Thursday, May. 22, 2008 By TIM PADGETT/MIAMI
John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, no doubt
believes he scored a 10 with his hard-line Cuba policy speech in Miami
earlier this week. But presidential candidates, like figure skaters, are
often judged on the originality of their moves —and in that regard
McCain may be staring at lower marks in the crucial swing state of
Florida than his campaign appreciates.
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McCain got the jump on Barack Obama, who is slated to speak to the
Cuban-American National Foundation in Miami on Friday. But while Obama
is expected to outline a more nuanced approach to Cuba, McCain's visit
to Little Havana and his speech to more conservative Cuban-Americans
were rote repeats of the routine every White House hopeful performs in
Miami: cafe cubano at the Versailles restaurant followed by equally
caffeinated bellowing about his anti-Castro bona fides and the
Cuba-policy cowardice of his opponent, in this case Obama. President
Franklin Roosevelt "didn't talk with Hitler," McCain argued, attacking
Obama's recent suggestion that if elected President he would open a
dialogue with communist Cuba's leader, Raul Castro, as well as leaders
of other hostile nations such as Iran.
The McCain mambo, not surprisingly, got robust applause at the town hall
meeting he addressed. But outside those walls the response was more
subdued. If McCain is vulnerable to the charge that his presidency would
effectively be a Bush third term, he might want to explore Florida
beyond the echo chamber of the older Cuban exile community. He's likely
to find a growing number of younger, more moderate Cuban-Americans who
no longer believe the 46-year-old U.S. trade embargo against Cuba will
topple the Castro regime and who yearn to hear candidates discuss
matters besides Cuba, like the alarming lack of accessible health care
among Latinos. "Waving the bloody shirt of anti-Castro politics is going
to be less effective" in this election, says political analyst Dario
Moreno of Florida International University in Miami. "The Cuba issue is
losing its saliency."
Even moderate Cuban-Americans want to see the Castros gone and democracy
returned to their ancestral island. But most resent President Bush's
policy of letting them visit their relatives in Cuba only once every
three years (although Bush announced on Wednesday that he'll allow
Americans to send cell phones to Cubans now that Raul Castro has
permitted his citizens to own them). And when recent surveys show that
even a majority of Miami Cubans, of all people, favor relaxing the
restrictions — in an FIU poll 55% backed unlimited travel to Cuba — it's
probably time for U.S. politicians to drop the one-string embargo banjo
and pick up a new instrument for effecting change across the Florida
Straits.
That's especially true when you look at what's happening in the three
major Miami congressional districts this year. For the past two decades
the G.O.P.'s hold on those seats has been unassailable thanks to the
hard-line Cuban-Americans occupying them. But this week the Cook Report,
a Beltway guide to state and local elections, changed its "rating" on
Florida's 21st congressional district from "solidly Republican" to
"likely Republican" — a sign that Democratic challenger Raul Martinez is
a genuine threat to eight-term Republican incumbent Lincoln Diaz-Balart.
Martinez, in fact, has so far been able to match Diaz-Balart in fund
raising — and new reports that Democratic voter registration growth is
significantly outstripping that of Republicans in Miami bodes ill for
the G.O.P. in the 18th and 25th districts as well.
What's more, for a candidate who sells himself as the foreign policy
sage in the field, McCain at times sounded more like the diplomatic
neophyte he accuses Obama of being. McCain, for instance, insisted that
he could and would get the hemisphere and the world on board with our
failed Cuba policy. But after half a century it's fairly clear by now
that while our allies may strongly disapprove of Cuba's politics and
human rights record, they view their economic and diplomatic engagement
with Cuba as no more out of line than our economic and diplomatic
engagement with iron-fisted regimes like China and Saudi Arabia. In
fact, if McCain were as serious as he declared about improving U.S.
relations with Latin America, he would realize that the region's
lingering grievances about our high-handed approach to the hemisphere
are often tied to our perceived Cuba hypocrisy.
Presidential candidates, of course, typically spout the same macho
rhetoric on Cuba because they believe it's essential to winning Florida,
which in turn is essential to winning the White House. But the state —
especially the growth of its non-Cuban Latino community, which is often
irritated by all the attention thrust on Cuba — has changed more than
McCain and the G.O.P. seem to realize. The Democrats, of course, haven't
been much more clued in themselves in recent years. But Obama has
already signaled that when he gives his own speech in Miami, he's likely
to challenge at least bits of the status quo — he supports letting
Cuban-Americans visit Cuba and send remittances to relatives there
whenever they want, for example. In a Miami Herald op-ed article last
summer, Obama insisted that those family ties are "our best tool for
helping to foster the beginnings of grassroots democracy" in Cuba, and
suggested he would be more willing than the Miami hard-liners to
normalize relations with the Castro government. So despite the Hitler
analogies, Obama at least seems willing to bet that the peninsula is
ready for a more original approach to dealing with the island.
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1808584,00.html?imw=Y
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