So what if Tim Kaine speaks Spanish?: Column

As expected, much has been made of Senator Tim Kaine’s Spanish fluency and what it will mean for the Democratic presidential ticket.

If the Democratic Party is to win its third consecutive presidential election, Latino support is indispensable and Kaine’s pick may solidify the vote — or so the narrative goes.

Speaking Spanish is great. As an immigrant from Cuba and the executive director of Latinos for Tennessee, a statewide organization committed to advancing faith, family, freedom and fiscal responsibility, it’s always nice to hear public elected officials speaking Spanish.

But let’s be clear: Kaine’s pick can’t hide the many broken promises made to the Latino community by President Obama and through extension Hillary Clinton, who is effectively running for the president’s third term.

By most economic indicators, Latinos are faring worse than the general population. More Latinos are unemployed relative to other population groups. The fortunate ones that are employed haven’t seen a pay increase in some time, even as it becomes more expensive to live in growing and thriving cities, including those in the Volunteer State.

And despite promises to make college more affordable, the opposite has happened. This is especially the case for young Latinos that are finding themselves with thousands upon thousands of dollars in college debt as a result of increased government involvement in the student loan industry.

Besides the pains in the labor force, the Latino community has also not forgotten that Obama did not live up to his promise to enact an immigration reform law in his first year in office. When the President finally did get around to pushing for an immigration law, the well of bipartisanship had been poisoned after he muscled through Congress the Affordable Care Act with absolutelyzero Republican support.

As a result, Republicans had little appetite to work with a partisan White House that showed scant interest to make concessions with members of the opposite party.

And then, even after saying repeatedly that he could not go around Congress, Obama unilaterally decided to shield undocumented immigrants from deportation proceedings. Even if done with the best intentions, the president’s actions were unconstitutional.

The Latino community is hurting. Despite heavily favoring Obama not once, but twice in presidential elections, the Latino community has had very little to show for. We have not seen the creation of jobs we were promised. And although more Latinos have health insurance, the numbers also show that more Latinos are paying more for health care premiums or being pushed into Medicaid.

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Kaine and Clinton will have to convince the American people, including the many Latinos that call Tennessee home, how their policies will differ from the very same policies enacted under Obama. They will also need to respond to the insensitivity Democratic Party staff members showed when referring to Latino engagement as “Taco Bowl engagement.”

It will not matter if they respond to this in English or in Spanish.

To be sure, it’s great that  Kaine speaks Spanish. We wish that more and more of our fellow Americans also spoke Spanish and other languages. But at the end of the day, the Latino community is more interested in results. And on this, the Clinton-Kaine ticket has a mountain to climb to explain why the results of the last eight years have been so underwhelming.

Raul Lopez is the executive director of Latinos for Tennessee and wrote this piece for The Tennessean.

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