America generally grew more prosperous and had one of its more robust economic swings from 1992-2007, and it was also an era, reports USA Today, when the nation became more bilingual.

In the early 1990s, the newspaper reported recently, 13.8 percent of residents 5 and older spoke a foreign language in their U.S. homes. In 2007, that percentage had grown to 19.7 percent. But keep this in mind: In 80 percent of U.S. homes the only language spoken is English.

Back in the day, say in mid-1800s to early 1900s, after this country had absorbed great numbers of European immigrants, could it be said that 80 percent of America’s households spoke only English? The answer to that question would surely be no as it to pertained to the American Northeast of that era, which contained great populations of Italian, Polish, German and Russian immigrants, to name a few.

There was no talk radio in that day, or Fox News for that matter, to report on and comment about the great assault of European immigrants on the American identity. There were nativists of that day, to be sure, now long forgotten as America got on with its business of assimilating immigrants and their descendants to this country’s way of economic and social life.

It’s just like today. While the great nationalists and self-appointed defenders of America advocate the building of border walls and revoking the citizenship of certain U.S.-born children, immigrants and their descendants are learning English, just like the Polish, German, Russians and Italians did back in bygone eras.

 From the Dec. 9, 2008 issue of USA Today, there is this headline: “More Hispanics fluent in English.” Hardly breaking news, I realize, but to hear the right-tilting rhetoric of recent years one would think immigrants of the Latino variety are intent on washing the U.S. in waves of enes. The picture instead is of the sort seen for generations in this country, which is first generation is dominant in language of the immigrants, with second and third generations quickly becoming English dominant.

The USA Today says as much with the lead to its story saying, “More Spanish speakers are speaking English very well despite a steady influx of immigrants this decade, a sign that they are blending in linguistically.”

The newspaper reached that conclusion after its analysis of the American Community Survey, which was released recently by the U.S. Census Bureau. The USA Today article showed that in several urban counties - such as those containing Los Angeles, Tucson, El Paso and Atlanta - the percentages of Hispanics having trouble speaking English dropped or stayed steady despite the growth of immigration in recent years.

How can this be? The children of these immigrants are quickly picking up English and assimilating into American life, just as previous immigrants from other parts of the world did in other eras. So the dynamic of a more bilingual nation forming from 1990-2007 was balanced by the willingness of immigrants and their children to take on the challenge of learning a new language, (English). It’s a complex linguistic brew, and one not one easily understood by the talk radio nation and their urges for simplicity of predictable thought patterns.

“Sometimes we’re too impatient for new immigrants to learn English,” said Patricia Gomez, the executive director of a Chicago-area non-profit group that offers English classes in conjuction with a local community college. “Fifty or 100 years ago, it was understood that the first generation would not be speaking English.”

In making those comments to USA Today, Gomez also had another pertinent observation. Those day and evening English classes she helps arrange with the local college? They are all full. It seems that immigrants, most of them Latinos, want to learn English. Who figured?

Even supporters of immigration reform, including President-elect Obama, sometimes appear to underestimate the yearning of present-day immigrants to learn English. They will cite the need to learn English as a requirement for application of U.S. citizenship as if it’s a burden many immigrants do not want to embrace. That’s a misplaced assumption in the vast majority of cases involving today’s immigrants, just as it was of newcomers of long ago.

Here’s the thing. The great American Melting Pot is working like it always has. More American folk should be confident in its ability to continue its unhindered march, scooping up newcomers and their children, and weaving them into this 50-state union, just like always.

- R.D. Cavazos

In his run-up to being elected America’s 44th president, Barack Obama promised to take up the matter of immigration reform in his first term.

Don’t bet on it.

With economic issues front and center, it’s understandable that the president-elect will immeadiately face what most Americans would consider to be more pressing matters, including a deep recession and the loss of hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs as key industries struggle for viability. The fire and fervor of the great U.S. immigration debate of 2006 seems a bit of a distant memory now that American voters have mostly dispatched the hard right rhetoric from the usual suspects.

The House Republicans whose blood boiled over Mexican immigrants two years ago are still an angry bunch, but they have largely been marginalized over the last two national elections. Democrats have built larger majorities in the House and Senate. It appears that Senate Dems will have 58 seats in getting ever closer to the sort of numbers that can overcome the sort of legislative blockade that sunk immigration reform efforts in 2006.

Bashing Latinos and immigrants is not a winning ticket for the beleaguered Republicans, but don’t expect many of their leaders to get it. They can’t help themselves, it would seem, and even after losing a presidential election in which the Democratic candidate gained nearly 70 percent of the Hispanic vote, right-tilting GOPers will keep at it, clinging to their ideology above all else on issues such as immigration.

This was in evidence again this week after Obama announced that he was nominating Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano to be the nation’s third Homeland Security secretary. Napolitano’s credentials for the job are solid beyond being a border governor who has had to address difficult immigration issues. She was also Arizona’s attorney general, and before that was the U.S. attorney for Arizona, where she was one of the federal government’s chief prosecutors in the Southwest.

Napolitano has largely been a centrist on the immigration issue, raising the ire of both the political right and left in her state, where this issue has a particular volatility. As governor, Napolitano spoke out forcefully against the construction of a border fence, and also vetoed legislation that would allow police officers to arrest undocumented immigrants. She also worked to bring humanitarian help to immigrants who get lost and wander the Arizona desert while entering the country illegally.

On the flip side, Napolitano signed into law legislation that would fine, and possibly shut down businesses in Arizona that hire undocumented immigrants. It’s a varied and pragmatic view on a contentious issue. Gov. Napolitano has been tough on illegal immigration while also showing compassion toward immigrants.

That’s not good enough for Lamar Smith, a Texas congressman, and one of the more stridently anti-immigrant Republicans in the House. After Obama’s selection of Napolitano this week, Smith told USA Today that the Arizona governor is “nothing more than a sheep in wolf’s clothing” when it comes to immigration enforcement.

To the dismay of Smith and others of his political ilk, Obama’s nomination of Napolitano to be Homeland Security secretary increases the odds the president-elect will take up some form of immigration reform in his first term given the governor’s knowledge of the issue, and her background from the Southwest.

Unlike her predecessors in Homeland Security - both of whom are from the Northeast and know little if anything about immigration and the border - Napolitano’s nomination should bring some reassurance to regions like the Rio Grande Valley. A region like ours understands the need for border security while also  believing that the needs of business and commerce should be taken into consideration, along with the value of contributions made by immigrants.

Napolitano was firm in her support of the immigration reform bill that failed two years, which attempted to balance border security with the need to deal realistically with the 10-million plus undocumented immigrants now living in the United States. One of her key determinations will be whether to continue with the construction of costly border fences in a time of limited resources when those dollars could be better used to hire and train more Border Patrol agents and other federal law enforcement officers.

Napolitano’s scope as Homeland Security secretary will go far beyond border and immigration issues. Still, it will be good to finally have a leader in Homeland Security of her stature and knowledge who will view the border as more than a place to put up barriers when a more balanced and varied view is needed to address some of the more difficult issues of our day.

- R.D. Cavazos

The 1970s - the age of bell-bottom pants, disco music and the Dallas Cowboys winning their first two Super Bowls - was also a time when the U.S. economy struggled through a gray period of what President Carter famously called “a malaise” of spirit.

Back in those days, when I wasn’t watching “Welcome Back Kotter” on television or admiring the football handiwork of Cowboy coaching legend Tom Landry, I was a kid with especially bad-looking hair noticing how my parents worked hard to make ends meet for a family of six.

 It was a typical American story back then. The 1970s were tough, man. The inflation rate soared well into double-digit percentages. Interest rates on 30-year mortgages likewise surpassed 10 percent, and by 1980 neared the mid-teens. Gas prices spiked after a Middle East oil embargo, shocking the nation and creating a full-fledged crisis that included long gas lines and general panic. Even as a kid, you could feel it. How bad would things get?

It has been a long time since Americans felt those sort of ominous vibes, but they’re back after a long hiatus. The decline of the U.S. economy in 2008 has been swift, and fraught with so much worry that some commentators have seriously advocated George W. Bush step down as president so Barack Obama can take over early to see if the nation can get its mojo back.

General Motors is going broke, the stock market is subject to wild fluctuations, the Bush administration is out of gas, and Obama says there can only be one president at a time as he names key economic advisors in trying to provide some degree of calm to a nation freakin’ out with worry, (dropping the `g’ like Sarah P).

“It’s important, given the uncertainty in the markets and given the legitimate anxiety that the American people are feeling that they know their new president has a plan, and is going to act swiftly and boldly,” Obama said a Tuesday press conference.

That sounds good, and more power to the incoming president if he can work with leaders of both parties, as well as those from the private sector, in fashioning some kind of new energy and optimism that may begin to lift some boats from the depths of current despair. However, keep in mind that the presidents of the 1970s - Nixon, Ford and Carter - for all of their efforts made little headway with the economic blues of that decade.

It was not until President Reagan got a deep recession behind America’s back in the early 1980s that an economic surge that would largely last for 15 years brought this country to a better place. The new prosperity that lasted roughly from 1982 to 2007, however, intoxicated Americans to spend more of their income - and save precious little of it.

Newsweek magazine reports that in 1982 the personal savings rate for the average U.S. household was 11 percent of disposable income. By 2007, it was almost zero, the magazine reports. Americans spent more - way more - as if they felt liberated from the downer times of the 1970s to splurge and buy anything that moved, or sat on store shelves. More shoes, laptops, appliances, automobiles, clothing, because Americans, as George Carlin famously said, “like having lots of stuff.”

I recall back in the good old days, the 1990s, when my Dad, a man who survived the Great Depression as a kid and was so the epitomy of thriftyness that he drove a Ford Pinto in the 1970s, was sitting in the living room of the McAllen home where my family lived, admiring some new furniture in my abode. We never had new furniture - or new cars - when I was growing up, not even close, so my father was marveling that one of his kids could pull off the feat of stuffing a new house with new furniture.

How much, he asked about the new living room set. I told him and then threw in this kicker - it was all paid for.  All paid for, he asked in astonishment. Yep, I said, feeling like I was making the man who shaped me proud. I had arrived as a man and husband in my Dad’s eyes. I had bought my wife some new furniture and paid for every bit of it early. He was so impressed that in the weeks that followed he boasted on my behalf to my siblings about my grand achievement.

Those were the days, huh? Buying stuff. These days, there is such an erosion of consumer spending that U.S. vehicle sales in 2009 are expected to drop to 12.2 million from almost 17 million in 2005. It’s the reversal of what Newsweek columnist Robert Samuelson calls the “wealth effect.” In the mid-2000s when Americans were still giddy about buying anything that moved, they added about $1 trillion annually to consumer spending, and the U.S. economy at large.

Now, in this new era we live in where Americans are trying to save more, Samuelson says that borrowers are repaying debts, surplus inventories are being sold, industries are consolidating, and government policies are promoting recovery. Economic slumps, as Samuelson writes, correct themselves over time. How long will this one take? Hopefully, not the dozen years between roughly 1970-1982, but markets and economic forces are as much subject to the fickleness of public confidence as the scientific theories of economists.

We’re not going back to driving Pintos, but maybe we’ll try out electric cars. That is, if GM is still around, and here’s saying it will be as the durability of the U.S. economy finds its way.

- R.D. Cavazos

In the thicket of numbers embedded in the U.S. automobile industry, there are real lives, real families wondering what will happen, and what their financial destiny will be in the next year or two.

There’s a guy like Rob, who right out of high school began working for a major auto components supplier, and over time worked his way up to a middle management position. When times were good, his Kentucky-based company sent him south to Harlingen to work as a manager at a facility that supplied parts and components to mostly General Motors-linked maquiladoras in Matamoros and Reynosa.

For nearly three years, Rob and his family, Kentucky natives with a southern twang to prove it, lived in Harlingen, and came to love a region that seemed entirely foreign to them at first. It seemed as if they were heading for a good stay in South Texas when word came that Rob’s company would close its Harlingen facility, which it did last spring, when U.S. auto sales really began falling.

It got worse when Rob and his family returned to Kentucky. His company layed off Rob, on a temporary basis and with some compensation, hoping to bring him back full-time when things got better. He did return to his job over the summer, but now looks at the huge struggles of General Motors and wonders how much longer he will keep his job.

I came to know Rob during his Harlingen days when our teenage daughters played on a basketball traveling team of Rio Grande Valley girls. We shared our love of the sport, along with getting to know a little about each other’s respective industries. When I read the stories about the struggles of the U.S. automotive industry - and whether the federal government should bail it out with a financial rescue package - I think of people like Rob.

The numbers - and implications - of what happens to GM, Ford and Chrysler are staggering. For all of its problems, the U.S. auto industry still makes up 20 percent of the declining manufacturing sector in this country. The automakers and their vast supplier network make up 2.3 percent of the nation’s economic production. The Big Three automakers employ about 240,000 workers, and their suppliers an additional 2.3 million. That amounts to nearly 2 percent of the nation’s workforce.

If you believe some claims, the Big Three won’t make it to January 2009, (when a president more friendly to the U.S. auto industry takes office), without a multi-billion dollar financial rescue package from the federal government. Many in the political world, (mostly conservative-leaning), say U.S. automakers should be allowed to fail, or file for bankruptcy. Too bad, they say, auto company management - and overbearing unions - are to blame for making cars that many Americans have no desire to purchase.

Democrats, meanwhile, with their closer ties to labor and having a more blue-collar bent, say the Big Three must be saved in some fashion lest an already struggling U.S. economy go from recession to something far worse. Incoming President Obama says he wants to help U.S. automakers under certain conditions, which include a retooling of the industry and the production of more fuel-efficient automobiles that will also utilize emerging technologies to create a more green/eco-friendly world.

And how about this scenario: If the Big Three were to fail, could foreign car companies pick up the wreckage by increasing production in their U.S. plants?

A Nov. 17 story in the New York Times  examines such a scenario. There are auto industry experts, as cited in the Times  story, who believe Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai and BMW, are established enough in the U.S. with their existing plants to take control of the industry and the supplier network that is attached to it. How would that look and would Americans be willing to accept the notion that all of the automobiles they buy are rooted in a foreign country?

“You would have an auto industry in the United States more like that of Mexico and Canada: foreign-owned,” said Sean McAlinden, of the Center for Automotive Research, in the Times article.

That would be a shocker and huge ego buster to U.S. pride. Ultimately, the Big Three may have to file for bankruptcy, which would allow the automakers to restructure, tear up old labor contracts, and come back as smaller, leaner companies.

“When we talk about bankruptcy, we’re not talking about them disappearing,” said one auto industry analyst, Chris Vavares, in a story in USA Today this week. “Maybe three become two, and the two are are both leaner and meaner.”

The mood of the American public seems to be one of putting a stop to goverment bailouts - or at least putting more stringent conditions on those industries receiving federal support. In the interconnected financial and economic world we live in, the struggles of one industry touch many others. Rob of Kentucky, like many other Americans, waits to see what it will all mean to him.

- R.D. Cavazos

In days of long ago, before the Internet and when you had to put a quarter into an outdoor phone if you wanted to call home, there was something called layaway.

In those quaint days, when families couldn’t afford an item or product, they simply wouldn’t buy it, or if they thought it was possible, they would put it on layaway. It was a simple concept. A shopper would put a little down on an item because he or she couldn’t afford to pay for the whole thing in one shot. Then, by putting down regular payments over a limited period of time, a Mom or Dad could get that bicycle for Juanito or Gabriela, or maybe some clothes for the kids with school starting up again.

My folks bought lots of thing on layaway. I remember trailing along behind my mother when she would make layaway payments, and then she would tell me how much longer she had to go before the item in question would be making its way home. I am a son of the layaway era, but I’ve never actually bought anything on layaway.

I hadn’t even thought of layaway in years. It was like some extinct species that had vanished from the American frontier, as it was readily replaced by credit cards and the incredible ease with which people were willing to go into deep debt. Then, to my amazement, I began reading recently about how many major retailers are bringing layaway back, a truly stunning development that demonstrates just how intoxicated Americans became with spending beyond their means.

That overspending intoxication is being seen in the rapid deterioration of the American economy of recent months. This downturn is largely the result of spending too much on too many things. The bubble is bursting. Too many banks gave too many mortgages to families who couldn’t afford the payments, which was multiplied by complicated and greedy schemes created by investors on Wall Street to tap into this feeding frenzy with their securities and hedge funds.

It’s all tumbling down now. The credit crunch, the impending collapse of the U.S. automotive industry, with  American consumers spooked by the whole thing in going old school in their retreat from the buy now, pay later society of the last 25 years. A New York Times  story last week said it best with this headline: “Buying Binge Slams To Halt.”

Sales of new vehicles are down 32 percent. Consumer spending appears likely to fall in 2009 when compared to previous year, the first time since 1980 that such a thing could happen - and that drop may represent the steepest decline since 1942.

“The American consumer,” the Times article says, “long the spender of last resort for the global economy, may finally be spent.”

In the layaway generation I grew up in - roughly from the 1950s through the 1980s - Americans spent about 91 percent of their income, on average, and saved the rest, says the Times article referred to above. From the 1990s on, however, Americans spent close to 99 percent of their income, saving only about 1 percent.

This pattern could not continue forever. With the pillars of the U.S. economy now swaying , many Americans are in spending retreat, paying down their debts and trying to replenish their diminshed savings accounts. Hence, the return of layaway from the era of Elvis and Eisenhower. Layaway goes back to the Great Depression when retaliers and merchants gave their customers a chance to purchase items they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford.

It’s hard to fathom now, but before the 1980s, only upper-income Americans had credit cards. So, most Americans either saved up enough money to buy something, or put it on layaway. When credit cards began to be given away like candy, and the rise of deep discounters like Wal-Mart offered products at cheaper prices, the era of layaway came to an end.

Now it’s back to the future, at least for now, with retailers such as Kmart, Burlington Coat Factory and TJ Maxx bringing the old dinosaur back. Unlike credit cards, layaway programs charge no interest and require no credit history, but you can’t take the stuff home until it’s payed for in full. The common sense vibe with its roots in the World War II generation makes a comeback, as fleeting as that may turn out to be before charging on plastic makes its ultimate comeback.

The upheavals of the sort we are now seeing are huge economic adjustments as the market gets its bearings back, with inefficient and badly run companies and industries croaking in the process unless the federal government bails them out. The buying binge is grinding to a relative halt. The return of layaway is like the canary in a coal mine. There’s trouble up ahead. It’s better to buy what you can afford - not what you wish for - just like the layaway generation used to do before plastic cards filled our wallets and purses.

- R.D. Cavazos

Financial risk and speculation strikes out would be a good way to describe the recent decision by the Brownsville City Commission to change its mind about financing a proposed minor league baseball stadium.

It was a wise call - and the commission should have never approved the deal in the first place. The notion is a noble one. Bringing minor league baseball to Brownsville is a good idea, in theory, but the reality of the city taking a substantial risk on such a venture would have been remarkably irresponsible, especially given the economic times we are currently enduring.

A team in Brownsville would have been part of the United League Baseball, an independent group with no affiliations to major league baseball. The ULB has regenerated itself many times over, starting in the mid-1990s as a league with teams in Texas and Louisiana. Harlingen has always been part of some version of the league, which has seen teams and cities come and go.

Edinburg joined one version of the league in the early part of this decade, with the city spending major dollars to construct a multi-million dollar baseball stadium near the University of Texas-Pan American campus. Harlingen has also spent over $1 million to renovate its old stadium to make it more appealing for minor league baseball.

The league in its current form appears to be on shaky footing. Litigation and dissension define the league as much as the game it tries to feature. Partners and owners are wrangling for control and rights of the ULB. For the city to finance upwards of $7 million to build a stadium on Alton Gloor Boulevard to host a team in such an uncertain league would have been unfortunate. That a majority of Brownsville’s City Commission approved doing such a thing in the first place calls into question the judgment of those officials who would go along with such a deal.

Attendance and interest in the Harlingen and Edinburg teams has waned over the years. The two teams generate scant interest in their communities. This is the risk of independent leagues such as the ULB. Without the necessary connection to major league baseball and the credibility and steady flow of good, young players that such operations bring, independent leagues are like gypsies of the diamond, never knowing if they will be around the following year.

Corpus Christi decided a few years back to kick in major financing for a double A minor league baseball stadium. Key element: The team would be tied to the Houston Astros. The stadium was built by the Corpus Christi ship channel in the shadow of the big bridge linking the city with Gregory-Portland. The Corpus Christi team with its link to the Astros and major league baseball has prospered.

Independent leagues are much more hit-and-miss. Some have prospered and endured, mostly in the western and northern parts of the country. There’s no real harm in trying, as long as public financing of such risky ventures is not attempted. Some developers and business interests say they will proceed with the Brownsville team and stadium even without public support. More power to them as they seek private financing in their attempts to push this project forward.

The Brownsville Charros, as the team would be called, may happen someday, but it ought to be on the dime of the private sector, not a local goverment that is being asked to service many more pressing needs than supplying the city with an independent minor league baseball team.

- R.D. Cavazos

The candidate, running for governor, was as crisp in his answers as the suit he was wearing.

“I’m hear to talk about Texas,” the candidate said directly, waving off questions relating to national Republican Party politics.

And, so methodically, the candidate went through his three big issues - staying on message as he plowed through taxes, education and criminal justice - and did as he promised. Looking at the candidate across the table along with other editors at The Monitor in McAllen, I thought, “The guy reallly looks like his Dad.”

Afterwards, one of my fellow editors said, “I wasn’t impressed. I don’t think he has a chance to beat Ann Richards.

“I think,” offering another viewpoint, “she better run a good campaign or she could be in trouble.”

Ann Richards would go on to run a half-hearted re-election campaign for governor. George W. Bush, as it turned out, cleaned her clock. The rest is, well, you know how things have turned out since 1994 when it comes to George W. Bush.

I sometimes think back to that  George W. Bush and wonder, “What happened to that guy?”

In the 1990s, with Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock as his mentor, Gov. Bush was bipartisan W., as he cobbled together Republicans and Democrats to get what he wanted for the most part. There were some notable failures, most especially a major tax reform bill Bush wanted but that ended up crashing in his first term. Still, as a Texan’s Texan sort of governor, Bush was in his element.

Bush liked to pretend he could speak a little Spanish, but he really couldn’t, (still can’t), but that didn’t stop him from yukking it up during his many jaunts to South Texas, with his good buddy Tony Garza of Brownsville often riding shotgun. Bush and Garza were real buds back then. During my editor days at The Monitor, they would stride in together, usually in their cowboy boots, and sit down to yak about whatever issue the governor was pushing at the time.

I can’t recall one time where Bush seemed tongue tied or mangled words badly. There was no “strategry,” a word coined by comedian Will Farrell years later in his savage imitiation of George W. Bush, the presidential candidate. Given his last name and relative success as a governor, it was inevitable that he would run for president. I could see the logic of it in 1999 as he geared up to run, but recall thinking, “Is he ready for what’s coming?”

All in all, one would have to say, no, George W. Bush wasn’t ready to be president, never was. I still like the guy, but honestly, he’s in over his head in the Oval Office. I wanted to believe he could do. I even voted for him in 2000 when he ran against Al Gore, much to the dismay of my die-hard Democratic Dad, who warned me.

“Bush is a right-winger,” my father said, shaking his head, when I pleaded that, no, really he was more of a moderate Republican.

My beloved Dad was right, and Bush would turn out to be a right-right president, not the center-right president I was sure he would be.

“I’m a uniter, not a divider.”

Remember that one? That was Bush’s mantra in his 2000 presidential campaign.

Yea, right.

I guess I didn’t see Karl Rove coming. Acting as the all-consuming political strategist for Bush, Rove fashioned a 50 percent-plus 1battle plan to get W. elected and re-elected president. The point wasn’t to build a wide array of support for Bush, but rather a smaller but solid and loyal base of voters for W.

Rove didn’t want a better country. He just wanted his guy to win. Did Rove take over Bush’s brain, or was the guy wired like that all along? We may never know.

And so now Barack Obama comes along eight years after Bush told us he was a uniter. Like Bush, Barack, the president-elect, pledges that he will work with Republicans, maybe put some in his Cabinet, and will be the sort of pragmatic politician Bush rarely was as president. The current and future president met today, (Monday), for their first meeting since Obama prevailed over John McCain in last week’s election.

All Americans can hope for a smooth transition between two presidents and their administrations that will have little, if anything, in common. In an era when bad economic news comes to our collective doorstep nearly every day, we should all hope Obama is the uniter not the divider that Bush turned out to be.

Bush will head to his ranch in Central Texas, or wherever he will end up living, and I wonder if he will ever think back to those heady days as the Texas guv, when he could speak in complete sentences in public without the help of a speechwriter. Too bad he had a Rove, not a Bullock, with him in Washington.

- R.D. Cavazos

The national media is a buzz with stories on how the Hispanic community’s shift back to the Democrats helped to deliver four battleground states to Barack Obama. Those four states - Florida, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada - all went for George W. Bush in 2004, a key element in the Republican president gaining 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in defeating John Kerry.

It was a reversal of fortunes in 2008, if you were rooting for Republican John McCain. Obama won Florida, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada, and a good part of those victories were built on the solid support the Democrat gained from Latinos. In the Southwest, Colorado’s Hispanic vote went 61-38 percent for Obama, and in Nevada and New Mexico the numbers were even better for the Democrat. Obama won Nevada and New Mexico by winning 60 and 69 percent of the Hispanic vote, respectively, in those two states.

The turnaround from 2004 was most evident in Florida, a state whose Hispanic vote went 57-42 percent for Obama after a 2004 election that saw Bush win the Latino vote by 56-44 percent. Nationwide, Obama earned 67 percent of the Hispanic vote to McCain’s 31 percent. Only four years ago, Bush, the Republican gained 44 percent of the Hispanic vote to Democrat Kerry’s 53 percent.

Here in the Rio Grande Valley, a national map in USA Today  showed our four-county region as one of the areas nationally where Obama’s support was 7 percent or better over what Kerry did in 2004.

And so, just two years after the Republicans and their conservative talk show allies unleashed harsh anti-immigration rhetoric in defeating a major reform bill, it was payback time, and it unfortunately fell on McCain to absorb the swing of Latinos back to Democrats in a major way.

“If the Republicans don’t make their peace with Hispanic voters, they’re not going to win presidential elections anymore. The math just isn’t there,” said Simon Rosenberg, head of the NDN, a Democratic group that studies Hispanic voters. Rosenberg made his comments to USA Today.

Danny Vargas, chairman of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly, told the same newspaper that the harsh tone of immigration bill opponents was problematic.

“Let’s have less on the emotional frenzy side of it and more on the solution side,” he said.

Early signs from the talk radio world that so dominates the GOP these days indicates more frenzy is on the way. One reason McCain lost, say many of the voices of talk radio, is because of his past support for immigration reform that included a path to legalization for some illegal immigrants. The economy may be falling to pieces, but we’ve got to make sure the Mexican immigrant working at a chicken processing plant in Iowa doesn’t get any sort of break. The talk radio world still has its priorities straight it would appear.

Next up in the switch from Republican red to Democrat blue may be Arizona and Texas, Rosenberg said.

“If these trend lines continue, Texas and Arizona will be in play in 2012,” Rosenberg told USA Today.

Texas going blue in the 2012 presidential election seems far fetched, but Dems are gaining numbers in the Texas Legislature. The state House of Representatives is now evenly divided between the two parties after two straight elections in which the Dems have gained seats. The state house will either consist of 76 Republicans and 74 Dems, or it will be an even 75-75 split, depending on the outcome of a Dallas-area legislative race that is still too close to call.

“I’m deeply concerned about the Republican Party, and I’m concerned about the Texas House,” said Rep. Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, in comments to the San Antonio Express-News.

He ought to be. Republicans better start getting Hispanics or else risk seeing that wide swath of American land between Louisiana and New Mexico go from red to blue.

- R.D. Cavazos

John McCain had Joe the plumber.

Barack Obama had the rest of America - or at least 63 million of his fellow countrymen and woman.

It was, as it turned out, a rout. Obama, the Democrat, earned twice as many electoral college votes than did McCain, his worthy Republican opponent. Obama turned the country blue, winning the usual big Democratic states, (New York, California, his home state of Illinois), but going far beyond what any Democrat has done since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

Obama won the Midwest - Iowa, Wisconsin, even turning Indiana blue, a state that had not voted for a Dem presidential candidate since LBJ in `64. The Rust Belt was his as well. Despite many efforts by the Republicans to turn Obama into a scary black guy, most working class whites in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania didn’t buy it. He won Michigan and Pennsylvania by big margins, Ohio not by a lot, but enough to deprieve McCain of a state he had to have.

Out west, Obama’s national strategy paid big dividends when New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada all went from red to blue, with the Democrat sweeping the Hispanic vote in each state enroute to his big win. And perhaps most impressively, Obama won what Politico.com called “the new South,” the states of Florida, Virginia, and most incredibly, North Carolina, the state of the old segregationist, Jesse Helms.

The rout of the Republicans was so complete, that GOP analyst Rod Dreker wrote on a National Public Radio website that his party “will be wandering around for some time like a google-eyed Wile E. Coyote after he’s had an anvil dropped on his head.”

Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and a mother from Kansas, beat John McCain, Vietman War hero and the son of a Naval admiral by a margin of 52-to-46 percent, the first time since LBJ blew out Barry Goldwater in `64 that a Dem has gained north of 51 percent of the vote in a presidential election. Only in America, in the words of Fox News commentator Juan Williams, “could you have a significant minority that was once so maligned and so oppressed, and now finally, have one of its sons rise to this level. I don’t care how you feel about him, (Obama), politically, on some level you have to say this is America at its grandest.”

The sweep of nearly 30 years, from Ronald Reagan’s rout of the Democrats in 1980, to Barack Obama’s astonishing victory on Nov. 4, 2008, is a testament to how far the political pendulum in this country can swing - and has swung. Reagan helped to revive a bedraggled nation - weighed down by a decade of soaring inflation, rising energy prices, and the national humiliaton of Americans held as hostages in their own embassy by a crazed Iranian government in Tehran.

Obama, too, would be elected on the heels of a national economy gone bad, as well as the same general early 1980ish vibe that the nation is headed on the wrong track in a major way, with a deeply unpopular president, (Carter in 1980, Bush in 2008), the source of much disdain. Reagan, the conservative icon, had the ability to inspire. Obama, the pragmatic liberal, does that in spades. Reagan used humor and a warm smile to disarm his critics. Obama did the same in his debates with McCain, and exhibited the same sort of above-the-fray feel Reagan usually displayed in  his campaigns.

Beyond that, of course, these two politicians have almost nothing in common other than their country of birth, and the fact that they both befuddled their adversaries. Like Reagan, Obama’s victory was complete. This was no George W. Bush fluke win in 2000, or beating John Kerry by a couple of hundred thousand votes in Ohio to gain re-election in `04. Obama prevailed over McCain in about every age group and demographic, even beating the Republican in the all-important independent voter group by 52-44 percent. Among all white voters, Obama received 43 percent of that vote, which is two percentage points better  than what Kerry did in `04.

The completeness of the Obama victory is such that it neutered all of the ususal wedge issue politics Republicans have long practiced, as perfected by the former political genius/has-been Karl Rove, to demoninze Democracts. It was all tried against Obama, the socialist, wealth redistributor, terrorist, Muslim, foreign-born African who was also against guns owners and for gays. And, somehow, it didn’t work, the swift boaters sank.

“The more the other side whined and pointed fingers, the higher Obama’s star climbed,” writes Matt Taibbi, of Rolling Stone magazine. “Obama isn’t interested in jacking up anybody’s bloodlust - a new thing in modern American politics.”

Now comes the hard part, the work of making it all work. Obama struck that tone in a somber victory speech before tens of thousands in Chicago. They were ready to party, but Obama nixed the fireworks and the rally-like feel. America, he said, has a long way to go to making things better for its people.

Still, for the young African-American girl in Atlanta, who feel to her knees, put her face in her hands and wept uncontrollably on national television after Obama pushed past 270 electoral votes, a lot of the work had already been done. You really can grow up to be anything you want to be in America.

Barack Hussein Obama is president-elect of the United States of America. A man has been judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin, just like the preacher from Atlanta dreamed in the 1960s.

And 63 million Americans made him the president - and made the dream come true.

- R.D. Cavazos

The key swing states of Nevada, New Mexico and Virginia have been the subject of much attention from the Obama and McCain campaigns. New Mexico looks to be solid for Obama, but Nevada and Virginia both look to be razor thin as the two candidates battle it out.

One key group in these key three battleground states could be “new Americans,” i.e. new citizens who were recently naturalized immigrants. Over the last two years, there has been a surge in the number of legal residents who have chosen to become citizens, in part, motivated by the recent national debate over immigration reform.

The Immigration Policy Center has released some new information on the role these “new Americans” may have in determining which candidate is ultimately victorious in New Mexico, Nevada and Virginia. In Nevada, where Obama and McCain are running within a few percentage points of each other, the policy center reports that new Americans now account for nearly 15 percent of registered voters in that state. In 2004, George W. Bush edged John Kerry in Nevada by 2 percent.

In New Mexico, new Americans accounted for less than 1 percent of the registered voters in that state in 2004. In 2008, these Americans total 7 percent of registered voters in New Mexico. Bush edged Kerry by a few thousand votes in the 2004 presidential race. And in Virginia, which historically has hardly been considered a destination for immigrants, new Americans account for 6 percent of all registered voters. The Virginia vote in 2008 between Obama and McCain may come down to a victory margin of less than 100,000 votes.

It is refreshing and exciting to see so many new citizens stepping forward to vote in this year’s historic presidential campaign. Depending how they vote, these new Americans may play a key role in deciding which candidate becomes the next U.S. president.

- R.D. Cavazos