President Obama is making education an economic issue. “When it comes to jobs, opportunity, and prosperity in the 21st century, nothing is more important than the quality of your education,” he asserted in his weekly radio address on October 9, 2010. Of course, for Obama, connecting higher education to the economy is a political imperative. Having proposed that the United States place a renewed emphasis on higher education and increase its proportion of college graduates—currently 40.4 percent, lower than eleven other countries—to a world-leading 60 percent by 2020, he now must demonstrate why this initiative deserves attention in the midst of America’s economic woes.

The moment is ripe to examine the politics and policy of higher education. Yet we might enter this conversation with some trepidation. This magazine is based at perhaps the world’s most iconic institution of higher education, but debates about undergraduate education at Harvard rarely focus on the economic value of a bachelor’s degree or the marketable skills it confers.

Instead, the discourse concentrates on questions like those raised by recent HPR endpapers, such as whether the West should have pride of place in the curriculum or whether Harvard students ought to eschew lucrative banking and consulting careers. These debates are often premised on the notion that what Harvard students learn or do in their formative years is especially significant because these students may go on to affect history. Rather than merely equipping the workforce of the future, Harvard imagines itself to be preparing the leaders of tomorrow.

Yet a conceptual divide between institutions that train workers and institutions that educate an elite threatens the fabric of democracy. In a country such as ours, all educational institutions in fact share at least one task in common: preparing every student to be a citizen. This responsibility is rarely discussed when it comes to higher education; we simply presume Civics has been taught in high school and leave it at that.

Just as the 21st century requires an increasingly educated workforce, however, it also demands a more educated citizenry. Citizens unfamiliar with statistics will be deceived by misrepresented data; those with no knowledge of the cultures, religions, languages, or even names of foreign countries can hardly parse international relations, while those who know very little of biology may find it impossible to take a position in bioethical debates.

Insisting that we should devote greater resources to the universal education of our citizens reflects genuine commitment to equality. Restricting certain areas of learning to a ruling class would be antithetical to the modern American system.

Not that it has always been so; Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of the gentleman farmer was someone whose leisure and comfort enabled him to study and judge from a position of detachment. But in embracing the universal franchise and the equal citizenship of everyone born in America, the United States has chosen a different path. Rather than cause us to decouple education from citizenship, however, this more inclusive model should prompt us to focus on education as the only way to move beyond formal equality and equip all citizens to actively exercise their rights. Again and again, elected officials stress that educational opportunity leads to economic success; we must become similarly preoccupied with its positive effects on democratic deliberation among all citizens, not just the elite.

For broad democratic citizenship itself is one of the assets American society brings to the 21st century. The more educated and empowered Americans feel as citizens, the more they will view the inevitable challenges ahead as obstacles to be jointly surmounted rather than problems that some distant government should confront. Improved higher education, therefore, may be an economic imperative, but it is also a democratic necessity.

Kenzie Bok ‘11 is a former Covers Editor.

Yet over a year later, the story of America’s current economy is one of institutional continuity. Sustained by taxpayer aid, independent firm Goldman Sachs continues to issue stratospheric bonuses, while major automaker GM emerges from bankruptcy less debt-laden but not necessarily more nimble. Consensus regulatory reforms, whether regarding shareholder influence on executive pay or constraints placed on banks , retain a great deal of deference towards financial institutions’ instincts for self-interest. Calls for the Federal Reserve to take a more activist role are rebuffed by experts who emphasize its traditional institutional function, that of overseeing monetary policy. And the mantra of “green jobs” comes in for criticism as mere economic window-dressing, an example of political interests promoting an agenda that cannot be institutionally sustained within the economy.

Meanwhile, whether the economic crisis has redefined the role of our home institution – Harvard University – in the financial system remains unresolved. We sent fewer graduates to Wall Street last year than in previous ones, but opportunities to enter finance were also scarcer. And we cannot yet know whether history will view our many professors-turned-policymakers in Washington as bold innovators, or as modest stabilizers.

The question, of course, is whether the government was so quick to tie achieving economic recovery to protecting institutions that it missed the opportunity for “challenging current conceptions,” as Shaw put it, about how the economy ought to function. On the one hand, “creative destruction” of companies and financial structures sounds more appealing before it throws lives into chaos. On the other hand, as the stock market rebounds but unemployment enters double digits, many Americans are left wondering what we have missed. In a society preoccupied both with its own stability and its sense of progress, such dueling concerns are not easily reconciled.

While the drug czars have vacillated about whether drug policy should count as war, the American understanding of war itself has changed. Since the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States understands war to be more akin to drug interdiction. Specifically, it is now an acknowledged fact of war that taking too uncompromising a line can threaten a fragile society.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. commanders struggle to root out enemies from among civilians without disrupting social stability in the process. Domestic drug policy faces the same challenge: mandatory minimum sentences, designed to harshly punish drug dealers, instead undermine the urban communities they were meant to protect (p. 16). Contributing to a prison-overcrowding crisis, this situation demands more careful efforts to distinguish between nonviolent drug users and the truly dangerous (p. 8).

The importance of such distinctions extends abroad to countries where the United States can succeed if it views drug-producing farmers differently from drug-financed terrorists. In both Afghanistan (p. 9) and Columbia (p. 18), the way forward is not eradication of drug crops, which dissuades few and angers many, but creation of alternative markets; so long as opium and coca remain profitable, they will also remain widely grown. In the same way, Mexico’s drug trade is unlikely to disappear while the incentives to sell drugs in the United States remain so lucrative (p. 13).

To alter these circumstances would require a shift toward a more dispassionate legal and economic understanding of drug activity. Domestically, this is already underway. Legal strategies addressing prescription drug abuse, for example, seek not so much to catch users as to make prescriptions harder to forge (p. 11). In Massachusetts, decriminalization of small quantities of marijuana aims to decrease user arrests (p. 12). And the Obama administration’s decision to deemphasize federal drug laws will shift power to the states, with some taking more lenient stances (p. 14).

Of course, these policies represent incremental, rather than seismic, change. Moral concerns over drug use keep arguments for legalization out of the mainstream debate (p. 15), and frenzied media reaction to drug “crises” will continue to prompt harsh congressional action (p. 17). Yet the overall trend suggests that Americans perceive the hard-line approach of the past decades to have harmed the social fabric that drug interdiction is supposed to protect. A sophisticated definition of war, such as that developed through public discourse about Afghanistan and Iraq, can accommodate this pragmatic approach. While “War on Drugs” language is likely to persist, perhaps a simplistic understanding of it will not. ♦

Since 1630, when John Winthrop first exhorted his fellow Puritans to “be as a city upon a hill,” America has preoccupied itself with serving as an exemplar. Indeed, perhaps no belief plays a more important role in the American psyche than the concept of national perfectibility. Speaking of a “more perfect union,” the U.S. Constitution’s preamble imagines a country in which the aims of justice, peace, welfare, and liberty are every day better met. American political rhetoric adopts this outlook on both sides of the aisle, debating goals and priorities but never asserting that any condition could be impervious to improvement. To claim so would be to circumscribe the limits of American possibility and thereby commit an unpardonable political sin.

Yet when it comes to America’s cities, vibrant homes to the majority of the country’s inhabitants, a more fatalistic attitude towards urban problems can undercut our optimistic national creed. Many Americans have come to consider certain disadvantages as intrinsic to urban life. We accept that homeless people (p. 6) and gangs (p. 12) are part of urban street life. We expect urban schools, with rare exceptions, to perform poorly (p. 7). The housing projects seem to us to demonstrate the futility of efforts to provide large-scale urban affordable housing (p. 10), and fears of ‘gentrification’ seem to poison any attempt at urban renewal (p. 15). As public transportation and road construction lag behind increases in urban density, traffic congestion appears destined to worsen our commutes (p. 11). We find urban politics as corrupt and obtuse as ever (p. 14), and we fear that urban economies remain reliant on manufacturing and thus highly vulnerable to the global recession (p. 9).

These assertions are articles of received wisdom about urban areas, ideas legitimized mostly by frequent repetition. Yet cities across America contradict these common assumptions, demonstrating the possibility of making major progress by tackling urban problems head-on. Some issues simply require a new innovative approach, such as congestion pricing for traffic, while other problems, such as gang-violence and affordable housing, demand renewed commitment to multifaceted solutions. In still other cases, as with homelessness, the public attitude itself is a critical stumbling block to overcome; ever since urban officials began to perceive homelessness as an ill society could end, for example, new tactics aimed at housing people have proven remarkably successful. Such efforts belie the assumption that urban problems have no remedy.

Close analysis of America’s cities reveals that urban reform is alive and well. This reform is also ripe for replication, as nearly every urban challenge has been addressed by an innovative new policy somewhere in the United States. It is never too soon to begin expanding success, as real people’s lives are shaped in the meantime by the education, housing, and opportunities of their urban environment. The work is not easy, but nor is it hopeless. In the great self-perfecting project of America, cities have a central role to play.

In December 1999, Kansas Insurance Commissioner Kathleen Sebelius expressed concern that new privacy rules imposed by the federal department of Health and Human Services would undercut state jurisdiction over health information. Federal bureaucracy, she argued, could not handle enforcement as nimbly as the states. A decade later, Sebelius will have the opportunity to prove herself wrong, as she takes the helm as Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Obama.

Over the past six years, Sebelius has served one-and-a-half terms as the Democratic governor of heavily-Republican Kansas. Supporters often cite her record of negotiation and compromise with Kansas’s Republican legislature as an indication that she will be able to forge the necessary bipartisan partnerships to get major healthcare reform passed. Yet a closer examination of her relationship with the Kansas state legislature reveals significant differences between that situation and the congressional dynamics that Sebelius will face as Secretary. The fact that she will need to build coalitions within her own party, rather than across the aisle, to succeed in healthcare reform means that Sebelius’s past performance is of little help in predicting her future success; she will have to employ new tactics to succeed in her new role.

Bipartisanship in Kansas?

In his March 2 announcement of her appointment, President Obama praised Governor Sebelius for having “time and again … bridged the partisan divide and worked with a Republican legislature to get things done for the people of Kansas.” Christian Morgan, Executive Director of the Kansas Republican Party, describes it differently; “I would say she knows how to work in the same state as Republicans. I would challenge the assertion that she actually works with Republicans,” he told the HPR. “She doesn’t hold a lot of meetings for negotiations, brainstorming, all the things a true bipartisan would do.”

State Senator Jim Barnett, who opposed Sebelius in her successful 2006 reelection bid, credited her success to internal rifts in the party in an interview with the HPR. As he came to know through chairing both the Senate Public Health and Welfare committee and the Joint Committee on Health Policy Oversight, “Governor Sebelius has been a very savvy politician, taking advantage of the Republican split between conservatives and moderates to obtain coalition votes to pass or block legislation.” Indeed, a disagreement over social issues had split Kansas Republicans into two parallel organizations, the conservative Kansas Republican Assembly and the moderate Kansas Traditional Republican Majority. That divide allowed Sebelius to use her veto to great effect, particularly against anti-abortion bills, as her opponents rarely mustered the votes to override a veto.

Nonetheless, State Senator Laura Kelly, Democratic Minority Whip and a member of the Senate Public Health and Welfare committee, disputes the Republican assertion that Governor Sebelius has only succeeded through division. “Certainly,” she told the HPR, “if the Republican Party in the state of Kansas marched in lockstep, no Democrat could get anything done.” But Sebelius, she insists, is “a very good consensus-builder, regardless of party. She figures out how to draw people to the table.” Perhaps most importantly, Kelly argues, “She lets ideas be someone else’s. Getting credit is not highest on her priority list, whomever she’s working with.” As an example of this strategy, Kelly cites the Kansas Health Policy Authority, an institution established during Sebelius’s tenure to consolidate the management of various state health programs and act as a sort of Public Health policy house. According to Kelly, “[Governor Sebelius] originally suggested creating it by Executive Order, but then the Republicans co-opted the idea and put it in the form of a free-standing agency and authority. She was willing to go along with the Republicans to make it happen.”

Barnett and Morgan agree that the establishment of the Health Policy Authority is one of the most significant health-related accomplishments of the Governor’s tenure, but they are dismissive of Sebelius’s role in its creation. “Her idea of a government entity to run state health policy in the state was more big-brother-like,” Morgan insists, “while the Republican version is like a government-run think-tank. The Governor will take credit, but when it comes to the actual work on the HPA it wasn’t her at all.” Barnett sees this pattern elsewhere, holding up ‘safety-net clinics’ for the uninsured and underinsured as another legislative initiative which Sebelius claims as a Democratic victory but which in fact already enjoyed broad support in the legislature. In Kelly’s view, of course, “Republicans taking credit for ‘safety-net clinics’ is a little disingenuous. It was actually my idea; while I worked with a Republican on it, they were only going to put in half [the funding].”

Leaving Kansas for the Emerald City

The debate over relative ‘credit’ for various initiatives reflects the typical acrimony of divided state government. Of course, neither the Republican depiction of a governor at the mercy of the legislature, nor Obama’s sweeping assessment of Sebelius as a great uniter, seems especially plausible. More than anything, however, the debate indicates how different Sebelius’s challenges in her new role will be from those of her governorship. Although her experience with coalition building in Kansas is often cited as one of Sebelius’s qualifications for overseeing healthcare reform, the coalition she must help the Obama Administration build in Washington is very unlike the ones she built at home.

Sebelius is adept at concocting strategies that pull policy from the ideological right towards the center. The advantage of this situation is that it masks a politician’s true ideology; activists from the left may assume that they have her sympathies, while independents give her credit for the centrist policies she enacts. Reconciling the full spectrum of positions within the Democratic party, however, promises to be a challenge for both Obama and Sebelius because it will require them to reveal some of their ‘true’ ideology on healthcare, and thereby alienate some portion of the party base.

Sebelius, to be sure, can claim that she is merely negotiating on behalf of Obama, but as a potential future contender for the Presidency she does not have the luxury of fully abdicating responsibility. Obama may have selected her in part to build relationships with moderate Republicans — whose potential support can be used as an excuse for ignoring more extreme liberal proposals — but doing so runs the risk of establishing her national profile as too moderate to ever win Democratic presidential primaries. On the other hand, if Barnett is correct in his expectation that Sebelius will “move very much to the left” in her new position, any future bid for a seat in Kansas’ Senate delegation will be somewhat more difficult.

Furthermore, the extent to which Sebelius and Obama’s healthcare agendas align are unclear. Known as a moderate Democrat, her approach to healthcare has focused on efficiency and has always trumpeted the cause of small businesses, an important constituency in Kansas. Obama employs some of the same rhetoric, to be sure, but the two may diverge somewhat on policy. One early signal of perceived divergence is that Sebelius was not offered the same dual role originally marked for Tom Daschle. As both HHS Secretary and head of the White House Office of Health Reform, a newly created office within the West Wing, Daschle would have been both public face of healthcare reform and the president’s foremost policy advisor on the subject; Sebelius will be forced to contend with the potentially divergent views of Nancy-Ann DeParle, whom Obama chose instead.

Accustomed to leading her state Democratic Party, Sebelius will have to adjust to advocating a policy that may not be her own. Besides DeParle and the president himself, she will need to cultivate a strong relationship with Max Baucus, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and the most important congressional voice on the issue besides Ted Kennedy. Thus far, Baucus’s unqualified support for Sebelius’s nomination bodes well on this front. Yet, ultimately, his is not the only support she will need: her relationships with all of the key players on the Democratic side will be critically important in determining the success of Obama’s proposal to provide a public health plan option for citizens to select in place of private insurance.

As former DNC Chairman Howard Dean told the HPR, “healthcare reform without a public option is not worth doing.” But Dean conceded that some conservative Democrats concur with the Republican view that this policy would threaten the free market and lead inevitably to a single-payer system, given government’s ability to operate at a loss and undercut private prices. Uniting Democrats behind a ‘public option,’ distinct from a single-payer system in that the public plan would be offered but not mandated, Dean asserted, “will be an essential aspect of achieving health care reform.” Kelly is certain that “everything [Governor Sebelius] does will be with the ultimate goal of equal access to affordable healthcare,” but the exact nuances of Sebelius’s position on providing a public health plan option are not yet clear. She and the other chief Democratic voices on health care will have to present a consistent view on this issue if they are to unify their caucus and win over at least two Senate Republicans to prevent a filibuster.

Uncertain Path Ahead

In her new role as HHS Secretary, Governor Kathleen Sebelius will confront a host of new challenges. Her experience as an insurance commissioner gives her a very detailed understanding of the healthcare system, her move to combine all of Kansas’s health-related government operations into one Health Policy Authority shows that she believes in efficiency, and her management style as governor indicates that she will be a competent administrator of existing policy and whatever new law may be enacted. But her past experience does not provide her with a clear model of how to succeed in passing national comprehensive healthcare reform, her most significant new responsibility as Secretary of Health and Human Services. To succeed in that task, she will have to adapt her leadership strategy as governor to a different style of forging coalitions. Her success in making this transition could permanently shape the future of American health care policy.

“A wise man’s country is the world,” Aristippus, an ancient Greek philosopher, once said. Many others have since echoed his sentiment that individuals ought to identify with broader humanity rather than with nations.  In more recent decades, astronauts have joined this chorus, suggesting that a world without borders is not an aspiration so much as a fact: viewed from outer space, Earth shows no boundaries. As Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Kovalyonok said, “After an orange cloud — formed as a result of a dust storm over the Sahara and caught up by air currents — reached the Philippines and settled there with rain, I understood that we are all sailing in the same boat.” An American counterpart concurred: “I watched the extent of one ocean touch the shores of separate continents,” said astronaut John-David Bartoe. “Two words leaped to mind as I looked down on all this: commonality and interdependence.”

Yet as modern societies transition to a more global definition of community, they do so not out of respect for their sages or their heroes but out of necessity. Problems that imperil human existence confound nation-based solutions. Nuclear materials are so plentiful and scattered that only a worldwide effort can keep non-state actors from harnessing their deadly potential. Human contributions to climate change threaten to unleash forces we cannot control, on polluters and non-polluters alike. And only close public health coordination among countries can prevent an infectious disease outbreak from becoming a global pandemic.

Some issues must be approached globally for the sake of mutual prosperity. Water shortages, which can cripple a society, can be mitigated only by good international stewardship. The international financial system has few built-in checks to prevent risky decisions in one nation from triggering worldwide economic ruin, and nationalistic trade restrictions can impoverish the global community.

Other questions defy the age-old concept of states as the basic unit of international relations. How can the world address crises in areas like the Congo, where a nominal state is a lawless deathtrap, or in the Kurdish regions of the Middle East, where an alternative “national” identity subverts political boundaries? How can Israel fight Hamas and still reconcile with the civilians Hamas purports to represent? If threats to member state security now exist beyond Europe, does NATO’s mandate extend to Afghanistan?

These questions have no easy answers, and in many cases international cooperation is insufficient to meet their challenges. But countries and their citizens are increasingly compelled to consider global consequences of their decisions. Furthermore, as the world community grows tighter, it imposes the moral claims that come with every community. A country’s responsibility to end the persisting evil of slavery, for example, is no longer satisfied by eradication within its borders but only by ending the scourge on a global level. A complete awareness of such moral duties is perhaps the most distant phase of global interdependence, yet it becomes inevitable as we contemplate a world beyond borders.

In 2005, President George W. Bush selected John G. Roberts and Samuel A. Alito to serve as the 109th and 110th justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Roberts’ confirmation went relatively smoothly, while Alito’s, in the wake of the aborted nomination of Harriet Miers, White House Counsel and the president’s long-time associate, saw stormier hearings in the Senate. In both cases, the men answered questions about their most recent job experience: sitting on a U.S. Court of Appeals. This prior judicial experience gave the nominees something in common with the wide ideological spectrum of justices they would join; like Roberts and Alito, every other sitting Supreme Court justice had served on a lower court prior to nomination.

While this fact may not at first seem surprising, only 50 of the 110 justices ever appointed have come from the ranks of sitting judges. Past justices have included cabinet secretaries, politicians, and life-long scholars. Despite the election of President Obama, who has hinted at an interest in unconventional judges, this trend towards Supreme Court nominees with judicial experience seems unlikely to change. The preference of presidents, senators, and interest groups for predictable justices and the greater ease with which lower-court judges, compared to politicians and academics, can hide their normative views from the public eye, will continue to make prior judicial experience a highly valued qualification.

Predictability is Primary

The desire for predictable nominees begins with the president. As Ryan J. Owens, an assistant professor of government at Harvard University, told the HPR, presidents “want to avoid uncertainty with their nominations, in so far as whether or not the nominees will be confirmed and what type of decisions they’ll make on the Court. You can minimize that uncertainty with current federal circuit court judges.” Appeals court judges hear similar cases as Supreme Court justices, albeit without the same breadth of interpretive power, and therefore give the president some sense of how they might rule. Even if the president has private reasons to believe he knows the judicial philosophy of the nominee, such as President Bush may have had regarding Harriet Miers, a pick without judicial experience risks failure in the Senate. Because senators feel thwarted in their “advice and consent” role by the existence of any private understanding to which they are not privy between the president and the nominee, the mere perception that someone is a “stealth candidate” could sink the nomination.

Justices without a judicial record, the conventional wisdom goes, might turn out very differently than expected. Indeed, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, winner of the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Supreme Court, cited the unpredictability of non-judge nominees as an argument for choosing them in an interview with the HPR. “My kind of judge,” he said, “is an unpredictable judge. I’d like a Supreme Court that isn’t perfectly predictable, where judges make decisions based on what they think is right rather than strict ideology.” The increased preference for lower-court judges as Supreme Court nominees due to their predictability, he argued, is sub-optimal because “the job is not just to narrowly interpret statutes. It’s terribly important to have people who have run for office and who have gained wisdom from other life experience. They understand the public more than a lot of judges who may have spent all their adult life in law school or on the bench.” Non-judicial life experience, Lewis argued, shapes justices’ decisions in important ways that even they cannot anticipate.

Todd Gaziano, Director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think-tank, takes the opposite position. “The Supreme Court is too important to take a stab at,” he said to the HPR. In his view, “the work of a Supreme Court justice has become more specialized as more of our life has become constitutionalized.” People without judicial experience, he asserted, are simply not qualified to tackle the job. Not only that, but, “senators, for example, make uniformly horrible justices. They don’t really do law, so we don’t know what they’re going to do.” In other words, Gaziano contended, former politicians bring their political beliefs to the Court and lack a coherent legal philosophy to assess during the confirmation process.

In terms of predictability of legal philosophy, however, even scrutiny of the nominee’s prior judicial record does not provide absolute insurance against a surprise. Justice David H. Souter, for example, was nominated by President George H.W. Bush in 1990. Based on his record on New Hampshire’s Supreme Court, Republicans expected Souter to be a reliably conservative judge, but he instead joined the Court’s more liberal wing. His case highlights a major advantage of nominees who have spent significant time on the bench: they leave a more opaque paper trail than most other candidates.

No Room for Normativity

This advantage, counterintuitive at first, stems from the fact that legal decisions in lower courts rarely make normative arguments. Particularly on appellate courts, they mostly require the application of pre-existing precedent, set by the Supreme Court. A judge can therefore ground each decision in the specifics of the case and the language of the law, rather than making the broader arguments of Constitutional intent inherent in a Supreme Court decision. A nominee with prior judicial experience can therefore insist, when a senator tries to extrapolate the judge’s broader view from a particular decision, that he or she merely applied a technical understanding of the law, not any deep-seated legal belief. This defense allows the nominees to differentiate their past activities as subordinate decision-makers from their future roles on the Supreme Court as free interpretive agents. Politicians, in contrast, have a lifetime of votes to indicate their normative positions. And legal academics, another potential pool of justices, also “have a tendency to take positions that could be used against them” according to Owens. Gaziano concurred, noting that academic articles on abstract principles like religious freedom or privacy have the potential to undermine a confirmation hearing.

Regardless of the relative merits of academic or political Supreme Court candidates, the trend of selecting justices with prior judicial experience seems unlikely to reverse anytime soon. In the meantime, attempts to expand the judicial pool to include more political practitioners and academics may be channeled towards the appellate courts, for which the stakes are lower and confirmation hearings garner less public attention. This strategy could lead to a slow shift in the makeup of the federal courts, and eventually in the Supreme Court itself. Whether such a development would mark a return to a proud tradition or a regression from an improved set of norms depends, as does so much else, on one’s attitude towards America’s highest court.

How President Bush Won Latino Voters and His Party Lost Them Again
By Kenzie Bok ‘11

“George W. Bush’s first foreign trip as President was not to a traditional European ally but to a ranch in a remote region of Mexico, where he met with another newly-elected cowboy president: Vicente Fox.”  As Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, University Professor and Co-Director of Immigration Studies at NYU, pointed out in an interview with the HPR, this symbolic gesture in 2001 signaled President Bush’s intention to make Latin American relations central to his policy agenda.  He had just received roughly 34 percent of the Latino vote in the 2000 general election, a remarkable achievement for a Republican candidate.  Latinos had traditionally been considered, like African-Americans, a secure part of the Democratic base.  In 2004, however, Bush expanded his support among Latinos to approximately 40 percent, prompting speculation that permanently increasing the number of Republican Latinos could be a surefire way to grow the Republican base.

By 2008, however, partisans on both sides of the aisle agree that this trend has reversed.  A slow trickle of Latinos back towards Democrats in 2006 became a flood in 2007 after House Republicans defeated a bill, advocated by President Bush, which would have paired stronger border security with a path to citizenship for some illegal immigrants already in the country.  The decrease in Latino support for the GOP ticket this year begs the question of whether Bush’s temporary inroads will leave any lasting legacy that could help to expand the Republican base.  Unfortunately for the Republicans, the party’s recent shift towards trumpeting deportation and anti-immigrant rhetoric seems to have not only reversed Bush’s advances in bringing Latinos into the Republican Party but also rendered this success unlikely to be repeated in the near future.

The Economy & “Family Values” Why Latino Support Can “Swing”
The apparent susceptibility of the Latino vote to Republican courtship can be traced to the priorities of the Latino voter, for whom immigration is often not the most important issue.  According to comments made to the HPR by Clarissa Martinez-De-Castro, director for Immigration and National Campaigns at the National Council of La Raza, “There is no question that the top issues for Latinos have for years been the economy, jobs, and education.”  Alex Castellanos, a prominent Republican strategist and media consultant, offered the HPR a similar assessment, saying that, “In the second Bush campaign we found that the most accessible Latino votes for us were homeowners and aspiring homeowners.  It wasn’t so much where you were from as where you were going.”

Social issues also matter a great deal to Latino voters. As Edward Schumacher-Matos, CEO and founder of Rumbo Newspapers and Meximerica Media, told the HPR, “When Republicans began pushing values issues, especially abortion, that really resonated with Hispanic voters.  They stopped voting in their economic interest and stated voting for their cultural values.” The conflict between these two sets of criteria leads, according to Martinez-De-Castro, to a great deal of split ticket voting and openness to candidates of both parties.

President Bush & the Latino Vote: A Road Paved With Good Intentions
While the economy and family values may be of primary importance to Latino voters, immigration nonetheless plays a key role in their decision-making.  In the words of Suarez-Orozco, “Latinos as voters behave just like everyone else, except in regards to immigration.  There, they have more refined sensibilities and feel that a broken immigration policy is a greater threat to them than to others.”  As Martinez-De-Castro put it, “immigration does not rank at the top of the Latino issue agenda, but it is a way in which Latinos gauge support and respect for their community.”  While they do not agree on one position any more than does the rest of the population, they do expect a certain moderation of tone.  This attitude explains Latinos’ concern with the shift in Republican rhetoric on immigration over the last three years.

In his first presidential term, Martinez-De-Castro explained, President Bush had a great deal of goodwill built up from his governorship of Texas.  She and Schumacher-Matos both referenced Bush’s staunch opposition in the 1990s to the anti-immigrant demagoguery occurring in California under Republican Governor Peter Wilson as an example of a moment in which Bush gained the Latino community’s trust.  Schumacher-Matos contends that the President genuinely intended to focus on immigration reform and Latin America policy early in his term but that the events of Sept. 11, 2001 prevented him from making headway on those issues.  Comprehensive immigration reform had to wait until 2007, when President Bush finally sought to push it through Congress.  With little political capital left to spend, however, he watched conservative members of his own party defeat the measure because of provisions allowing some illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.

Latinos and the GOP: Bridges Burned?
The fractious debate in 2007 included a great deal of anti-immigrant language.  Martinez-De-Castro pointed out, however, that, “in the 2006 midterms you could already see immigration being manipulated to stir up the Republican base, and in November of 2006 you already saw Latinos leaving the ranks of the Republican Party.”  In Schumacher-Matos’ view, the last three years have brought a shift in which “the Republican party has become more populist, more angry, and so anti-immigrant that it is taken as anti-Hispanic.”  The Southern Poverty Law Center found that the recent increase in anti-immigrant fervor has lead to more hate crimes and racial profiling of Latinos.  Schumacher-Matos even declared that “the Republicans have lost the Hispanic vote for a generation” because of the perceived anti-Latino nature of their tone.

Castellanos agreed that much of the Republican problem regarding the Latino community is tonal.  “The Republican message about securing our borders needs to be coupled with a message that America is a land of immigrants,” he says.  In his view, however, “the best Republican strategy to gain Hispanic votes is to grow the economy.”  Far from accepting Schumacher-Matos’ dire predictions, Castellanos believes that Republicans can repeat Bush’s high-water mark by returning to the message of compassionate conservatism.

Looking Forward: A Challenge for the Party
Castellanos’ approach, however, is easier described than implemented.  A declining economy is likely to only make anti-immigrant rhetoric more appealing to some Republican constituents. President Bush demonstrated how a Republican candidate whose campaign aggressively courts Latinos could garner significant Latino support, yet even his example and the nomination of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who supported comprehensive immigration reform in 2007, has not sufficiently moderated the Republican tone to reassure Latino voters.  If individual leadership will not suffice, perhaps future defeat at the polls will convince the Republican Party to address the tarnished image of its brand among Latinos.  Until that moment arrives, however, Bush’s legacy will have little impact and the Republican Party will not gain support in the growing Latino demographic.