New York Times op-ed: Cruz Victory Not Historic Because He Doesn’t Meet the ‘Conventional Expectations’ of a Latino.
Which are, of course, to be a Democrat.
Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio Made History. Didn’t You Hear?
Defying most polls and predictions, a Latino won the Republican Iowa caucuses, and another Latino came in third. Together, they won more than half the vote.
With Sen, Ted Cruz taking nearly 28 percent of the vote and Sen. Marco Rubio getting 23 percent, each vastly surpassed the results for any other Latino candidate in any previous United States presidential contest.
How is that not being celebrated as historic or at least worth a headline for a day or two?
The answer is not that complicated: Neither Mr. Cruz nor Mr. Rubio meets conventional expectations of how Latino politicians are supposed to behave.
Oh? And how is that?
Neither of these candidates claims to speak for the Hispanic population or derives a crucial portion of his support from Hispanics.
Neither bases much of his political identity on being a Latino. To varying degrees they oppose legalization for unauthorized immigrants, a policy that is central to most organized Latino political interests and that is supported by a great majority of Latino elected officials and Latino voters.
The final claim is obvious bologna, since Messrs. Rubio and Cruz never shut up about their Cuban heritage.
And the claim that Mr. Rubio opposes legalization to any degree, when he actually supports a path to citizenship, is also just false. Really, what this “analysis” boils down to is that they’re not authentic Latinos because they are not Democrats. Oh, but it gets better!
No less an arbiter than Jorge Ramos, the Univision anchor, seemed to condemn them without naming names in a column last month.
“There is no greater disloyalty than the children of immigrants forgetting their own roots,” Mr. Ramos wrote. “That is a betrayal,” he wrote.
It is criticism that echoes the rhetoric aimed at Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court and other successful members of minority groups who are perceived as failing to uphold their own group’s interests.
“No less an arbiter than Jorge Ramos” is a phrase that mocks itself, but there’s no law that says we can’t pile on.”
