La Política, Counting On The Hispanic-Vote Counters

Just in time for Hillary Clinton's bilingual Web page, Barack Obama's three-part telenovela, Christopher Dodd's discursos en español, Craig Romney's Spanish testimonials for papí Mitt, John McCain's immigration reform fracaso, Tom Tancredo's "amnesty" outrage and the simple fact of Bill Richardson: Here comes La Política, turning it all into a beat and a business.

The Web-based newsletter and blog debuted yesterday, dedicated to covering "the business of reaching Hispanic voters." Published in English for a prospective audience of campaign insiders, consultants and media types, the newsletter takes its name from the Spanish word for "politics." The blog is called Platicando -- "chatting."

This is the moment when all the thumb-sucking and hyperventilating over the potential political power of the nation's largest minority goes meta. Until now it was enough to figure out who Latinos are and how to reach them. Now the process of discovery and outreach is itself the subject.

The presidential campaigns are already reacting -- sending tips, getting quoted. But then, we already knew from Heisenberg that the act of scrutinizing can influence what is being scrutinized. The larger question about La Política is whether its advent signals a material change in Latinos' status in the political calculus. Does something become more real when attention is paid?

The people behind La Política are too much old-school-journalist types to make brash claims about Latinos swinging the election. They're just walking the beat.

"We aren't advocates, we aren't activists," says Luis Clemens, the editor, a Cuban American and a former Buenos Aires bureau chief for CNN en Español. "We'll watch and report on the way this plays out."

But he does insist something new is afoot.

"Iowa, Iowa, por Dios!" he says. "Who would have thought there would be competing [Hispanic] voter outreach efforts in Iowa?

"There's a sea change. But whether it's surf's up or a tsunami, I don't know. We'll see over the course of this electoral season. It could end up being a relatively minor political force. It could be heavy on symbolism but lighter in the ballot box. It could turn out that the election is a landslide and it doesn't really matter how Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado go, how Florida goes."

Either way, La Política is having fun making it a story. It tut-tuts grammatical errors on campaigns' Spanish-language Web sites -- even fluent Spanish speaker Bill Richardson's! It tracks canny gambits on behalf of Obama, such as the candidate singing "México Lindo y Querido" on a Los Angeles radio show. Obama supporters not affiliated with the campaign just launched a "Web-based mini-novela," a fictional, serialized political drama about a Latino family that realizes marching in the streets is not enough; one must also vote -- for Obama. The supporters group earlier recorded a reggaetón Obama theme song.

La Política also directs readers to the origins of Latino outreach, posting a video clip of a seminal moment in 1960 when Jackie Kennedy stared wide-eyed into a television camera and spoke for a solid commercial minute in finishing-school Spanish: "Les habla la esposa del senador John F. Kennedy. . . . Que viva Kennedy!"

The publisher is Arturo Villar, a former magazine and feature syndicate editor who was born in Spain and who also is publisher of Hispanic Market Weekly, a 10-year-old publication that reports about 3,000 subscribers and 15,000 readers. The inspiration and model for La Política do not spring from political or social activism -- the instinct to protest that sometimes animates minorities staking a claim on the American stage. Rather, La Política owes more to the capitalist and commercial soul of that sister publication, also based in Coral Gables, Fla. Villar's market weekly is an analytical insider's tip sheet about the work of reaching Hispanic consumers.