Tag Archive for: politics

Hispanic Vote Is Wooed With Eye Toward Fall

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Jun 6, 1988, Robert Reinhold — The New York Times

LOS ANGELES, June 5 — When Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, the son of Greek immigrants, visits the Mexican-American barrios of East Los Angeles, he delights audiences with his flawless Spanish.

Backers of the probable Democratic Presidential nominee here call it his ”secret weapon,” although many in his audiences are not American citizens and cannot vote.

Vice President Bush cannot order breakfast in Spanish, so his campaign has drafted his son Jeb, who is married to a Mexican woman and speaks fluent Spanish, to woo the Hispanic vote. Burgeoning But Unproven

Both the Democrats and the Republicans are gearing up to attract the burgeoning Hispanic vote, which many see as a potential, but as yet unproven, ”swing” bloc in California, Texas, New York and other major states.

The potency of the Hispanic vote is not likely to be tested in Tuesday’s Presidential primary here. With Californians’ feeling that the race in both parties has long been settled, the predictions are for a record low turnout. Only the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who met with Hispanics here this morning, has campaigned heavily here in a final effort to untrack Governor Dukakis of Massachusetts.

But both parties are looking toward November, and the Republicans see much potential in the Hispanic people, who are increasingly middle class and whose conservative family and patriotic values find an echo in Republican rhetoric. In 1984, polls showed that President Reagan ran exceptionally well among this tradionally heavily Democratic electorate, losing to Walter F. Mondale by a narrow 55-to-44 percentage.

But so far Mr. Bush is not doing as well as his boss did four years ago. In a survey released Friday by KMEX, a Spanish-language television station here, and Univision, a Spanish network, Mr. Dukakis beat Mr. Bush by 66 to 23 percent among Hispanic voters in California who are likely to vote in the primary and in November. The poll questioned 700 would-be voters, and the margin of error among the 170 Hispanic was 7.5 percent. About 3 Million Voters

Nationally, about three million voters are considered Hispanic, a catchall category for persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban and other Latin American origin. That is only 3.6 percent of all American voters, but Hispanics are considered a potentially key vote because they are concentrated in six major states – New York, New Jersey, Florida, Illinois, Texas and California – that together account for 173 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win in November.

”In close elections that are decided by a few percentage points, incremental shifts in the Latino vote can be a deciding factor,” according to a recent analysis by Harry P. Pachon and Louis DeSipio of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

But there are doubts among some political experts.

Here in California, according to Mervin D. Field, director of the California Poll, Hispanics make up 22 percent of the general population, but in 1986 they represented only 8 percent of the voters. Only one in four Hispanic adults voted that year; more than a third were not eligible to register because they were not American citizens.

”They are a big population, but not a swing vote,” Mr. Field said.

Eileen Padberg, regional political director for the Bush campaign, said Hispanic voters would be courted through such efforts as Spanish-language ads, even though there have been none for the primary. ‘Increasingly Conservative

And Mr. Bush has met repeatedly with Mexican-American leaders. ”This Hispanic community is growing and it’s increasingly conservative,” said Steven A. Merksamer, a former campaign director for California Gov. George Deukmejian, a Republican. ”We have to make every efffort to attract them.”

”The majority of Hispanics are conservative,” said Ray Jaurequi, coordinator of the 552-member Republican Hispanic Task Force here. ”Most are Democrats only because their fathers and mothers were. The Hispanic middle class is growing by leaps and bounds.”

The Dukakis camp says the Democrat can overcome the Republican appeal by stressing his own ethnic origins. ”Dukakis as the son of immigrants symbolizes the American dream in a very magical way to Hispanics,” said Alice R. Travis, national political coordinator of the Dukakis campaign. ”His ability to talk directly with them, in Spanish, is also very important.”

Mr. Dukakis, whose California campaign director, Richard Ybarra, is Mexican-American, began radio spots in Spanish only this weekend. They stress such concerns as education, housing, the family and Central America.

Both parties are planning concerted get-out-the vote campaigns. The Democrats have allotted $2 million to register Hispanic and other minority voters, hoping to shake them out of their political torpor. And the Republicans are focusing on the newly affluent professionals and suburban residents.

Leo Estrada, a demographer at the University of California in Los Angeles, said the Democrats must role up a huge margin among Hispanic voters in the Los Angeles area to offset the lead held in the rural andsuburban areas of this state, which are heavily Republican and conservative. And, according to Richard Santillan, a political scientists at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, who has been watching the Republican efforts, says there is disenchantment with Reagan Administration among Hispanic voters because of what it sees as ”false promises” on Federal appointments. Bad Press for Bush

Moreover, Mr. Bush recently received unfavorable publicity in the Spanish press after a visit to Garfield High School in Los Angeles, home of Jaime Escalante, the teacher who inspired the film ”Stand and Deliver” and who urges students to go to college. According to the news accounts, Mr. Bush implied that Mexican-Americans were needed as laborers and could bypass college, saying ”We need the people who do the hard physical work in our society.”

”It represented a stereotypical view,” said Larry L. Berg, director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California.

Nonetheless, he noted: ”Among Hispanics, I’m seeing some shift away from the Democrats. They’ve taken them for granted. But parties are going to have to pay attention to them.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/06/us/hispanic-vote-is-wooed-with-eye-toward-fall.html

Costa Mesa Consultant Has Won, Lost Some Big Ones : Guiding Clint to Victory ‘Was So Much Fun’

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Apr 10, 1986, Jeffery A. Perlman — Los Angeles Times

Eileen Padberg was sitting in her Costa Mesa office last December when the phone rang and a voice said, “Eileen, this is Clint Eastwood.”

“My immediate response was to tell him, ‘Hey, there’s something I’ve got to get off my chest before you go any further: Go ahead and make my day,’ ” Padberg recalled.

He did.

Eastwood hired Padberg to manage his campaign for mayor of Carmel, a race which he won handily Tuesday amid all the hoopla and hype of an old-fashioned Hollywood movie premiere.

After flying back from Carmel Wednesday afternoon, Padberg reflected on the four-month mayoral race and decided it was the “highlight” of her career “because it was so much fun.”

Padberg, who moved to Orange County from Philadelphia in 1957, began her political career by stuffing envelopes for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. Subsequently, she ran a county supervisor’s campaign and worked as a legislative analyst for the Orange County Employees Assn. in the early 1970s.

Padberg’s successes include former Nevada Gov. Robert List’s 1978 campaign, plus the election and reelection victories of Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates, state Sen. John Seymour (R-Anaheim), Supervisor Thomas F. Riley and Dist. Atty. Cecil Hicks.

She also managed the successful 1982 campaign to defeat a statewide bottle-deposit measure, turned aside a 1984 effort in Santa Barbara County to block a new offshore oil pipeline, defeated a 1980 statewide anti-smoking initiative and in 1984 secured Arizona voters’ adoption of a health care cost-control initiative.

But she has also known defeat.

Padberg and partner Robert Nelson, a former Board of Supervisors aide, ran the unsuccessful campaign two years ago to block San Francisco’s anti-smoking initiative. They also managed the failed 1984 effort on behalf of Proposition A, a 1-cent sales tax for transit projects rejected overwhelmingly by Orange County voters.

The Proposition A defeat was her most disappointing campaign experience, Padberg said, because “I knew that it (the measure) was the right thing. I still do.”

Padberg said she wishes she could have run the Eastwood campaign “for free. . . . Clint was the best candidate I’ve ever worked with. . . . He decided he had hired good talent, and he went with it.”

Padberg said Eastwood paid Costa Mesa-based Nelson-Padberg Communications $18,000 for running his campaign. But with so many political consulting firms out there, why did Eastwood choose Padberg’s company?

According to Padberg, she had an inside track, explaining that she has known Eastwood since they were both active in one of former President Richard M. Nixon’s campaigns. Also, former Nixon speechwriter Ken Khachigian recommended her, Padberg said.

“My base for candidate clients comes mostly from among my friends,” she added.

Padberg, who serves as secretary of the American Assn. of Political Consultants, said Eastwood’s campaign posed special problems.

First, a preelection survey showed that Carmel voters were hostile toward any candidate with a “Hollywood image.” The same survey, taken in January, showed that 52% of the 287 respondents favored retaining the incumbent mayor.

Also, the town was so small (fewer than 5,000 residents) that voters could not be contacted about anything without word spreading rapidly, heavily biasing responses to various campaign polls and messages, she explained.

Another problem was that Eastwood’s base of support–mainly merchants angry with tough regulations on tourist businesses imposed by the incumbent City Council–lived outside the city limits and thus could not vote for him.

Eastwood also insisted that he must have a council majority to serve effectively as mayor, which meant that two Eastwood supporters had to be recruited to run for council seats and that Padberg had to handle their campaigns as well. Both won.

Finally, money became a negative issue, she pointed out. No candidate had ever spent more than $900 in a Carmel election, yet Eastwood paid more than $7,000 just for a preelection survey to assess his chances, even before deciding to run.

Padberg said that Eastwood overcame all of this, especially his negative “Hollywood image” as a rough, tough guy of little substance, by attending dozens of teas and coffees at homes throughout the area. This allowed him to personally meet virtually every voter who had been categorized either as a supporter or as “undecided.”

“It was a textbook case of getting back to the basics of campaigning,” Padberg said. “It worked like a charm.”

There was no use of campaign mail, partly to offset the money issue, and partly because Eastwood had no name identification problem among voters, she said. “Our survey showed that there was nobody who had not heard of him.”

Just as important, no out-of-town news media interviews were allowed.

“The people in Carmel felt that the whole world was watching them,” she said.

Padberg also credited Eastwood’s use of an “actor’s trick,” which he suggested himself, for Tuesday’s victory.

“He sat down with me and said he knew he would have to repeat the same message thousands of times, which is what is required in political campaigns. And he said that he didn’t want to hear himself repeat things so often. He was already getting tired of it. So he said to me: ‘I’ll use an old actor’s trick and change the order and the emphasis (of the issues) each time.’ ”

The technique worked, she said. “The voters never tired of listening to him speak.”

Padberg said that she was as surprised as others to learn that Eastwood is not the “rough, tough” person portrayed on the screen and that he isn’t a male chauvinist.

“I’m an ardent feminist,” Padberg said. “Whenever I go to a party or social gathering, I always leave something of that there. I get my points across. With Clint, that was never necessary.”

Padberg said, however, that it hasn’t always been so easy.

She recalled that former Orange County GOP Chairman Tom Rogers once told her: “There’s no place for women in politics.” Padberg added that Nevada politicians were upset when she was hired to manage List’s 1978 gubernatorial effort. “They didn’t trust a woman, especially one from Southern California,” she recalled. “They didn’t take me seriously.”

Seymour, a state senator, said Padberg has continued to influence his legislative behavior long after the votes were counted on election day.

“She made me recognize that I needed to do something about women’s issues,” Seymour said. “As a result, I’ve introduced several measures that deal with things like rape, physical abuse and child care.”

Padberg said the best advice she has ever received came from presidential political consultant Stu Spencer in 1978, when she voiced doubts that she was ready to run a gubernatorial campaign such as List’s in Nevada.

“He said: ‘Geez, Padberg . . . you have nothing to lose,’ ” Padberg recalled. “If you win, you’re a hero; if you lose they’ll say it was an unwinnable contest anyway,” he observed.

Source: http://articles.latimes.com/1986-04-10/local/me-3143_1_anti-smoking-initiative