| Before we all get carried away watching the results come in from Nevada, I was wondering about a more fundamental question about the nominating process that the Las Vegas Gleaner raised yesterday.
The hope was that bringing the candidates to Nevada would encourage them to talk about issues addressing Western states and Latinos. This never really happened. Unlike in Iowa, where candidates unleashed elaborate ethanol production schemes and brushed up on their knowledge of agricultural issues like hog farming, there was never really an opportunity to do the same in Nevada. Candidates instead came to Nevada with the programs and framed candidacies that had carried them through other states. No one took up grazing or water rights, the unsustainable growth of Las Vegas (as the Gleaner points out), mining regulations (at least not recently), gambling restrictions, or problems of the Native American community --- or at least there was no real discussion of them. This was in part because Western candidates like Bill Richardson never gained traction here. The party establishment locked in early for Clinton to try to give her a win but may have damaged the process that might have come out of it. And no one addressed the issues of Latino voters in a real way aside from recording some ads in Spanish. The immigration debate, which had burned so hotly elsewhere, barely came up this week. As the Gleaner points out, there was no discussion of driver's licenses for illegal immigrants. He supposes that the immigration failed to come up for lack of disagreement between the candidates. It may also be due to the fact that Latino voters have yet to exercise their voting rights in a powerful way, yet to vote in proportion to their population --- a trend that today might change, leading them to become a greater voice in political discussions. The only real exception was Yucca mountain, on which there was no disagreement, despite all of Clinton's attempts to cast doubts on Obama's support from an Illinois nuclear power corporation (while not raising her own similar stated agnosticism about nuclear power). But this wasn't so much a conversation as a tiresome repetition of a talking point. |
