The Coming Latino Revolt (vs. Obama and Democrats)

[pampango]

http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/?p=96807

It’s zero hour for the DREAM Act, a bit of immigration legislation that has taken on a hulking importance among Hispanic leaders. For two years, Barack Obama failed—or, if you prefer, refused—to nudge along a major immigration bill. The last-ditch hope is that departing Democrats, and a few Republicans, somehow band together in the lame-duck session and pass a law allowing illegal immigrants who came to the United States as minors to gain citizenship. Harry Reid promised to bring up the bill for a Senate cloture vote this week. Republicans vowed to scuttle it, just as they did in September.

The DREAM Act, Gutiérrez says, is for now his final legislative maneuver. He’s finished waiting for the mythical 60th vote to materialize in the Senate. No, when the lame duck ends, Gutiérrez and his movement allies will ask for a divorce—from the Democratic Party, from the entire lawmaking process. To hear Gutiérrez tell it, Hispanic leaders are about to stage a full-tilt campaign of direct action, like the African-American civil-rights movement of the 1960s. There will be protests, marches, sit-ins—what César Chávez might have called going rogue. The movement will operate autonomously, no longer beholden to wavering Democrats, filibustering Republicans, and—perhaps most tantalizingly—no longer beholden to Barack Obama.

None of this is to say Latino voters have dumped Obama. “The honeymoon is not quite over,” says Fernand Amandi, the managing partner of the polling firm Bendixen & Amandi. A June Gallup poll showed Obama down more than 10 points among Hispanics. But as the midterms neared, the immigrant salvos of candidates like Jan Brewer and Sharron Angle made the president seem more appealing to Hispanic voters. If Obama had once looked like the hesitator-in-chief, next to Brewer and Angel he looked like César Chávez. Hispanics voted overwhelmingly for Democrats.

This, then, is the dilemma for Hispanic leaders: They find themselves wedded to a president and a party that is their only conceivable hope to pass immigration reform. But the president and the party—because of the GOP, or because of internal priorities—could not pass immigration reform. Which brings us to the divorce. “I haven’t thought this out completely,” Gutiérrez says in the church. Then he begins tentatively spelling out a plan to sever the immigration-reform movement from the Democrats.