Clinton and Obama battle for Hispanic vote

In just over a decade, Hispanics are scheduled to become the majority ethnic group in California, the most populous state in the Union. On February 5, Democrats not just in Calfornia, but in other states with significant Hispanic populations such as New York, Florida, Illinois, Arizona and Colorado, will be going to the polls in their party's primaries. The way these Hispanic voters tilt between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will be decisive in the race for the nomination.

As cruelly as a new mountain range suddenly looms up, even as a climber pants to the top of the first ridge, so do these states loom over Obama's challenge.

The January 26 primary in South Carolina is above all a register of how African-Americans feel about the two leading contenders, and polls suggest Obama has a commanding lead. If these predictions hold, Obama will have no time to exult. Commentators will say that, as a black candidate, victory in South Carolina was his for the taking and that the true test of his political stamina is still ahead.

A sinister omen for Obama came in last weekend's contest in Nevada in the fact that Mrs Clinton eked out a narrow but decisive victory because she won the Hispanic vote decisively. According to the entrance poll of Nevada caucus-goers, 64 per cent of Hispanic voters favoured Clinton to just 25 per cent for Obama.

There were confrontations, confirming the conventional political wisdom that browns - both native Chicanos and immigrant Hispanics - do not feel a commonality of interest with blacks.

After a study of Hispanic communities in a number of American cities, Paula McClain, a political scientist at Duke University in North Carolina, concluded that "Latinos tend to identify more with whites than with blacks", and that "what you may see is that Latino voters, despite conservatism on issues of gender, will feel more comfortable voting for Hillary Clinton than Barack Obama. They can quickly get over the gender issue with Clinton - because she is white."

McClain added that Obama is running "a very good campaign" on a platform of multiracial and multicultural coalition-building, but in the end "there is a question about how many Latinos will go into a voting booth and pull a lever for a black."

From the first few contests it's clear that Obama is picking up his support from the better-off and the young, who like his moderate style. But he also has to capture the support of millions of blue-collar working people - many of them Hispanic - and thus far he has not registered any decisive impact.

Mrs Clinton, by contrast, has successfully recruited labour icon Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farmworkers, and also Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a national chair for the Hillary Clinton campaign.

There is a way Obama could make an impact on these millions of Hispanics he has thus far failed to set on fire, but it would ratchet up the animus between the Obama and Clinton campaigns to a new and acrid intensity.

Across the next crucial days he could declare bluntly that while Mrs Clinton may profess profound sympathy for the concerns of Hispanics, the substantive record of the Clinton presidency was terrible.

The Free Trade bill ratified by Bill Clinton in 1994 sent hundreds of thousands of Mexicans north across the border out of Mexico's reeling economy, there to be met by criminal sanctions - aimed at the poor generally - harsher on Clinton's watch than on Bush's. It was Senator Obama, not Senator Clinton, who was a co-sponsor of the Immigrant Reform Bill, a major issue of 2007 for the Latino population.

Obama is learning that to stay in the game with the Clintons he has to play it rougher. He has very little time to escape from the box into which Hillary and Bill have been trying to trap him as the black candidate Hispanics should not trust. ·