Evita Effect

The Evita Factor
The Clinton campaign has long known what Obama’s team is only now learning: Hispanics are the key to Super-Duper Tuesday—and November.
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By John Heilemann
Published Feb 1, 2008
(Photo: Illustration by Ward Sutton )
The ad begins with a frozen image of Barack Obama and Ted Kennedy; on the audio track the former intones, “Soy Barack Obama y yo apruebo este mensaje.” The next shot features Congressman Luis Gutierrez from Chicago, looking straight into the camera, speaking in Spanish, too. “We know what it feels like being used as a scapegoat just because of our background and our last name,” goes the English translation. “And no one understands this better than Barack Obama.”
The commercial, which went on the air this week in California and Arizona, is remarkable on a number of levels. There’s the bluntness of the language. There’s the crudeness of the appeal. There’s the way the ad plays the victim card with all the subtlety of Doyle Brunson slapping down a royal flush—something that Obama has refused to do in any other context. The other day, over a meal in Los Angeles, I asked two seasoned political pros what would happen if an adman proposed running a spot so artless, so thoroughly off-message, on English-language TV. Both responded without hesitation: The idea would be laughed out of the room.
That the Obama operation is running such an ad tells you a great deal—and not merely that it’s trafficking in the sort of identity politics it claims to abhor. It indicates just how much is at stake when it comes to the Hispanic vote on Super-Duper Tuesday, February 5. It reflects how aggressively, if perhaps belatedly, Team Obama is moving to prevent a royal culo-kicking among Latinos. But it also hints at something darker and more troubling for Democrats: that the race-tinged politics being practiced by both sides poses major risks down the road to whichever of them is left standing.