Hispanic Media Turns on Obama

I realize that I have been - and continue to be - very critical of Barack Obama's leadership. At times he seems more concerned with trying to appease the far right of the GOP which will hate him and endeavor to destroy him no matter what he does than he is concerned about pushing initiatives to those who put him in office. At this point many in the LGBT community, many environmental groups, and many in the labor movement are feeling very disillusioned with their "fierce advocate." Now, add to that list the Hispanic community. One would almost believe that Obama is out to destroy the allegiance of the party base by his across the board failure to deliver on campaign promises. Personally, I don't know whether it's Obama's White House advisers who are to blame or if its Obama himself. Regardless of where the bad decisions are coming from, the threat to the larger party remains the same. Here are highlights from Politico from on the Hispanic media's active sense of betrayal by Obama:
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President Barack Obama has lost the most trusted man in the Hispanic media. Univision’s Jorge Ramos, an anchor on the nation’s largest Spanish-language television network, says Obama broke his promise to produce an immigration reform bill within a year of taking office. And Latinos are tired of the speeches, disillusioned by the lack of White House leadership and distrustful of the president, Ramos told POLITICO.
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“He has a credibility problem right now with Latinos,” Ramos said. “We’ll see what the political circumstances are in a couple of years, but there is a serious credibility problem.”
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Ramos has been called the Walter Cronkite of Spanish-language media, an unparalleled nationwide voice for Hispanics. And just like the famed CBS newsman’s commentary helped turn the country against the Vietnam War, Ramos may be on the leading edge of a movement within the Hispanic media to challenge the president on immigration — a shift that some observers believe is contributing to Obama’s eroding poll numbers among Latino voters.
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The editorials and commentary from the Spanish-language media have been brutal since April, when Arizona passed its controversial immigration enforcement law — a moment that crystallized a sense of urgency among Latinos but also underscored how little progress the White House had made on reform.
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“Words matter,” Telemundo anchor Jose Diaz-Balart said in April on NBC’s “Meet the Press” — adding that Obama’s campaign promise, known as “La Promesa de Obama,” has gone unfulfilled. “We haven’t seen it.”
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“It is unprecedented what Spanish-language media has been doing over the past several months,” Cancela said in an interview. “Many in the administration thought there was a cozy relationship and the Spanish-language media would play the role of quiet cooperator. It has been a wake-up call.”
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They [Latino voters] held great hopes for the president — given his promise in a May 2008 interview with Ramos to draft an immigration reform bill during his first year in office — but he has deeply disappointed them so far. “Latinos voted overwhelmingly for President Obama, and they expected him to keep his promise and he broke his promise,” said Ramos, author of the recently released book “A Country for All: An Immigrant Manifesto.”
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The swing in opinion couldn’t come at a worse time for Democrats, who need a strong Latino turnout in November if they hope to maintain control of Congress. That voting bloc could be decisive in dozens of competitive House, Senate and gubernatorial races across the West, according to a report by America’s Voice, an immigration reform advocacy group. But polls show signs of trouble.
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Editorial page editors and Spanish-language journalists told POLITICO that their coverage reflects rising frustration in their community. For years, they said, Democratic leaders told Hispanics to be patient; now, their patience has run out.
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At the same time, the Obama administration is set to deport more illegal immigrants this year than during the last year of the Bush administration, expelling otherwise law-abiding workers and tearing families apart.
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Not that it's any great consolation, but the LGBT community is not the only portion of the Democratic Party base to be deliberate thrown under the bus by the Obama administration. If the Democrats are decimated in the November mid-terms, much of the blame for the debacle will be able to be summed up by two words: "Barack Obama." It's far past time that Obama boot Rick Warren from his circle of advisors and if Rahm Emanuel and/or others are involved in the decsions that are pissing off the entire party base, they need to be shown the door as well.