesting.

Steven Ybarra's role as a superdelegate, as far as I can find, comes from his work in the DNC Hispanic Caucus, where he currently works as "Chair of the Committee on new citizens' outreach and voter registration for the DNC Hispanic Caucus and is the Pacific Regional Director for the DNC Hispanic Caucus". Quite the lofty title. As for the purpose of the $20 million he's demanding for his vote: Mr. Ybarra wants the money in order to setup concerted efforts to court the Mexican-American community of eligible voters, something that according to him, both Democratic candidates have largely ignored.

Hispanics as a voting bloc are relatively new to the scene. The Democrats have a long established relationship with the African-American community, but these strong ties do not exist with Latino voters. It seems surprising to me to see how little effort they are putting into building those ties, considering the evidence that shows Hispanic voters were a key voting bloc that delivered the 2004 election to George Bush. I would think that a relatively unaffiliated voting bloc, that is large and getting larger, would be a gigantic point of focus for anyone interested in becoming the next President. While Obama and Clinton focus on people that will probably vote for them anyway, namely African-Americans and Blue-Collar European-Americans, McCain is launching an aggressive campaign to court the Hispanic vote. Mr. Ybarra is not trying to get a bribe to vote for a candidate, he's trying to push the Democrats into doing the same, which would be an extremely good idea.

In an extreme exercise in missing the point, a blogger on the Official DNC site says:

Many minorities share democratic values such as social equity and social justice therefore there is vast potential for democratic candidates to gain these votes. Steven Ybarra has blatantly violated these values and may have turned away minority votes by attempting to extort 20 million dollars from other Democrats.

I think the Democrats are making an extremely dangerous assumption in thinking that Hispanics will vote for them simply because they are a minority. The past two Presidential elections have proven that this was wrong. The Democrats have built a relationship with African Americans by listening to their problems, their concerns, their efforts, and working with them to accomplish their goals. Their idea of building relationships with Hispanics is pointing to the Republicans and saying "Those guys want tougher immigration laws and therefore hate you, so you have no choice but to vote for us" while the McCain and the Republicans are knocking on doors, meeting with community leaders, and bringing Hispanic voters to the table. Which approach do you think will help build a strong long-lasting voter base?

While Ybarra's method might be disagreeable to some, he makes a strong point when he says that Democrats cannot afford to ignore Hispanic voters. If either of the democratic candidates actually stop long enough to listen to what he's saying, it might be the best $20 million they will spend. If they don't, Latino's will start to realize that they have more in common with the Republicans than they were led to believe, and I won't be surprised to hear talk in 2012 about how it was the Hispanic voters that helped lock McCain into the Presidency in 2008.