Richardson hopes for massive Hispanic turnout for Obama who will be in New Mexico Thursday!
::::::::
Obama plans Española visit Thursday; Richardson launches new group while courting Hispanics in battleground states;
[BATTLEGROUND and FENCESTRADDLER STATES' ELECTORAL VOTES ARE NOT DOOMED TO BE FOR MCCAIN!]
9/15/2008 - 9/16/08
Gov. Bill Richardson on Monday launched a group called Hispanics for Obama , and announced that the Democratic presidential candidate himself will appear Thursday in Española.
Barack Obama is relying on Richardson to help court Hispanics in battleground states including New Mexico, which narrowly went for Republican George W. Bush four years ago and where John McCain also has visited several times this year.
In informal remarks to dozens of local Democrats at the opening of a new south-side Santa Fe campaign office, Richardson began with a hearty "Buenos tardes." He laughed and made joking asides to enthusiastic audience members as he happily played the role of Obama cheerleader.
"As the Hispanic vote goes nationally, so goes the presidency," Richardson said. He got loud cheers by predicting big margins for the Illinois senator among Hispanic voters in New Mexico as well as in Colorado and Nevada.
"And we want that number to be close to 65 or 70 percent," he said of New Mexico's Hispanic vote for Obama.
It was a chance for locals to see Richardson do what he's been doing increasingly on the national level.
During the weekend, he attended several Obama events in Las Vegas, Nev. He met Saturday with Hispanic leaders there, spoke to Obama volunteers at a North Las Vegas campaign office, had a town hall at the College of Southern Nevada, attended a soccer tournament sponsored by Spanish-language television network Telemundo and spoke at a dinner for Las Vegas Democrats.
(The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that boxing fan Richardson also attended a title fight between Juan Manuel Marquez and Joel Casamayor.)
Also on Saturday, Richardson, in his role as Obama surrogate, taped an interview on MSNBC. On Sunday, he appeared on Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer, opposite Republican Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.
During last month's Democratic National Convention in Denver, Richardson told The New Mexican that the Obama campaign mainly wanted him to campaign in New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado, three swing states with significant Hispanic populations.
But Obama apparently isn't limiting Richardson to those Western states. The New York Times last week listed Richardson among surrogates including Sen. Hillary Clinton and Caroline Kennedy who were scheduled to appear at high-dollar fundraisers this month in New York.
A spokeswoman for the Governor's Office said Monday that travel expenses for such out-of-state trips are paid by the Obama campaign. He normally travels with a state police officer, a state Public Safety Department spokesman said. Although the officer's salary is paid by the state, the spokesman said, travel expenses are covered by the campaign.
Some at Monday's event in Santa Fe seemed to want to use Richardson to pass advice to Obama.
"Governor, tell him to toughen up those ads," one man said as Richardson left the building.
Hispanics for Obama is a statewide group, Richardson said after the event. It will hold policy forums involving Hispanic leaders around New Mexico.
Although Hispanic voters traditionally have favored Democrats, the percentages targeted by Richardson are hardly guaranteed. In 2004, President Bush attracted about 40 percent of the Hispanic vote according to exit polls conducted for The Associated Press and television networks.
Richardson said the campaign's goal is to register 12,000 new Hispanic voters as part of a statewide effort to boost total voter registration by 30,000 during the next 30 days.
Contact Steve Terrell at 986-3037 or sterrell@sfnewmexican.com.
IF YOU GO
What: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama visits Española
When: Rally starts at 12:30 p.m. Thursday at the Española Plaza
Tickets: Free, available starting today at two Obama campaign offices in
Santa Fe, 720 St. Michael's Drive 2-N and 3494 Zafarano Drive Suite B, as
well as at campaign offices in Las Vegas, Taos, Española, Los Alamos and
Raton.
Steve Terrell | The New Mexican
BREAKING NEWS; "Being the 'detective' that I am, I got the message below from the McCain camp today. I can understand why he wants people to vote for him now, by absentee ballot. He doesn't want people to be able to change their minds as they hear the upcoming debates."
JaneAnne from Wisconsin for Obama
BRILLIANT!
SO HERE IS THIS AGAIN:
By Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News -
First thoughts: The Electoral Map 50 days out :
Turn on the Steam in (leaning Obama) IA, MN, NM OR, PA, WA (61 votes) Toss up: CO, MI, NV, NH, OH, VA, WI (78 votes)
A lot of letters to the editor from you, and emailed all over your state might turn the tide, if they were well reasoned and hard hitting, to the point, about why Obama would be best for your state, in the long run! If you speak with the Editorial Page Editor, ask for an op/ed slot, 600-800 words, to really make your point, and don't forget that these are the very editors who are likely to be writing their endorsements in a few short weeks for President, so don't bombard them with blast emails: they won't get printed, and you will just irk the person.
Editorial page editors are listed in EDITOR AND PUBLISHER in your library,
and indirectly through
usnpl.com : unitedstatesnewspaperlist
And no doubt, as Dr. Howard Dean III pointed out in Santa Fe about a month ago, nothing works better than going door to door, and personally talking at length with your neighbors, colleagues, and family, to answer any questions they might have regarding Obama's strengths and McCain's failures.
You may find the earlier articles in my blog (there are 109 of them) to be helpful as all have been filed with strategy and tactical considerations in mind, above all.
Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News
Founder, New Millennium Fine Art
stephen@santafefineart.com
Submitter: Stephen Fox
Submitters Website: https://www.facebook.com/groups/592985284186083/
Submitters Bio:
Early in the 2016 Primary campaign, I started a Facebook group: Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Help Him Win! As the primary season advanced, we shifted the focus to advancing Bernie's legislation in the Senate, particularly the most critical one, to protect Oak Flat, sacred to the San Carlos Apaches, in the Tonto National Forest, from John McCain's efforts to privatize this national forest and turn it over to Rio Tinto Mining, an Australian mining company whose record by comparison makes Monsanto look like altar boys, to be developed as North America's largest copper mine. This is monstrous and despicable, and yet only Bernie's Save Oak Flat Act (S2242) stands in the way of this diabolical plan.
We added "2020" to the title.
I am an art gallery owner in Santa Fe since 1980 selling Native American painting and NM landscapes, specializing in modern Native Ledger Art.
I have always been intensely involved in politics, going back to the mid's 1970's, being a volunteer lobbyist in the US Senate for the Secretary General of the United Nations, then a "snowball-in-hell" campaign for US Senate in NM in the late 70's, and for the past 20 years have worked extensively to pressure the FDA to rescind its approval for aspartame, the neurotoxic artificial sweetener metabolized as formaldehyde. This may be becoming a reality to an extent in California, which, under Proposition 65, is considering requiring a mandatory Carcinogen label on all aspartame products, although all bureaucracies seem to stall under any kind of corporate pressure.
Bills to ban aspartame were in the State Senates of New Mexico and Hawaii, but were shut down by corporate lobbyists (particularly Monsanto lobbyists in Hawaii and Coca Cola lobbyists in New Mexico).
For several years, I was the editor of New Mexico Sun News, and my letters to the editor and op/eds in 2016 have appeared in NM, California, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and many international papers, on the subject of consumer protection. Our best issue was 10 days before Obama won in 2008, when we published a special early edition of the paper declaring that Obama Wins! This was the top story on CNN for many hours, way back then....
My highest accomplishments thus far are
1. a plan to create a UN Secretary General's Pandemic Board of Inquiry, a plan that is in the works and might be achieved even before the 75th UN General Assembly in September 2020.
2. Now history until the needs becomes clear to the powers who run the United Nations: a UN Resolution to create a new Undersecretary General for Nutrition and Consumer Protection, strongly supported ten years ago by India and 53 cosponsoring nations, but shut down by the US Mission to the UN in 2008. To read it, google UNITED NATIONS UNDERSECRETARY GENERAL FOR NUTRITION, please.
These are not easy battles, any of them, and they require a great deal of political and journalistic focus. OpEdNews is the perfect place for those who have a lot to say, so much that they exceed the limiting capacities of their local and regional newspapers. Trying to go beyond the regional papers seems to require some kind of "inside" credentials, as if you had to be in a club of corporate-accepted writers, and if not, you are "from somewhere else," a sad state of corporate induced xenophobia that should have no place in America in 2020!
This should be a goal for every author with something current to say: breaking through yet another glass ceiling, and get your say said in editorial pages all over America. Certainly, this was a tool that was essentially ignored in 2016, and cannot be ignored in the big elections of 2020.
In my capacity as Editor of the Santa Fe Sun News, Fox interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev: http://www.prlog.org/10064349-mikhail-gorbachev