The Class Politics of Cultural Pluralism:

Presidential Campaigns and The Latino Vote

 

The history of immigration in American presidential rhetoric may be regarded as a record of responses to the defining question posed by Hector St. John de Cr�vecoeur in 1783: “What then is the American, this new man?”  Although presidents and presidential candidates from Washington forward have addressed the assimilation of new immigrants, Nathan Glazer summarized the whole of American responses to Crèvecoeur in this way: “Everyone can be an American; but some people, it seems, can be better Americans than others, and they have been defined through most of our history by race, religion, or ethnicity.”[1] At the twilight of the twentieth-century, however, the assimilability of immigrants is measured less by race, religion, ethnic identification, or even language acquisition.  Rather, the acquisition of material goods and ascension to the middle class—the quintessential American demographic—increasingly constitutes the leitmotif for presidential imaginings of Crèvecoeur’s “new man.”

Literature on immigration politics typically foregrounds race and ethnicity; however, class ideologies also structure immigration rhetoric in significant ways.  The American dream, with its commensurate promise of social mobility, has been a longstanding trope in presidential rhetoric and remains a central ideology of Americanism.  Nativist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries emerged during economic downturns and garnered support for restrictive immigration policies by playing on the class anxieties of native-born workers.  More generally, public opinion regarding immigration has served as a reliable indicator of state, national, and (in a post-NAFTA era) global economic stability.  Despite its importance to immigration policy and presidential politics, the class dimension of presidential discourse on immigration has received limited scholarly attention.  In the few studies that foreground class, the lines of analysis typically emphasize the construction of immigrant groups as an economic threat, and thus less assimilable.[2] 

This chapter explores how class ideologies are put to inverse ends in particular presidential campaigns.  Specifically, the analysis attends to the ways in which presidential campaigns mark an immigrant group as “fully American” through class imagery.  The conflation between assimilation and consumerism appears most evident in campaign renderings of the American dream.  Homeownership constitutes the most obvious example as both a benchmark of assimilation and a symbol of social mobility.  The American presumption of social mobility—that “success” is not predetermined by class or ethnicity but is the result of hard work and ingenuity—is among the most defining tenants in our civil liturgy.  Social mobility historically functioned as both reward and rationale for cultural assimilation.  The rise of ethnic consciousness-raising in the 1960s, however, established pluralism (rather than assimilation) as the reigning paradigm.  Presidential campaign ads marketed to Latino voters, which serve as the focal point of this chapter, rely on pluralist imagery to portray social mobility and promote Latino assimilability.  Nevertheless, I argue that, despite their pluralist imagery, such campaign ads homogenize diversity by molding ethnicity to a static class ideology.

Pluralism and assimilation traditionally function as oppositional paradigms.  Whereas assimilation upholds the ideal of e pluribus unum, pluralism endorses “multiplicity in a unity,” a harmonious coexistence that maintains ethnic heritage and “Americanness” as not only coequal but also eminently combinable.  Historian John Higham notes, however, that pluralism not only “has unconsciously relied on the assimilative process which it seems to repudiate,” but that a “multiethnic society must rest on a unifying ideology, faith, or myth.”[3]  This chapter focuses on the unifying class ideology underpinning pluralist campaign ads.  Ultimately, the analysis demonstrates the entanglements of pluralist and assimilationist paradigms by tracing notable campaign constructions of Latino social mobility.

 

The Latino Vote

Presidential campaign rhetoric aimed at particular immigrant groups, as well as the nation generally, draws from the political optimism that informs American dream ideology.  During the last two decades, no group of immigrants more dramatized the ideology’s potential—as well as its limits—than Latinos: a diverse ethnic population grouped together by virtue of a Spanish-language heritage.  The 1980s may well have been the “Decade of the Hispanics” but the “Latin wave” of the 90s has been credited with altering “the way the country looks, feels and thinks, eats, dances and votes.”  Evidence of the group’s mainstream political status appeared throughout the 2000 presidential campaign.  Headlines such as “The Year of the Latino Voter,” “Are Latino Voters the ‘Soccer Moms’ of the 2000 Election?” and “Hispanics in Middle America May Be a Deciding Factor in Presidential Election” reinforced the pro-Latino message featured at party conventions and in political advertising.  Indeed, Bush-Cheney 2000 spent an unprecedented $10 million on advertising that would tap what pollsters labeled the “explosion of the new immigrant voter.”[4]  

Since the 1960 Viva Kennedy! campaign, Latino immigrants have, to varying degrees, been part of the political landscape.  The history of redubbing English ads with Spanish narration in the weeks before the general election attests to the longstanding salience of the Latino vote.  While the period between the 1960s and 1980s was distinguished by an incremental approach to Latino outreach, the 1984 campaign to reelect Ronald Reagan marked a significant shift in both strategy and the electoral influence of Latino voters.  Press accounts described the GOP’s ambitious outreach efforts during the 1984 campaign as attempts to offset the black vote by tapping into the “fastest growing minority in the land.”  Following the GOP’s relative success in capturing thirty-five percent of the Latino vote in 1984, Democrats and Republicans developed increasingly specialized outreach campaigns by targeting particular markets for English and Spanish-language media.  In contrast, the 2000 election was defined by appeals aimed at mobilizing a much broader base of Latinos.  The scope of Latino outreach by both parties was overshadowed, however, by GOP efforts to recast the party as simpatico with Latino culture. Bush-Cheney 2000, for example, was a largely bilingual campaign that boasted daily translations of speeches and over a half-dozen Spanish-language ads, including “Es un nuevo día” [It’s a new day], the first Spanish-language ad aired in a presidential primary.  Post-election press and party rhetoric suggest that Latino voters will remain a focal point for Republicans.  Bush’s chief strategist, Karl Rove, advised that getting a higher percentage of the Hispanic vote was the “mission” and “goal” for 2004, while former House speaker Newt Gingrich premised the future of the Republican Party on its ability to attract the fastest growing sector of the voting public: “It’s a very simply equation.  With the rising number of Hispanics, it is possible for the Republican Party to become a governing majority for a generation if it learns how to reach out to create a common community.”[5]

The political stature associated with Latinos is often attributed to Hispanic population growth; yet widespread social acceptance of Hispanicity corresponds more directly to a changing class identity.  “A generation ago,” argues New American Foundation fellow Gregory Rodriguez, “being Mexican in America was still synonymous with being poor and marginal . . . But as the Latino middle class has grown over the past few decades, the definition of Latino has broadened.”[6]  Within presidential rhetoric, this broadening process has been dramatized most explicitly in political advertising.  Of course, afterimages of Bracero programs and the farmworkers movement continue to shape the political imagination, much as the economy for migrant labor from Mexico directs immigration policy.  But the Latino migrant constitutes only a piece of the increasingly diverse mosaic that defines contemporary Hispanicity.

To understand the role that class plays in presidential renderings of Hispanicity generally, and Hispanic assimilability in particular, this chapter focuses on GOP ads produced for the 1984 and 2000 campaigns.  These pivotal campaigns not only extended the scale of Latino outreach, but also introduced an inclusiveness epitomized in 1984 by the message “You ‘re one of us.”  The “new symbolism” associated with the 2000 GOP campaign was most evident in Latino-targeted political ads—particularly those featuring George P. Bush, the candidate’s nephew. According to Rodriguez, “The Bush message to Hispanics historically has been ‘You are part and parcel of the mainstream, you are part of America.’  This [ad campaign] is taking it several steps further: ‘Your are part of our family.’”  This is not to suggest that the Latino community, which commonly voiced concerns that the campaigns emphasized marketing over policy, embraced the ads’ inclusiveness unconditionally.[7]  Political advertising functions by virtue of a symbolic shorthand that often glosses the complexities of an issue and simplifies the needs of a community.  When considered from a rhetorical perspective, however, these constraints prompt a number of questions pertinent to the study of class and immigration in presidential rhetoric.  How do campaign ads frame the liminal identity of immigrant groups, specifically second- and third-generation Latinos?  What class markers signify assimilability?  In what ways are pluralist appeals constrained or enabled by class tropes?  In addressing these questions, the following analysis explores the class limits of American pluralism.

 

Hispanic Victory Initiative ’84: “A New Tradition”

Neither immigration policy nor Latino outreach figures prominently in rhetorical histories of the reelection efforts most associated with Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign.  Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s study of the campaign, for example, focuses on the GOP’s strategy of preemptive politics and advertising as inoculation.  In an effort to neutralize the Republican gender gap,  Jamieson notes, Reagan appointed women to high-profile positions on the Supreme Court and in the cabinet.  In order to pacify anxieties regarding the economy, general election ads featured scenes of middle class prosperity and small town security that a Washington Post headline credited with “Making America Feel Good About Itself.”  Although overlooked in Jamieson’s account, GOP strategists also argued that offsetting the black vote with an “awakening giant in American politics, the nation’s 14.6 million Hispanic Americans” constituted the winning gambit of the election.  Effectively wooing the “giant,” strategists argued, would insure not only short-term success but also long-term survival.  Press accounts echoed this logic.  The courtship was framed as a mercurial effort to capture the critical few percentage points needed for a Republican majority and strengthen the party by tapping into the United States’ fastest growing minority.  Ultimately, the relative importance of the Hispanic vote to Reagan’s reelection campaign is evinced by the $6 million spent on campaign ads targeted toward Latinos, which accounted for fifteen percent of the $40 million spent on the Reagan-Bush reelection campaign as a whole.[8] 

The Republican “blueprint” for winning the Latino vote, “Hispanic Victory Initiative ‘84,” emphasized mass media campaigning and constituted a significant turning point in both Latino outreach and market specialization.  Federico Subervi-Vélez, Richard Herrera, and Michael Begay conclude in their study of Latino advertising that, prior to the 1984 election, “most, if not all, presidential candidate ads directed at Latinos were simply Spanish language translations (dubbed versions) of English language ads.”  The Reagan reelection campaign, however, produced six thirty-second television ads and four radio spots as part of the Hispanic Victory Initiative.  The Hispanic marketing firm Sosa and Associates produced the radio spots and four of the six television ads, while the “Tuesday Team”–an ad hoc group selected from leading agencies across the country–created the mainstream “Morning Again in America” series, as well as two Latino-targeted ads.  In comparison, the DNC spent only $120,000 to commission and air four Spanish-language radio spots that ran in limited markets during the last two weeks of the campaign.  RNC ads aired repeatedly in timeslots with an established Latino market-share on “major broadcasting stations in cities with Hispanic markets as large as New York and as small as Harlington, Texas.”[9]  Decisions to run either English-language or Spanish-language ads were based on market research regarding the acculturation level of audiences in a particular market, specifically census data on language preference.

Two advertising principles—emotion and repetition—governed the campaign’s creative process from brainstorming and script development to shot selection and editing.  Sosa and Associates president Lionel Sosa reduced his approach in the Latino-targeted ads to the imperative that “an emotional nerve be touched.”  Phil Dusenberry, “Tuesday Team” adman and producer of the Reagan convention film, characterized the “Morning Again in America” series as emotional advertising that is not “designed to think about, to understand, so much as to feel.”  Scenes of American families in their new homes, neighborhood driveways with the latest model sedan, and workers back on the job appeared throughout the general election spots and evoked a middle-class idealism that Lee Greenwood’s folksy theme song, “I’m Proud to be an American,” infused with patriotic undertones.  Crafted for a mainstream sensibility, the “Morning Again in America” series portrayed the American dream from a communal perspective: 

In a town not too far from where you live, a young family has just moved into a new home.  Three years ago, even the smallest house seemed completely out of reach.  Right down the street, one of the neighbors has just bought himself a new car, with all the options.  The factory down the river is working again . . . . . Life is better.  America is back.  And people have a sense of pride they never felt they’d feel again.  And so, it’s not surprising that just about everyone in town is thinking the same thing.  Now that our country is turning around, why would we ever turn back?[10]  

The Latino counterpart to such general election spots also featured the promise of a better life associated with the American dream, albeit one calibrated to Hispanic sensibilities.

 

Success: An American Commodity

                The American dream is a narrative about success.  The standard measure of success is class mobility; the meaning of that success, however, may encompass a well being irreducible to wealth, job status, or power.  Whether success is defined narrowly (in relation to income and prestige) or more broadly (as fulfillment and autonomy), the inherent optimism of American dream ideology not only draws newcomers to America but also animates the restless aspirations attributed to the mythic American spirit.  Such optimism can also blind, however.  By conflating opportunity with equality, and success with virtue, American dream ideology can obscure the economic, social, and demographic structures that constrain aspirations and thwart success.  As political scientist Jennifer Hochschild concludes,

Because success is so central to Americans’ self-image, and because they expect as well as hope to achieve, Americans are not gracious about failure.  Others’ failures remind them that the dream may be just that—a dream, to be distinguished from waking reality.[11]

Like a dream, the bucolic scenes of small town America featured in the “Morning Again in America” series displaced the “waking reality” of Reaganomics and, in so doing, primed voters to evaluate Reagan from a middle-class point of view.  The series of campaign ads produced for Latino audiences more than displaced concerns over the ill effects of Reaganomics; they portrayed a static vision of Hispanic identity that privileged class-consciousness over ethnic identifications or heritage.

The desire for a “better life” may constitute the sine qua non of American Dream ideology; campaign appeals that play on such aspirations, however, must balance the dream’s universal lure with Hispanic cultural norms.  The ability to achieve such a balance entails not only cultural sensitivity but also an understanding of the candidate’s political vulnerabilities.  Throughout the Reagan reelection campaign, three constraints most shaped the GOP’s pitch to Latinos.  First, the campaign had to counter longstanding cultural norms associating Democratic Party affiliation with Latino identity.  Efforts to establish an affinity between Hispanics and Republicans included events organized to spotlight Reagan’s religious conservatism and anti-communist agenda, as well as media appeals that framed the Latino work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit as consonant with decisive Republican values.  Second, the effect of Reagan’s economic policies on Hispanic unemployment and poverty levels provoked criticism from Democratic Party leadership and Latino political organizations.  In response to Republican appeals for the Hispanic vote, Democratic senator Edward M. Kennedy characterized Reagan’s first term as “the most anti-Hispanic administration in modern history.”  The League of United Latin American Citizens organized a press conference to discredit the administration’s “clear, negative track record on issues that affect Hispanics.”  In light of such criticism, the credibility of GOP promises to “bring the sustained prosperity Hispanics need to get ahead” remained illusory.[12]  Finally, the assimilationist connotation associated with Latino class mobility required a vision of success more culturally attuned than the Anglo boomtowns of the “Morning Again in America” series.  In short, the campaign required a vision of Hispanic prosperity culturally uncompromised by success.  By visualizing class mobility in this way, the campaign offered Latinos a counter-image to Chicano portraits of the Hispanic middle-class as cultural traitors.

The 1984 Republican slogan was “Leadership that’s working,” yet campaign advertising was crafted according to an even more elemental logic: “Who can argue with success?”  In order to personify Hispanic economic integration under Reagan, Sosa & Associates created a series of personal witness ads featuring “regular people” rather than the candidate or notable Latino Republicans.  Unlike previous incarnations of the personal witness format, the ads produced by Sosa & Associates framed the characters as “real people” by identifying each spokesperson by name.  According to Sosa, the use of commonplace Latino surnames, characters with “pan-Hispanic” faces, and a “generic Spanish” dialect dramatized Reagan’s appeal to Latinos of varied descent.[13]

As products of a GOP melting pot, the ads’ prototypical Latinos conformed to a uniform class mold.  The ads’ portrait of middle-class life and work normalized a linear model of economic assimilation.  This lock-step view of mobility was epitomized in a “Tuesday Team” ad originally produced for the general public but aired in Hispanic markets: “It was the dream that built a nation.  The freedom to work in the job of your choice, to reap the rewards of your labors, to leave a richer life for your children, and their children beyond.”  The upward mobility celebrated across the campaign appeared to be a natural (if not absolute) end to the seemingly singular route of Latino social ascent forged by hard work and educational opportunities.  Appeals trumpeting “la buena vida” [the good life] enabled by Reagan cited improved public education.  Rodriguez notes, however, that the “Latino path to the middle class is marked less by rapid individual educational progress and more by nuclear or extended family members who are engaged in blue-to pink-collar labor pooling their money to improve the status of the whole family unit.”[14]  Presenting this perspective on mobility would amount to challenging the very presumption of universal equity that inspires and justifies the sacrifices made on the varied and uneven paths to la buena vida.  The campaign, therefore, profiled Latinos for whom such journeys were but an inherited memory.

Cultural memory figures prominently in the monologues and settings of GOP campaign ads aimed at Latinos.  Unlike the personal witness format used in previous elections, these spots challenge Latino cultural norms rather than an opponent’s record.  The focal point of the series reflects the locus of Latino culture, its familism.  Every ad produced by Sosa & Associates devolves on familial traditions, particularly the political tradition of voting Democrat. The first lines in three of the four television ads dramatize the interrelationship between civic life, party affiliation, and Latino family life:

Four years ago I voted for the first time.  The same way the family voted, Democrat all the way. 

Voting around this house is almost tradition.  We’re Democrats.  My father started it. I picked up on it, so did my kids.

El otro día le dije a papá que iba a votar por primera vez, por el presidente Reagan.  Se sorprendió pues toda la familia siempre ha sido Demócrata.  [The other day I told my dad that I was going to vote for the first time, for President Reagan.  He was surprised, well, all the family has always been Democrat.][15]

These narratives operate much like the “generic” dialect used in the ads; their familial appeal is

“pan Hispanic.”  The turning point of the monologues, however, devolves on middle class

appeals to “la buena vida.” 

Justifications for leaving the Democratic fold invoked middle-class sensibilities in implicit and explicit ways.  Amorphous claims such as “things are getting better” and “He has returned the good life to us” take on a decidedly bourgeois meaning in the context of spacious homes that serve as the ads’ backdrop.  The ads are set in a “well-kept, middle- or upper-class residence with colors and styles,” which Sosa & Associates contrived to “give the impression of the all-American-home.”  This comfortable normalcy is in itself a form of preemptive politics that seeks to offset or redefine the compromises made in pursuit of American success. In the most explicit version, the very meaning of tradition is redefined:

Voting around this house is almost tradition.  We’re Democrats.  My father started it.  I picked up on it.  So did my kids.  But this year, it doesn’t feel right voting only for tradition.  Especially now that my business is up and my wife and daughter can shop for those little extras.  So this year I am starting a new tradition.  I am voting for President Reagan.[16]

Unlike other ads in the series, which feature “little extras” as an implied rationale for conceding traditions, this ad presents consumerism as the very basis of tradition.

The ads foreground cultural markers of Latino authenticity in order to deflect critiques that the American dream is incommensurate with Latino traditions.  Generational relationships dramatized in the series, for example, normalize a shift from the family as the focal point of political life to the individual.  In order to minimize the tenor of individualism, the ads qualify ballot decisions in relation to familial authority, such as a grandmother’s concession to “vote how you feel hija.”  In order to minimize anxieties over cultural assimilation, the ads visually center vestiges of immigrant heritage through mise-en-scène.  Framed photographs–specifically the formal portraits that signify a family’s enactment of the America dream–constitute the most obvious example.  In “Pride/Nancy Cisneros,” a framed black-and-white image of a couple either on their wedding day or having just arrived in the United States–both significant thresholds to the American dream–not only appears in the background, but functions as the vanishing point in at least half the shots.  The variance between the ads’ visual imagery and spoken text dramatizes what then-editor Henry Grunwald described in a 1985 special immigration issue of Time magazine as the “double life” of an immigrant.  Defined by a “double identity and a double vision,” the immigrant remains “suspended between an old and a new home, an old and new self.”[17]  Notwithstanding postmodern notions regarding the fractured nature of subjectivity, Grunwald’s reduction of identity to old and new, past and present, offers insight into the ethnic identity modeled by the Reagan ads.  To be clear, this relationship between the past and the present functions as a displacement of sorts.  The ads model a compromise of old and new, the individual and familial, that situates class mobility as the animating force for Latino voters while relegating heritage and tradition to the literal background of civic life.      

A static vision of America coheres throughout Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” campaign.  If one were to look to the campaign for answers to Crèvecoeur’s question, we would find that the perpetually new “American” assumes a uniform class-consciousness.  Reagan’s 1984 campaign ads maintain the pluralist notion that cultural difference is the “spice” that makes the American stew rich and flavorful, yet reduce assimilation to an economic process defined by home ownership and the ability to “shop for those little extras.” The framed portraits featured in “Pride/Nancy Cisneros” and “Tradition/Miguel Fernandez” visually signify immigrant heritage, whereas the work uniforms, window garden, and home interiors normalize commonplace bourgeois ideals.

Reagan’s success in capturing thirty-five percent of the Hispanic vote during the 1984 election stood as the GOP benchmark until the 2000 election when George W. Bush nearly matched Reagan’s record, garnering, by conservative estimates, thirty-two percent of the Hispanic vote.  More than election results connect the two campaigns, however.  Hispanic voters constituted a pivotal but wary constituency for both the 1984 and 2000 GOP campaigns.  In the wake of rising Hispanic unemployment rates and cuts in bilingual education during Reagan's first term, the GOP’s affinity with the Hispanic community was often challenged.  Republican support for anti-immigrant initiatives in the mid-90s, such as California’s Proposition 187, provided what GOP pollster Lance Tarrance characterized as “a case history of what not to do” in 2000.[18]  Although the particularities of each campaign resulted in distinct approaches to Latino outreach, pluralist appeals distinguished Hispanic ads aired during both the 1984 and 2000 elections.  In 1984, ads featuring “everyday” Hispanics ornamented American traditions with Latino trimmings.  In 2000, pluralist scenes featuring the candidate celebrated the changing face of America.  As I demonstrate in the following analysis, the cultural pluralism reflected across both campaigns obscured economic equalities by virtue of a one-dimensional, middle-class portrait of social mobility.

“Es un Nuevo Día”: Bush 2000

 

Political ads and political slogans share a similar controlling logic.  In either case, candidate positions and overarching themes are distilled into iconic images and memorable phrases that function as much to deflect certain standards of evaluation as to naturalize them.  The Bush campaign’s Spanish-language slogan and political ad tagline, “Es un nuevo día,” established change as the standard for evaluating the Bush candidacy.  The literal translation of the phrase is actually “It’s a new day”; during events staged for Latino voters, however, the Bush campaign retranslated the slogan into the uniquely American expression, “A Fresh Start.”  Although incorrect as a direct translation, the campaign’s dual slogans called attention to a GOP cultural sensitivity uncharacteristic of recent political campaigns.  Much like the well-known “Got Milk?” catchphrase that translates “Are you Lactating?” when phrased in Spanish, the racy undertones of the Spanish translation of “Fresh Start” made “Nuevo Día” the more culturally appropriate, if not grammatically equivalent, phrase to demonstrate Bush’s attentiveness to Latino culture.  In fact, the most salient message conveyed to Latino communities proved to be the slogans’ connotation that Bush constituted “a different kind of Republican.”  To be clear, however, the “new America” proffered in Bush’s “nuevo día” defined change in relation to tone rather than policy.  Bush’s status as a Republican of a different stripe hinged on running against the ghost of campaigns past: particularly Pete Wilson, the former California governor who functioned as the “bete noire of the GOP’s 2000 campaign.”[19]

Despite Bush’s gubernatorial success with Latino voters in Texas, media accounts framed Bush’s Latino outreach efforts as a direct response to an anti-immigration backlash that activated pro-immigrant activists and facilitated Democratic successes in post-Proposition 187 elections.  The Bush campaign added weight to such contrasts by making apologies for the party’s “anti-immigrant past” and differentiating the campaign’s 2000 outreach efforts from anti-immigration ads produced for Wilson’s 1994 gubernatorial campaign.  In place of immigration flashpoints from the 1996 campaign, such as taxpayer burden and eroding citizenship norms, the Bush campaign mainstreamed a rhetoric of inclusion summarized by assertions that “New Americans are not to be feared as strangers; they are to be welcomed as neighbors.”  Further evidence of the campaign’s inclusiveness appeared during the GOP convention, which featured the popular Mexican singer Vicente Fernandez.  While the Republican turnaround on immigration remained more a change in tone than policy, these efforts by the Bush campaign served as sufficient warrants for headlines such as:  “On Latino Voters, Bush Gets It” and “Mexican Americans Are Now Just Family.”  Rodriguez credits Bush’s campaign ads featuring George P. Bush, the candidate’s Latino nephew, with helping to “normalize the image of Latinos for society at large.”  Given such claims, the Bush 2000 campaign marked a significant transition regarding contemporary reimaginings of Crèvecoeur’s American.  But do such ads truly envision a pluralist America where the “tide of assimilation [has] turned,” as Rodriguez argues?[20] 

At the level of cultural pluralism, the answer is yes; at the level of economic pluralism, no.  The bourgeois ideal, and its enabling economic structure, constitutes a non-negotiable clause in the contemporary assimilation contract displayed across the campaign ads.  Though culturally diverse, Bush’s pluralist vision assumes relatively uniform definitions of opportunity and social mobility.[21]

 

“New America”: A Synergy of Class and Ethnicity  

Among the lasting mythologies of Crèvecoeur’s treatise on American émigrés is the presumption that the assimilation process transforms the nation’s newcomers rather than the nation itself.  Recent movements to restrict immigration justified calls for a moratorium on immigration with threats of ethnic separatism and Anglo marginalization.  Books such as Lawrence Auster’s 1990 The Path to National Suicide and Peter Brimelow’s 1995 Alien Nation warned that multiculturalism and Third World immigration would create “not some utopian, ‘equal’ society, but simply the end of American civilization.”  Campaign ads produced for the 1996 presidential election prophesized a nation imperiled by unassimilable “illegals.”  The 2000 presidential campaign also traded in images of a nation transformed by newcomers.  In place of nativist scenes playing on Anglo anxieties, however, the 2000 campaign introduced a hemispheric vision of America that linked San Antonio to Santigo and Chicago to Chiapas.  In a stump speech delivered before a meeting with Mexican President-elect Vicente Fox, Bush welcomed the synergy of U.S. Latinidad:

America has one national creed, but many accents.  We are now one of the largest Spanish-speaking nations in the world.  We’re a major source of Latin music, journalism and culture.  Just go to Miami, or San Antonio, Los Angles, Chicago, or West New York, New Jersey and close your eyes and listen.  You could just as easily be in Santo Domingo or Santigo, or San Miguel de Allende.  For years our nation has debated this change—some have praised it and others have resented it.  By nominating me, my party has made a choice to welcome the new America.^[22]

This cultural coexistence not only defined “the new America,” it was embodied by the Bush campaign.

The telegenic George P. Bush (twenty-three‑year‑old son of Jeb Bush and his Mexican‑born wife, Columba), personified a harmonious coexistence of ethnicity, “Americanness,” and free enterprise.  George P. Bush supposedly so seduced one audience of farm workers that they, according to a GOP spokesperson, “forgot he was a Republican.”  Lionel Sosa, the marketing architect of Bush’s Latino outreach efforts, justified featuring George P. in this way: “He’s able to deliver a message in a very natural way, and is, in fact, not only a handsome young man, but also totally Latino‑looking and as proficient in Spanish as he is in English.”  More important than simply appearing “totally Latino-looking,” George P. modeled the “pluralist personality” representative of George W.’s transnational vision.  He balanced American and Latino culture without losing the Republican message in the translation.  According to Sosa, Bush “is the ideal young man, the ideal young Latino that’s very acculturated, very comfortable with a grass-roots Latino community—as comfortable in East Los Angeles as he would be in a corporate boardroom.”[23]  The acculturation process reflected in his campaign efforts, particularly political ads in which he was featured, portrayed an ethnic identity enriched by American class-consciousness. 

George P.’s overarching message sought to counter claims that achieving the American dream requires giving up who you are for who you want to become.  In “Same as Mine,” an ad released to coincide with New York City’s Puerto Rican Day and placed on existing rotation in Florida and New Mexico, Bush identifies himself as a Latino typically “American” in his ideals:

You soy un joven Latino de este pais, muy orgulloso de mis raices.  En muchas maneras soy como cualquier Americano, creo en la oportunidad, en un trato justo para todos, creo en el sueño Americano.  Tengo un tío que quiere se Presidente porque él cree en los mismo que yo, en la opotunidad para cada Americano, para cada Latino.  Su nombre? Igual que el mío, George Bush. [I am a young Latino in the U.S. and very proud of my bloodline.  In many ways I am like any other American.  I believe in opportunity, a level playing field for everyone and the achievement of the American Dream.  I have an uncle that is running for President because he believes in the same thing: opportunity for every American, for every Latino.  His name?  The same as mine, George Bush.] 

The ad relies on appeals common to all Latino outreach campaigns by foregrounding generational relationships and the promise of economic opportunity.  Yet the differences from previous campaigns are significant.  First, the ad begins with an explicit expression of ethnic pride, establishing a stark contrast with the 1984 Reagan campaign ads that indirectly expressed ethnic pride through mise-en-scene as well as the 1996 campaign, which equated illegal immigrants with Hispancity.  Bush’s self-identification as a Latino rather than a “hyphenated American” (Hispanic-American or Mexican-American) further underscores the evolving status of Mexican-Americans as an assimilable group.  “A generation ago,” Rodriguez notes, “a child of an Anglo U.S. governor and a Mexican immigrant mother probably would not be called Latino.”^[24]  Though merely implied, the fact that Latinidad constitutes part of the political mainstream indicates a significant shift regarding assimilation--specifically that the infrastructure and ideals of a market economy now form the central domain of the assimilation contract.  Finally, the ad turns on the disclosure that George P. shares a name, and thus a family heritage, with the presidential candidate.  This twist dramatizes the embodied connection between candidate Bush and the Latino community and, in so doing, recontextualizes the candidate as a Latino by proxy.

This approach of portraying the candidate as a Latino by proxy is further developed in a second ad featuring George P. Bush.  The ad transforms established Latino values into warrants for electing the Republican candidate.  George P.’s bilingual voiceover enumerates such warrants as a litany of slogans accented by occasional Spanish phrasing:

Why vote for George W. Bush?  Because he believes in family.  Because he supports education.  Because he knows we are all the new face of America.  Because he wants no child left behind.  Because it is time for a change.  Because he understands our culture. Porque.  Because he is a great guy.  Porque el sueño Americano es para todo . . . This is the reason, este la razón, why I will vote for him.  How about you?  E tu?[25]

Ideologically, politically, and culturally, in other words, Bush’s values are essentially Latino values.  The rationale of this ad—indeed, of the GOP’s 2000 presidential campaign—is unified by its governing warrant: el sueño Americano es para todo [the American dream is for all].  The ad demonstrates that, ultimately, the American dream forms the red thread in the campaign’s pluralist tapestry.

The apparent pluralism of the American dream presumes equal opportunity for every citizen regardless of race, ethnicity, class or gender.  In practice, however, the discourse of pluralism can function as a way of denying economic inequalities.  Commenting on the slippage between the ideal of equal opportunity and the realities of ethnic and racial discrimination, Jennifer Hochschild argues, “not only has the ideal of universal participation been denied to most Americans, but also the very fact of its denial has itself been denied in our national self image.”[26]  Those denied the dream “disappear from the collective self portrait” so as to maintain the expectation of success.

The diversity, the “collective self portrait,” rendered in George W. Bush’s campaign ads conflate inclusiveness and equality.  Such ads, that is, offer diversity without social conflict, immigration without economic burden:

Where I come from, cultural diversity isn’t something you read about.  It’s something you see everyday.  In my core, it’s family.  I’m proud of the Latino blood that flows in the Bush family. Latinos contribute so much.  In return they deserve the full promise of American Life.  With reforms that say-this is your country-this is your home. El sueño Americano es para ti. [The American dream is for you.]

The strategic mix of inclusive phrases and policy ambiguity displayed in “America the Beautiful” is characteristic of the Spanish-language commercials released by the Republican National Committee.  In a New York Times Adwatch evaluating “Nuestros Hijos,” an ad promoting Bush’s education record, Frank Bruni offers the following scorecard: “In some ways, the subject matter and the claims here are less important than the language being spoken, which tells Hispanic voters that they matter.”  Bruni’s point focuses on the role of the Spanish language in particular.  In contrast, my analysis demonstrates that the language in which the claims are advanced matter less then the ad’s pluralist imagery.  That is, the claims are not only “less important” than the language spoken, they are also secondary to the culturally pluralist America visually naturalized throughout Bush’s ad campaign.  Ultimately, the ads do not simply communicate that Latinos matter, they recontextualize Hispanic immigration in relation to notions of the “open society that allows and promotes social mobility.”[27] 

Proof of such a claim is evident in comparisons to both 1984 and 1996 campaign ads focusing on immigration.  The contrasts with the 1996 campaign are most jarring.  Instead of ads dramatizing overcrowded schools and an overburdened middle class, “Nuestros Hijos” features a Latino barrio untouched by the economic upswing of the 90s.  Over black-and-white images, an off-screen narrator states: “They say that the economy’s better than ever, but in our neighborhoods, we feel forgotten.”  The imagery depicts neglected urban spaces such as a barrio shanty and littered underpass, yet frames such scenes as an effect of failed education policy: “We need a better education.  And that means a new commitment.”  In contrast to campaign ads from the 1996 election that portrayed urban decline as the effect of a particular immigrant population, this ad suggests that the blame should be placed upon inadequate schools and unenforced academic standards.  In so doing, the campaign distinguishes candidate Bush from his predecessors’ perceived nativism while implying that public education constitutes the most pressing issue for poor Latinos and the central barrier to social mobility.  The ad reinforces this point by concluding with a color close-up of a Spanish-speaking George W. Bush, who vows, “For me, education is number one. Because our children deserve the best.”[28]  The focus on children is conspicuous, even in Latino-targeted campaign ads unrelated to education policy.  If one were to look to the ads for a prototypical “new American” in Bush’s “new America,” the image would not depict the bourgeois voter of the 1984 campaign, or the “illegal” of the 1996 campaign.  Rather, Bush’s “new Americans” are literally new in that they have not long been on this earth.  Of the four ads that feature scenes other than a candidate or surrogate headshot (Nuevo Día, Nuestros Hijos, America the Beautiful, and Para Sentirse Mejor), the Latino child constitutes the most iconic image. 

Most significantly, this iconic image of the Latino child embodies the pathos of the American dream, and all it promises, thereby deflecting the political agendas that may subvert its realization.  The realization of such promises varies generationally, in relation to the economy, and even according to race and gender.  Opportunities for success, however, are presumed to exist for all Americans.  For second- and third-generation immigrants, the promise of the American dream is renewed and enacted through their children.  Thus, in addition to connoting an innocence that stands in dramatic relief to the threat dramatized by depictions of illegal immigrants during the 1996 election, the imaging of opportunity and equality through the trope of the immigrant child deflects the distance between promise and achievement.  In an analysis of the meaning and limits of success as imagined through the master myth of the American dream, Hochschild details the social function of conflating the promise and probability of success:

The general point, however, always holds: no one promises that dreams will be fulfilled, but the distinction between the right to dream and the right to succeed is psychologically hard to maintain and politically always blurred.  It is especially hard to maintain because the dream sustains Americans against the daily nightmares only if they believe that they have a significant likelihood, not just a formal change, of reaching their goals.

Hochschild’s analysis explains why the immigrant child is such an apt image for the Bush campaign, which was simultaneously commended for its inclusiveness and charged for not acting aggressively enough with regard to the healthcare of poor Latinos and their living conditions in impoverished Texas barrios.[29]  Like the recurrent references to “promise,” “opportunity,” and that “el sueño Americano es para ti,” the face of a Latino child deflects attention away from the more divisive issues concerning contemporary immigration politics and race relations. 

Finally, Hochschild’s analysis also explains a striking absence evident not only in the Bush ads but in all the presidential campaign ads that form the larger intertext of this study.  Despite the iconic status of the migrant worker within Chicano activism, only two presidential campaigns invoked such icons.  The advertising for 1976 Viva Ford! campaign included brief shots of workers in the fields, while ads produced for Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential run featured a personal witness testimonial and press photos of Jackson’s participation in a 1986 strike in Fulton Beach, California.  Given the motivating logic of the American dream myth and its status within presidential campaign rhetoric, the fact that campaign ads are marked by such a relative absence makes perfect sense.  For, if Hochschild is correct, the rhetorical success of the so-called American dream depends upon its appeal to those capable of realizing the dream, not those for whom it seems most out of reach.

 

Conclusion

 

Class politics play a ironic role in presidential campaigns as a source both of division and inclusion.  During the 2000 election, the divisiveness associated with class politics was most tangible in the days following the Democratic National Convention.  The morning after Gore’s populist acceptance speech, Bush rallied supporters by chiding Gore’s working-class appeals: “They’ve got a candidate who wants four more years of finger-pointing and politicizing and blaming, a candidate who will pit one group of people against another, a candidate who wants to wage class warfare to get ahead.”  Political inclusiveness regarding social class, however, ironically surfaces even as candidates are charged with inciting class divisions.  During Bob Dole’s 1996 “Listening to America” tour, the candidate rebuked charges of “class warfare” with an argument by definition: “We’re not a class society.  We’re a classless society.  This is the United States of America.”[30]  The logic underpinning Dole’s comments, which assumes that class distinctions bear little importance in American politics, also structures the campaign ads examined in this study.

The overarching argument of this essay is that pluralist appeals featured in pivotal 1984 and 2000 GOP campaign ads presented seemingly inclusive images of the “new American” yet circumscribed diversity along particular class lines.  To varying degrees, each campaign featured “pluralist personalities” that balanced ethnic heritage with what Novak describes as an American “superculture” overlying diverse and autonomous ethnic cultures.  The “superculture” reflected in the ads’ narratives and imagery magnified bourgeois ideals so as to eclipse norms and values unrelated to economics.  Class markers within the ads assumed both explicit and implicit forms.  References to the American dream clearly established Latino social mobility as the central theme addressed by both campaigns.  Homes serving as the backdrop for personal witness ads displayed the rewards of middle-class comfort.  Within the spectrum of Latino life depicted throughout the ads, social mobility was either achieved (as in the series of personal witness ads portraying Latino success stories) or opportunities for success appeared limitless (as children featured in the Bush ads imply).  The ads’ optimism regarding the availability of opportunities and the expectation of success preserved the illusion that the American dream is limited only by volition.  In reality, however, this illusion is politically and economically difficult to maintain; as Hochschild concludes, “When people recognize that chances for success are slim or getting slimmer, the whole tenor of the American dream changes dramatically for the worse.”             

Pluralism, in the most general terms, promotes diversity and affirms the right of ethnic groups to maintain their culture.  The political ads examined in this essay, however, endorsed a more attenuated conception of pluralism.  The political context shaping both the 1984 and 2000 GOP campaigns called for pluralist appeals that would convince Latinos of their affinity with Republicans, despite anti-Hispanic policies of the recent past.  Although the ads employed different means, their ultimate ends were similar.  The Reagan campaign ads fictionalized social mobility through personal witness ads, whereas the Bush campaign personified the pluralist “new American” embodied by the bicultural George P. Bush and the bilingual George W. Bush.  Nevertheless, the ads’ tolerance for cultural coexistence extended only to a particular class of Latinos.  Moreover, the route of social mobility featured throughout both campaigns deflected modes of economic assimilation that challenge the optimism of the American dream.  Thus, this study contributes to literature on the “ethnic angle” of presidential campaigning by demonstrating how class tropes shape pluralist appeals to ethnic voting blocs.

Although assimilation may no longer constitute an explicit policy objective or national ideal, the dynamics of cultural coexistence featured in presidential campaign ads often function as a form of civic priming.  Choices in imagery, music, and language reveal, as Edwin Black might remind us, “a model of what the rhetor [the campaign] would have his real audience [a nation of immigrants] become.”^[31]  Campaign ads prime voters as much on the norms of American citizenship as they do on policy positions and candidate competencies, and thus, ultimately reinforce a standard for assimilation.  This standard is shaped by not only by the changing face of America but the shifting landscape of economic fortune.  In an era increasingly defined by transnational commerce, the primary currency of the assimilation contract is no longer language, religion, or ethnicity as such, but the economic optimism of American dream ideology.