Barack Obama met with faith-based leaders in Brownsville on Friday, participating in what his campaign called a prayer meeting as part of the senator’s ongoing efforts to show America that a leading Democrat “gets it” about religion and politics.

I wonder if somewhere on his way to Brownsville the leading Dem candidate for president got a prayer of an idea about the importance of trade and commerce in our part of the world as it relates to business ties with Mexico. Obama and his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, have been trying to out do each other over the last week in Ohio in their denunciations of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The two Dem candidates had a wonderful “me too” moment in their last debate, this one in Cleveland, where they both promised to pull this nation out of NAFTA, if necessary, unless Canada and Mexico meet U.S. demands to renegotiate the 15-year-old trade pact.  It remains a mystery as to why Obama and Clinton believe either Mexico or Canada would agree to any such negotiations, or even if a majority of Congress would go along with such a notion.

The three-nation trade agreement has become a handy scapegoat in Ohio for all that ails the state’s economy. With that state and Texas voting on March 4 in two criticial primaries that could decide the Democratic presidential race, Clinton and Obama are fallng over themselves in pandering to the protectionist leanings of Ohio.

Obama had this this gem the other day as reported by the Chicago Tribune.

“In Youngstown, Ohio, I’ve talked to workers who have seen their plants shipped overseas as a consequence of a bad trade deal like NAFTA, literally seeing equipment unbolted from the floors of factories and shipped to China,” Obama said.

Uh, senator, NAFTA involves the U.S., Mexico and Canada. How exactly is NAFTA to blame for the loss of jobs to China? In reality, according to one economist at Cleveland State University, NAFTA is directly responsible for less than 10 percent of the manufacturing jobs Ohio has lost since 2000. The reminder of the job losses are due to the general globalization of industries, the greater efficiencies sparked by the relentless march of improving technologies, and some bad business strategies on the part of some U.S. companies.

“It’s easy to blame the bogeyman (NAFTA), rather than the failed business strategies of Ford, GM, or Chrysler,” said Ned Hill, an economist at Cleveland State, in an story published last week by The Christian Science Monitor.

Here’s getting to the heart of this issue as stated so well in a recent USA Today editorial: “The reality is that NAFTA has relatively little to do with either the overall job losses or job gains. China is a far larger force…as has been the unprecedented and sweeping gains in worker productivity that have allowed U.S. companies to churn out more goods with fewer people.”

There’s lot more. How about the 25 million jobs that have been added to the U.S. economy since NAFTA’s passage? Or the fact that the U.S. unemployment rate has declined from 6.7 percent when NAFTA took effect to today’s 4.9 percent rate. There’s also the matter of trade between Mexico and the U.S. growing from $81 billion to $232 billion over the first 10 years of the trade pact’s existence.

And here’s something you won’t hear from Obama or Clinton. USA Today reports that the supposedly NAFTA-ravaged Ohio has seen a net gain of 900,000 jobs since the trade pact took effect, with new jobs in finance, professional services and health care more than making up for losses in manufacturing.

NAFTA has also helped to save U.S. jobs, according to John Engler, president fo the National Association of Manufacturers. Englier told the Wall Street Journal last week that under NAFTA many U.S. firms “found they could be more globally competitive by putting some manufacturing in Mexico or Canada while retaining high-end production in the U.S.” The bottom line result: “Such flexibility may have saved thousands of U.S. jobs from going abroad,” the Journal reports.

Even for all of the doom and gloom coming from Obama and Clinton about NAFTA and trade in general, data compiled by a Harvard economist shows that the average U.S. blue-collar worker’s wages, when adjusted for inflation, have risen by 11 percent since NAFTA passed.

“Instead of driving pay scales down, it (NAFTA),  appears to have pulled them up,” wrote Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune.

Another Obama gem on trade came when he said in Ohio last week that NAFTA “hasn’t put food on the table” of Ohio families. That’s debatable, but greater volumes of trade and commerce under NAFTA have surely put plenty of food on the tables of South Texas families, not to mention helped to push up household income levels in our area.

Democrats on the national level are still locked into old political scripts in which their party is tied to traditional constituencies in the Rust Belt, ignoring the growth and vitality of states in the Sun Belt and the Southwest. This helps to explain why the Dems have strugged so much in this wide section of America. Obama and Clinton are mouthing more of the same old, same old on economic and trade matters, putting the Rust Belt and the demands of fading labor unions over the emergence of the Southwest and the possibilities of a new day in America.

On matters of trade, Obama ought to follow his promise to tell Americans not what they want to hear, but what they need to hear. That’s what he did when he was running for the U.S. Senate in Illinois in 2004, when “he told Illinois farmers that the U.S. benefits from exports under the World Trade Organization and NAFTA, and he recommended that the U.S. go after more deals like it,” the Wall Street Journal reported last week.

“As an exporting state,” Obama said back then, “Illinois would be hurt by a trade war sparked by tariffs,” which would be “particularly devastating to our agricultural economy.”

Somewhere on the road to Ohio, Obama and her rival Hillary, (whose husband Bill pushed NAFTA through Congress as president), lost their way on trade, and became the same old Democrats, saying the same old things, and promising the same old results, to paraphrase a Barack chant.

Maybe if he is elected president, Obama will not only find religion at meetings of faith, but also get a prayer of an idea how more trade and commerce benefits America.

Joaquin Tijerina, Official Chisme Columnist & Blogger

Steve Nash, the peerless point guard of the Phoenix Suns, offers up a saucy take on the need for basketball balance between fundamental play and the flamboyance of high-flying players.

“People say they want the league, (NBA), to have more (funadmental play), but if they’re going to choose one, they’re going to go with the badass dunks,” Nash recently told Sports Illustrated.

It reminds me, in a way, of your average American who whines about the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs to overseas factories and the corporations who ship those jobs to foreign locations. Greedy corporations, they say, robbing Americans of jobs while paying foreigners much lower wages and fewer benefits.

Then, later in the day, those same Americans are shopping at Wal-Mart, buying manufactured products at the lower prices that U.S. consumers demand and expect, which in good part, are made possible by manufaturing products in other countries. In other words, many Americans say they want manufacturing jobs kept here, (fundamental play), but then hurry off to the world’s biggest discounter to buy products at the lowest prices to save money, (the slam dunk).

“We want clean air, clear water, good living conditions, the best health care in the world,” said Steve Dobbins, the president of a North Carolina-based company that supplies thread, yarn and textile finishing to clothing makers. “Yet we, (U.S. consumers), aren’t willing to pay for anything manufactured under those conditions.”

Here’s what Dobbins is saying: Many U.S. consumers say they want America’s manufacturing base protected and restored, but don’t want to pay the higher prices it will take to provide the American worker with the pay and benefits he or she believes are entitlements to employment here. The proof: 97 percent of the U.S. population lives within 25 miles of a Wal-Mart as Americans clamor for the low product prices that the world’s largest retailer provides.

That statistic and the Dobbins comment are cited in the book, The Wal-Mart Effect, which details how the retail giant has wrung the lowest prices possible from its suppliers, who are also squeezed by American consumers who need and want lower prices, even if it means manufacturing has to go elsewhere.

“The cost structure of operating manufacturing plants in the United States is just enormously out of sync with what (American) people want to pay. Dramatically,” said Barbara Lucas, a senior vice president for Black & Decker, as quoted in The Wal-Mart Effect.

All of this ties into the rather pathetic pandering that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are currently displaying in Ohio as they scurry for votes leading up to an important March 4 primary in the Midwest state. At Tuesday’s debate in Cleveland, both Democratic presidential candidates said they would pull the United States out of the North American Free Trade Agreement unless Canada and Mexico agreed to renegotiate the pact.

NAFTA, you see, is the chief culprit to blame for the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs since the pact was enacted in 1983. That’s right, folks, a nation, (Mexico), with an economy 1/20th the size of the U.S. economy is uniquely to blame for the loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs in Ohio and other Rust Belt states. NAFTA has become such a handy scapegoat in Ohio that the New York Times  reports that the mere mention of the trade pact “provokes as much ire as the name Osama bin Laden.”

Ouch.

It’s quite handy to dump all U.S. manufacturing woes on little old NAFTA, but the long-standing trajectory of manufacturing in this country predates the passage of the trade pact. Jobs at steel plants in Pennsylvania were disappearing long before anyone thought up the concept of NAFTA, as were declines in U.S. auto plants as American consumers began to buy more Japanese and German cars because they preferred them over the crappy cars General Motors and Ford were making in the 1980s.

And isn’t it ironic that Honda and Toyota are opening new manufacturing plants in the U.S., (including one in San Antonio), even as Ford frantically tries to convince more of its workers to take buy-out packages as it moves to downscale manufacturing operations because, in part, it has not operated as efficiently and with the same competence as Japanese car makers.

I guess that’s NAFTA’s fault, too.

And isn’t it something that since 1993, the year NAFTA passed, that the U.S. economy has grown by 54 percent, and the national jobless rate has dropped from 6.9 percent to 4.9 percent today, not to mention that Canada and Mexico are now our first and second-largest export markets.

But, alas, every four years Democratic Party presidential candidates have to trudge through the Rust Belt, promising good Midwesterners who believe a good factory job is their birthright that they will work to bring back good times again. And, if they have to bash trade agreements, so be it, for it’s all part of the game, as is whining about the loss of manufacturing jobs while shopping for slam dunk prices at Wal-Mart.

Joaquin Tijerina, Official Chisme Blogger

  

The 71st version of Charro Days is sure to be as festive as ever with all of its traditions and pomp and ceremony on display in vivid colors and lively celebrations.

But this year will be different in this respect: Brownsville’s famous and most enduring celebration will lie under the national glare of a brand of American politics that disses the very essence of Charro Days, which is to revel in the cultural and historical ties between U.S. and Mexican border communities. The nativists and nationalists of the political right were on a roll a few years back, exploiting the 9/11 terrorist attack as the currency to push their views into the periphery of the American mainstream.

It worked well enough that those forces were able to ramrod a border fence bill into law, with a president and Texan who had long opposed such a thing folding up like a cheap tent in the face of the noisy right of his party. And so it is that when locals gather up next year to enjoy the 72nd edition of Charro Days that a troubling quandry may well exist. Festival goers may have to go through some sort of special access to gain entry through a border fence that will relegate the Charro’s sprawling carnival to the “Mexican side” of the wall.

“Nobody wants to go through an access to the carnival grounds across the border,” said Michael Puckett, the longtime executive director of Charrro Days. “The wall would really hurt Charro Days.”

The commencement of Charro Days this year dove tails with the intensity of interest in our region and community from the two major Democratic Party presidential candidates. Hillary Clinton has been to the Rio Grande Valley in successive February weeks, including a stop in Brownsville last week, and she dispatched her daughter, Chelsea, to this region over the weekend. Big Bill can’t be far behind in the run up to the crucial March 4 Texas primary.

Barack Obama, meanwhile, made his initial Valley visit last Friday, chatting with students at UT-Pan American in Edinburg before addressing a large outdoor crowd at the university. Clinton and Obama, in seeking favor from South Texans, were clear in their debate points last week at the University of Texas at Austin that they had problems with the construction of a border fence.

There’s this little problem with the opposition they expressed last week. Both Obama and Clinton voted in the fall of 2006 to build a border fence. It was no doubt a political calculation on their part as they fired up their presidential bids. Neither, I’m guessing, wanted to be seen as being weak on illegal immigration, so they both went against their natural political grains and voted for the construction of 370 miles of border fencing.

Now, with a Pew Hispanic Center poll showing that nearly 70 percent of Latinos oppose building additional fencing, Clinton and Obama are making like Texas border mayors in voicing their concerns about such a structure. So much so that on Monday morning, La Jefa herself, (that would be Hillary), issued a statement in response to a Sunday story that ran in The Brownsville Herald and El Nuevo Heraldo, saying the article, which detailed the cultural and economic impacts of the border fence, raised serious concerns.

“It is troubling to me that our country’s current border security plan threatens a South Texas tradition, (Charro Days), historically created to celebrate the sharing of cultures,” the Hillary Statement stated. “I believe we need to re-evaluate the border wall as it is currently being implemented.”

Esta bueno, Hill, thanks for the attention and sending the note of concern. Pero, here’s the thing, by the time you or Barack take office in January 2009, if either one of you can beat GOP bad boy John McCain, the fence is likely already going to be up. As comedian George Lopez would say, the fence is going up “right now- right now,” unless border leaders are successful in running out the clock in 2008 and convincing that pelon, Michael Chertoff of Homeland Security, to hold off a bit and work things out so a fourth of the UT-Brownsville doesn’t end up in Mexico.

Look, both Clinton and Obama are playing the panda-rama political game with us right now on the border fence. Where were they in late 2006 when we needed national political leaders of their type to stand up against the right-wing noise machine and say a border fence may work in some concentrated areas, but please don’t let it cut through the heart of American communities like Brownsville, Laredo, Eagle Pass and El Paso. Instead, they voted for the thing, quietly and with an eye toward the 2008 presidential election year cycle.

Well, 2008 is here, right now-right now, and with Charro Days firing up for its seventh decade, let’s enjoy this edition before the border fence goes up and we have to show our passports at a Border Patrol check station so we can be allowed entry into the carnival grounds on the Mexican side of the fence. Who could have known that eating sticky cotton candy and throwing little hoops at bottles could be so controversial?

Joaquin Tijerina, Official Chisme Blogger

Sitting a mere foot or two away from the eloquent challenger who has eclipsed her, Hillary Clinton reached back to her travels of the week to push forward policy points about health care and immigration.

Just the evening before her Austin debate with Barack Obama, Clinton made an impassioned plea for her candidacy at a boisterous Wednesday night rally at the University of Texas at Brownsville/Texas Southmost College. At the Austin debate, Clinton first spoke of a woman at the UT-Brownsville rally who had “pulled me aside” to speak of struggles to find adequate health care coverage. A few minutes later, she spoke of the lunacy of the federal government’s original border fence plan that would have put a portion of the UTB/TSC campus on the “Mexican” side of the fence.

It’s heady stuff for a mid-size U.S. community when a major presidential candidate mentions the city’s name twice in a nationally broadcast presidential debate. In fighting to keep her presidential bid alive, Clinton has made the South Texas rounds over the last week, with two stops in McAllen, one visit each to Brownsville, Robstown and then San Antonio, and then on to Laredo the morning of her Thursday debate with Obama. It is telling that other than traveling to Austin for the debate, Clinton has not ventured beyond South Texas in her Lone Star political travels leading up to the March 4 primary.

She surely knows that her struggling presidential bid depends heavily these days on a huge amount of support from Mexican-American voters in South Texas. Clinton’s husband, Bill, the former president, said this week while campaigning in Beaumont that his wife must win Texas on March 4, or face the likely inevitably of losing to Obama. It won’t happen for the Clintons without a strong South Texas showing.

But for all of the vaunted Clinton familiarity with the Rio Grande Valley and South Texas, how much of this vote will she actually get? Lots of it, to be sure, but not as much as was once thought, or so it seems to me. It would appear that the same sort of generational divide that has hurt Clinton nationally will take root here. Younger Mexican-Americans, say those between 18 and 35, are going to go for Obama in a major way. They have none of the historical ties and affections to the Clintons that hold sway with their elders. For younger South Texans, Bill Clinton is a guy who was president during their grade school and middle school years. Barack Obama is the now, a voice speaking to them.

“My wife and I support Hillary,” said Juan Ruiz, a retired 58-year-old firefighter who attended one of the Hillary rallies in McAllen. “But our kids are for Obama.”

Ruiz made those comments to the Chicago Tribune, one of the various national media species that has discovered the Valley and South Texas in search of the exotic Mexican-Americans they’ve heard so much about. One fact unearthed in all of the reporting is this: 40 percent of this state’s 8.5 million Hispanics are of the ages 18 to 40. In that Tribune article, one of the Valley’s Democratic Party gray beards, Juan Maldonado, the current Hidalgo County Demo chairman, spoke of days gone by.

“We are guilty to some degree in assuming that because the leadership leans one way, the rank-and-file are going to follow,” said Maldonado, whose roots in politics go back to the La Raza Unida days of the 1960s when young Mexican-Americans of his generation were making their mark in Texas politics. “But the old patron system where the boss would tell everyone how to vote, that’s gone.

“It’s obvious,” Maldonado went on to say, “that Obama is real attractive with a lot of the younger generation.”

So, for all of the breathless reporting on local TV about how all of the local Valley political officialdom is backing Hillary, here’s a simple push back: Who really cares? Surely, not the younger generation Maldonado speaks of. Congress people like Ruben Hinojosa and Solomon Ortiz and the local political types of their 50-plus age range are just talking to themselves when they yell on their microphones for Hillary.

On Friday morning, when Obama made his first Valley visit, bounding on stage at an outdoor rally at UT-Pan American in Edinburg, the kids went nuts. They got more than a glimpse of the future. Barack Obama represents the first wave of the sort of multi-racial candidate that will populate American politics for generations to come. Hillary put up a good fight, but it’s hard to fight a future that has arrived in the fierce urgency of the present, a candidate on the glide whose flight path is now beginning to cover South Texas.

Earvin “Magic” Johnson led many a fast break during his glory years with the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1990s, but even the gifted hoopster didn’t see the phenomenon of Barack Obama coming down full speed at his candidate, Hillary Clinton.

“None of us thought Obama would be able to do this much, this fast,” Johnson told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on one of the Sunday morning chat shows. “He has run an amazing campaign.”

Part of running a successful national campaign is bobbing and weaving down court,  just as Magic used to do when running the Lakers’ famed “Showtime” offense. Obama’s views on trade similarly go here-and-there, depending some on where he’s campaigning. In recent days, as Obama has barnstormed through the Rust Belt on his way to again laying a whopping on Hillary Clinton, Prince Barack has been the populist politican.

“One thing I do have to say about Sen. Clinton - she says speeches don’t put food on the table,” Obama said in Youngstown, Ohio this week, as cited in the New York Times. “Well, you know what? Nafta didn’t put food on the table either.”

That line wins wild applause in states like Ohio and Wisconsin, where economic anxieties run high and it’s easy to dump on trade with other countries as a chief culprit for the loss of manufacturing jobs. That view is so prevalent, in fact, that a recent Associated Press story cited a Wisconsin poll where 72 percent of respondents said trade takes more jobs than it creates.

No surprise then that both Obama and Clinton are channeling John Edwards this week in ripping trade and corporations for all that ails the economies of struggling Rust Belt states. The real reasons behind job losses, of course, run much deeper than dumping all of the blame on something like the North American Free Trade Agreement, but politicians can’t resist pandering to crowds for cheap applause lines.

Some of the Democratic Party’s chief constituencies, most notably labor unions, have always hated NAFTA and trade with other nations in general, preferring the U.S. impose protectionist policies and heavy government subsidies of struggling industries. According to this view, the U.S. should only trade with other countries if they enact the same sort of labor and wage rules and conditions that we have here. This would be quite a fantasy, obviously, if one expects the developing nations we do business with to immeadiately develop the same standard of living we enjoy in the U.S.

Trade in general, and NAFTA in particular, are easy whipping boys for TV and radio dopes like Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan, two aging white guys who are mad about many things, chief among them the changing demographics of America, which they lump with trade agreements as the ruin of the U.S. I’m a Wall Street Journal guy on this issue, believing as that newspaper advocates, “free markets and free people.”

It’s folly to think that goverment can protect the elimination of jobs in the private sector. The creation and elimination of jobs in various sectors of our economy is driven by ever changing market forces that are in turn influenced by improving technologies and the efficiencies they bring. There’s also the matter of changing lifestyles and the choices made by customers and how they combine to affect business, industries, and in turn, jobs.

Here’s an example.  I have a friend who moved to the Rio Grande Valley from Kentucky three years ago to help manage a small manufacuturing operation in Harlingen that supplies Matamoros maquilas with parts that are used in automobiles made by General Motors. Americans are buying fewer Chevrolets and Buicks and more Hondas and Toyotas, so demand for GM cars is down. Guess what? That small operation in Harlingen, with its parent company in Kentucky, has decided it can no longer justify its business enterprise here, so it’s closing down the local plant in a few months.

How would a President Obama or President Clinton stop that from happening? They couldn’t, of course, and the Democratic frontrunner has said as much when he’s speaking more honestly.

“Revolutions in communications and technology have made it easier for companies to send jobs wherever labor is cheapest, and that’s something that can’t be reversed,” Obama said this week in Ohio, in a moment of candor, as quoted in the NY Times. “So I’m not going to stand here and say that we can stop every job from going overseas. I don’t believe we can - or should - stop free trade.”

So, I’d say the candidate of hope shouldn’t give false hopes that, as president, he could substantially stem the forces of free markets and free people. He can’t and he ought to be honest about it and not allow himself to become a shill for the protectionists and demagogues of cable television.

- Joaquin Tijerina, Chisme Blogger

Hillary Clinton’s Texas firewall isn’t crumbling yet, but it may be showing some signs of wear-and-tear.

A CNN poll released Monday showed Clinton with a mere two-point percentage lead, (50%-48%), over Barack Obama. Other Texas polls are showing Clinton with a bigger lead, but still in single digits. The first polls out last week showed Clinton with leads of 15 to 20 percent over Obama, so the fresher polls showing a much leaner margin are troubling in Hillaryland with the Texas primary still two weeks away.

Obama hasn’t even shown up in Texas yet, and he’s already cutting into Clinton’s lead. History shows during this campaign season that the more time Obama spends in a state via personal visits, the higher his numbers climb. At least for now, Obama seems to be wearing well, while Hillary fades enough in the homestretch to now be 0-for-8 in the lastest round of voting around the country, (Virginia, Maryland, Washington state, Louisiana, etc.).

Wisconsin comes up today, (Tuesday), and Clinton is hanging close in the polls. It would be huge for her to pull off a Wisconsin win, giving her great momentum heading into March 4 votes in Texas and Ohio. She needs every bit of the big Mo that she can get. And she needs the Rio Grande Valley vote in a major way, which explains a return visit to the Valley this week after rallying the troops in McAllen a week ago.

Wednesday will be Valley day for the Clinton campaign, with stops scheduled in McAllen, Edinburg, and in Brownsville, where she will speak at UT-Brownsville. Obama is expected in our area by month’s end, so it all makes for exciting political news for those into such things. But for all of the hub-bub about Clinton’s support among Hispanics in South Texas, a Washington Post story pointed out yesterday, (Monday), “that convoluted delegate rules in Texas could water down the impact of strong support for her” in our region.

What worries the Clinton types is that even if their candidate does really well in targeted districts, “such as Democratic state Sen. Juan Hinojosa’s heavily Hispanic district in the Rio Grande Valley, Clinton could win an overwhelming majority of votes but gain only a small edge in delegates,” the Post story reports.

This is inside baseball stuff, but the Texas primary will be decided in two parts. One will be based on the popular vote and the other half to be determined by caucuses to be held on election night after the polls closed. Bottom-line, even if Clinton racks up significant vote totals over Obama in South Texas, it may not translate into a sweep of delegates, which Hillary badly needs since she trails Prince Barack by over 100 in pledged delegates thus far.

Oh well, at least we get the drama of visits by high-profile presidential candidates. It has been quite a while since we’ve been treated to such entertainment.

The much praised, on-the-ground organization of Barack Obama’s presidential campagin came calling on Thursday.

“Hello, this is Michelle Obama,” the recorded message said on my home phone. I didn’t take the call, but my 13-year-old daugther did, and after pressing “1” for yes to a couple of questions, (including the key question as to if she supported Obama’s candidacy), she hung up when questions about health care proved a little too complex for a teen who watches more Disney than CNN.

My daughter is obviously too young to vote, but her mother isn’t, and the daughter pushed “1” for yes because the mother is one woman who has ditched Hillary for Obama, and plans to vote that way on March 4 in the Texas primary. I’m guessing the Clinton campaign has similar calls going out in these parts, although my family hasn’t gotten one yet despite our usual Democratic Party leanings, (full disclosure: I voted for George W in the 2000 prez campaign and have voted for Sen. Kay Bailey as well).

Still, after reading many an article on how the Obama campaign has out-organized and outworked the Clinton campaign in nearly every state thus far, it’s not surprising my household would hear first from Barack. Indeed, it is rather amazing how a first time U.S. senator has appeared to outsmart and organize the Clintons in running a far more sound and solid presidential campaign.

Hillary keeps telling us she’s ready to be president from day one, but she appears to be having serious troubles running her national campaign for president. Clinton hasn’t been competitive in a number of states, including the most recent trouncings she absored from Obama in Maryland and Virginia. Obama has raised far more money than the Clintons, a truly astounding fact when you consider that Bill Clinton is the biggest Dem fundraiser around. Obama has also avoided the sort of crisises that have troubled not only the Hillary campaign, but the one of GOP nominee John McCain as well.

So, the guy with supposedly no experience, has been a far better CEO of his presidential campaign than have the far older candidacies fronted by Hillary and McCain. Maybe that doesn’t mean much, but then again, there’s voters like my spouse who asked the other day: “If they can’t run a presidential campaign well, how are they going to run the country?”

Back to our part of the country, I read a Newsweek article online this week where mega-rich McAllen developer Alonzo Cantu, a close bud of the Clintons, chided Obama for knowing nothing about the border, and for his lack of visits here. The Clintons, he said, have been to the Rio Grande Valley many times. True, Alonzo, but where exactly have they been? Have Bill and Hill seen much of the Valley beyond the inside of your mansion in north McAllen where you and your wealthy friends raise scads of dough for the Clintons.

Look, good for Cantu that he has earned the fortune he has amassed from modest beginnings, and he now owns more banks and hospitals than the little guy with the cute hat in the Monopoly game. But to portray the Clintons as the man and woman of the people in the Valley? Por favor. They’ve just come here for the dough, but now that they need the votes of Valley people, Hillary is coming back to our neck of the mesquite woods for a stadium rally in McAllen next week so Tia Juana and young professional Hispanic women named Ashley and Brittney can jump up and down with their Hillary! campaign signs.

That’s cool, nothing wrong it at all. Hillary will carry the Valley, that’s for sure. She better. A new statewide poll shows Clinton with only a single-digit lead in Texas over Obama. Better get Hillary back before Michelle makes too many more phone callls.

Give it up for Hillary! I thought her speech this morning in McAllen at a festive rally was quite good as Hillary speeches go. The Rio Grande Valley in general adores the Clintons and the crowd at the McAllen Civic Center was dishing out plenty of love for their candidate.

I’m guessing Sen. Clinton was feeling it because it seemed as if she spoke with more emotion and sincerity than is normally the case. It didn’t seem that Hillary refocused or honed her standard stump speech much from ones she has given for some weeks now. The pundits keep saying she needs to retool her message to catch up with the galloping Barack Obama, but it seemed like the usual lines today in McAllen, but they were said with a bit more oompfh.

Clinton did throw in a couple of Valley-oriented lines in her stumper today. She promised to bring a veterans’ hospital to the region, which is such a shop-worn pledge at this point that the locals just clap without thinking because we know that, yea, of course they have to promise the vets a hospital. It’s like a prez candidate going to south Florida and promising to boot Castro out of power.

The senator also promised to push immigration reform that would bring humanity for the undocumented, (but no drivers’ licenses, por favor), as well as added border security. Good, we’re all for that, so those are popular points to tout here. She went back in time a bit to recall her days as a young political organizer who registered voters in South Texas, (including McAllen, she said), for the 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern. In fact, you know those “35 years of experience” Hillary is always promoting, well, one of those places where it all started was right here.

Anyway, watching the Hillary rally on TV was good fun, although you have to wonder how much structural reinforcement those event platforms need, what we all of the local politicos crammed like tamales in a cacerola to get on stage with the presidential candidate. Hey, I want to give a shout out to my Tio Polo the JP who somehow got a space up there behind Hilaria. I got so excited that I thought of calling my dear tio on his cell to confirm it was really him, but I refrained because it would be embarrasing, after all, to have someone lip read JP Polo saying, “Si, mijo, it’s me,” while Hillary talked about bringing universial health care to America.  

And how about Valley congressman Ruben Hinojosa, who shared mike time with Clinton. Rep. Ruben got so caught up in the moment that when he announced Hillary would be back in the Valley next week for an even bigger rally at the McAllen football stadium, he blurted out: “And we’re going to have 50,000 people there!”

What, we have the Rose Bowl here now? You know, back in the 1990s when I went to a huge Weslaco-Donna football game at the McAllen stadium and all the fans were crammed in there like tamales in a cacerola, I recall the attendance being announced at 15,000. Looks Rep. Ruben was only off by 35,000 or so in anticipating the McAllen stadium crowd next week for Hilaria.

It’s all in good fun. We await for The Obama to come to our neck of the mesquite woods by month’s end. Tiene que. Barack has his two slices of bread in the toaster warming up, but Hillary isn’t toast just yet, and won’t be unless Obama can get to around 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in Texas in the March 4 primary, and that ain’t happening unless his campaign tries bery, bery hard in the Balley.

Maybe Barack can do a rally at Brownsville’s Sams Stadium. I bet we can cram 50,000 people into that joint.

Joaquin Tijerina, Chisme Blogger

It’s crunch time, Rio Grande Valley, and Hillary Clinton is down to a few life lines to keep her presidential campaign from being Obama-ized.

With Barack Obama winning big over the weekend in primaries and caucuses in Washington (state), Nebraska, Louisiana and Maine, the Clinton campaign is gasping for air, even more so with Obama expected to score substantial victories Tuesday in primaries in Maryland and Virginia.

One of Hillary’s firewalls - and one she absolutely has to have - is deep South Texas, specifically the Valley. Both campaigns know it, with an Obama campaign memo obtained by Bloomberg news indicating that his campaign plans to work actively in the congressional district of U.S. Rep. Ruben Hinojosa, a Mercedes-based Democrat. The Obama memo indicates that his campaign expects Clinton to get upwards of 75 percent of the vote in Hinojosa’s Valley-based district, a level of support Hillary must surely achieve to score the kind of win she needs in Texas.

To no one’s surprise, Clinton’s campaign was quick to plan a Valley stop for Hillary with the Texas primary coming up on March 4. Clinton is scheduled to have a campaign rally on Wednesday at UT-Pan American, although local political run-run has the event being moved to the new civic center in McAllen to accomodate a larger crowd and more parking capacity. Meanwhile, political gossip also has Obama’s people scouting for a Valley event for their man, with Brownsville as the possible spot so the Illinois senator can outline his views on immigration.

Obama is sure to be on a major roll by March 4 as he keeps winning states and Hillary’s campaign begins to go into panic mode. The tonic for Clinton would be big wins on March 4, not only in Texas, but in Ohio as well. If she wins both of the big states by good margins, Clinton once again recaliberates the race. Si no, and Obama wins both, or even one of those two big states, it will be tough for the Clinton Machine to get to ultimate victory.

It’s something to hear the cable news talking heads who usually refer to Hispanics only when talking about illegal immigration to now be trumpeting the importance of Latinos in the Democratic race. Granted, they know nothing about Latinos anywhere, most certainly here in South Texas, so don’t expect to hear worthy insights in their yak-yaks about the Texas primary. It is clear that the Mexican-American vote in Texas will be contested in the next few weeks like never before when it comes to presidential politics.

A desperate Clinton campaign needs a huge turnout and support from Valley voters to carry Texas. Obama needs to avoid the sort of rout he suffered in California, where he drew only about 25 percent of the Hispanic vote in losing that state by a large margin.

 In Arizona, New Mexico, New Jersey and his home state of Illinois, Obama was able to get 40 percent or more of the Hispanic vote. Can he do the same in Texas? If he can’t, the Clinton campaign likely scores a big enough win in Texas to keep her campaign alive long enough to trudge on.

Get the mariachi bands lined up. Get a stage big enough to accomodate all of the Valley politicians and hangers-on who want to be been seen standing behind Clinton with their Hillary! signs. The Clinton Machine is coming back to the Valley, and this time it’s not for the usual private shing dig at Alonzo Cantu’s mega-mansion in north McAllen where you have to pay $5,000 to eat sushi and foofy finger food with Hillary. The Clintons have come down a bunch of times to raise cash at Alonzo’s, so we regular people never see Bill and Hill as they’re whisked in an out of Cantu’s gated neighorhood, where one house occupies the equivalent of an average-sized city block.

No, this time, raza, Hillary needs your votes, really, really bad. So, this time she’s going to pretend to like you, the common, arroz con pollo people who don’t live in big houses in north McAllen. She’ll put on that plastic smile and clap robotically to the tunes of marachis playing for her. And hey, don’t forget she’s married to Bill, who use to be the first black president, but now that he has been tossed from that commuity for trying to ghettoize Obama, we’ll take him because we’re friendly people.

Bill Clinton, the first Hispanic president who loves to inhale enchiladas on his visits to South Texas, and his wife, Hillary, the candidate we must save from that Obama guy. It’s now or never, gang. A strong RGV vote is one of the last roadblocks left between Obama and the Democratic presidential nomination.

Joaquin Tijerina, Chisme Blogger

Sitting high on their political perches in Washington, right-leaning Republicans egged on by the yakkers of conservative talk radio have no idea of the havoc their border fence will have on our South Texas communities.

I’m not sure that they much care about our community sensibilities and histories - in fact they likely care not one whit about such things given the urgency to protect their version of the American identity from excessive immigration, especially from Mexico. Right-wing Republicans pushed through their border fence project with the approval of a president who had previously spoken out against it, (that would be George W. Bush), because of their own biases and simplistic notions of what can secure a border.

And so now those of us who live here, and who have had families that have lived here for generations in many cases, will be forced to put up with this mess and the indignity of the federal goverment shoving this thing down our collective throats. Most of us in the Rio Grande Valley community aren’t against additional border security in the way of more Border Patrol agents, or improving ports of entry with more Customs agents and better bridge facilities to boost inspections. Barriers of some sort in short intervals around the bridges and/or certain heavily used crossing points may make sense in providing a bit better security.

But the notion of hundreds of miles of a border fence, some of it in fairly remote stretches, will be neither effective or cost-efficient, not to mention the tens of millions of dollars in maintenance it will take in yearly upkeep. Beyond the efficiencies, there are other practical realities that politicians in Washington would not have a clue about.

In Rio Grande City, for example, the feds are considering a fence map that would extend in some fashion into or around a historic 130-year-old military fort, as well as adjacent land that houses four school campuses, the local school district’s administrative offices, and a football stadium. In Brownsville, the fed’s first map had the fence running across the northside of a nearby levee, leaving UTB-TSC’s International Technology, Education and Commerce Campus on the other side of the fence with Mexico.

The feds backed off that notion after UTB’s leadership pointed out that, uh, it’d be nice to have part of our campus located in the United States. The latest is that feds via the Department of Homeland Security want access from the levees to the heart of the campus in an area near the Student Union and the Life and Health Sciences Building. So, rightly, UTB leadership wonders: How far will this fence cut into our campus?

UTB-TSC President Juliet Garcia has thus far refused to grant the feds access, saying giving the feds the access they want would jeoparadize campus security, and saying the building of an 18-foot fence on the edge of the UT System campus would “directly contravene our mission and destroy the campus climate that has been so painstakingly and carefully created.”

On Wednesday, the UT Board of Regents backed up Garcia’s position in urging the federal government to work cooperatively with the UT System “to identify solutions that will ensure border security and allow UTB-TSC to fulfill its education mission.”

Given that nearly half of this nation’s illegal immigrants entered this country legally and then became illegal by overstaying their visas, one wonders where all of the passion and heat is from the political right in going after this aspect of the immigration issue. But, of course, the heat and missives of the angry right is aimed at the southern border in its ongoing battle to protect America from multiculturalism and the Balkanization of this country that they’re always freaked out about.

And so, for that, let’s hope kids in Rio Grande City don’t have to go through a fence checkpoint to get to their classes, or students at UTB don’t have to sip their Coca-Colas at their student center while looking up at an 18-foot fence built to satisfy the wishes of Americans who are frightfully worried about too many Mexicans finding their way to Iowa.