The news out of the political circus yesterday was that Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, had been booed during a speech honoring Martin Luther King Jr. on the 40th anniversary of King’s assassination.
As Steve Benen and others have recorded, McCain has followed a serpentine path on the issue. And I’m not sure I can clearly reconcile their accounts of the candidate’s past actions with his current position.
MLK holiday angst is hardly a new story in American politics (Remember Public Enemy’s “By The Time I Get To Arizona”). What caught my imagination this weekend for the first time was the possibility that we might be one day playing out an identical drama, but in a different color.
Less than a week before the anniversary of King’s death, another notable date passed. March 31 is the birthday of union organizer and Hispanic-American hero Cesar Chavez. With Hispanic participation in the Democratic party vaulting, Sen. Barack Obama took the opportunity to make a point of supporting a national holiday, which dovetails with a fledgling resolution in the House of Representatives offering to make the same idea law. Meanwhile, an array of prominent union organizers have signed on to the lobbying effort.
If the Democratic leadership ever brings the measure to a vote, I wonder if a ‘Nay’ might one day come back to haunt a future presidential candidate, just as McCain’s 1983 vote haunted him yesterday. Voting against Chavez Day might not be so politically beneficial four or five election cycles from now if you’re running for president in an America where Hispanics are a larger, more affluent and more political active segment of the population.
While it was a new thought for me — living only blocks from Los Angeles’ Cesar Chavez Boulevard may be having an effect — the concept of Hispanic demographics as destiny certainly occured to Chavez himself. In the course of kicking around the web this afternoon, I found the following passage from a 1984 Chavez speech that offers a strong prediction. You can read and listen to it here.
I am told these days farm workers should be discouraged and pessimistic. The Republicans control the governor’s office and the White House. There is a conservative trend in the nation. Yet, we are filled with hope and encouragement. We have looked into the future and the future is ours. History and inevitability are on our side. The farm workers and their children and the Hispanics and their children are the future in California, and corporate growers are the past. Those politicians who ally themselves with the corporate growers and against farm workers and the Hispanics are in for a big surprise. They want to make their careers in politics; they want to hold power 20 and 30 years from now. But 20 and 30 years from now, in Modesto, in Salinas, in Fresno, in Bakersfield, in the Imperial Valley and in many of the great cities of California, those communities will be dominated by farm workers and not by growers, by the children and grandchildren of farm workers and not by the children and grandchildren of growers.
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Like the other immigrant groups, the day will come when we win the economic and political rewards, which are in keeping with our numbers in society. The day will come when the politicians will do the right thing for our people out of political necessity and not out of charity or idealism. That day may not come this year. That day may not come during this decade, but it will come someday. And when that day comes, we shall see the fulfillment of that passage from the Book of Matthew in the New Testament: “The last shall be first, and the first shall be last.” And on that day, our nation shall fulfill its creed, and that fulfillment shall enrich us all. Thank you very much.
It’s a little eerie how closely it mirrors MLK’s famous last speech in Memphis, but with a stronger nod to the virtues of bare-knucked, union-style politics than King’s offer of divine revelation. What do you think of the comparison?