Obama has stated that he supports affirmative action. This helped him racially polarize the election in which he defeated Hillary Clinton, but has harmed him among latinos.

[“Discrimination and how to pay for it”, tdaxp]

Is this true or mere spin? The so-called evidence presented in the blog piece consists of an excerpt of an excerpt of a piece the blog tdaxp did not in fact link. As mentioned previously, the standards of blogospheric pundits and propagandists devolve to the quoting of opinion pieces in order to shore up the impression of a consensus opinion in support of dogmatism; this may be a case in point.

Tdaxp’s excerpt of an excerpt is a very tiny sampling which Dan tdaxp would stand in for a universal.

Essentially: Rep. Grace F. Napolitano, D-Calif, has not been approached by the Obama campaign, and she is “miffed” according to the original piece at CQPolitics.com. In fact, the original article, unlinked by tdaxp, is titled, “House Latinas Irked by Obama’s Neglect”, and covers merely exasperation in the U.S. House of Representative by some members — not the entire nation — that they have not received special attention. One key sentence in the original article seems to sum it up:

Over the course of the campaign, many House Democrats have privately expressed frustration with what they describe as Obama’s neglect of elected officials.

[CQPolitics.com]

If I were to insert my own opinion or “analysis” here, rather than try to build a universal from a tiny piece of so-called evidence I would state, clearly, that this is my own impression only: That, certain members of the House of Reps., and perhaps other members of the so-called “establishment”, are accustomed to being treated specially, as a matter of course, since (to borrow a meme from Barack Obama’s campaign), that’s how Washington works.

But let us skip forward from impressions to fact. Dan tdaxp, instead of linking the original, merely passes on a smaller chunk of the original while linking to a source that had itself only excerpted the original — in order to build an opinion piece. Tdaxp linked “The Blog” at The Weekly Standard. While the piece actually referenced the primary content of the original piece at CQPolitics.com,

Capitol Hill is full of primadonnas who overestimate their importance and resent being overlooked.

— a bit of observation totally lacking in the tdaxp use of a handful of cited sentences — Brian Faughnan bends over backward (metaphorically speaking) in his attempt to stress a supposed weakness in Obama’s campaign:

1. “Throughout the Democratic primary campaign, Hillary Clinton bested Senator Obama among women, latinos, and middle and lower income white voters.”
2. “Polling over the next few months will help identify which of Hillary’s constituencies Senator McCain might have a chance at co-opting in the general election.”
3. “This suggests that women and latinos may join conservative Democrats in being up for grabs.”
4. “And lest anyone assume that latinos will ultimately fall into line, remember that for Hispanic Americans, John McCain is a different kind of Republican.”

Given the weight of those statements in comparison to anything else in The Weekly Standard’s blog piece, and judging by the fact that Faughnan like Dan tdaxp would apparently be drawing a universal (for all American Latinos) on the basis of the purported two House members’ being upset that their “primadonna” status is not playing out as it should, one might make the inference that the Blog piece has as its goal the shoring up of the meme, wishful thinking or not, that John McCain can snatch up disaffected Democrats come the vote in November. That would be items 2-4 above. Item #1 I’ll get to in a bit.

Similarly, the tdaxp blog piece would seize on the meme and twist it by adding a maligning race-based argument:

1. “While it has a bewildering number of defenses, one of the primary functions of affirmative action is to assist blacks in resource competitions against hispanics.”
2. “Both groups are disproportionatedly uneducated, but political organization among blacks far outpaces that among hispanics.”
   
3. “Therefore, rationally, blacks political activists attempt to reward their supporters by supporting laws, rules, and regulations which assist blacks in getting jobs, contracts, and admissions, while making it harder for hispanics to do so.”
   

Whereas tdaxp’s #2 may be true and thus may actually lead to the outcome mentioned in #1, the tdaxp rhetoric in #1 attempts to suggest that affirmative action was designed specifically to hurt latinos! (#3). Absolutely no factual evidence is given for this statement; merely, a reduced citation of a longer citation about a couple disgruntled House members is given as well as a link to The Weekly Standard opinion blog piece. Such is the modus operandi of the propagandistic blogosphere: truly, a type of echo chamber,

Metaphorically, the term echo chamber can refer to any situation in which information, ideas or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission inside an “enclosed” space.

For example, observers of mass media journalism describe an echo chamber effect in media discourse.[1][2] One purveyor of information will make a claim, which many like-minded people then repeat, overhear, and repeat again (often in an exaggerated or otherwise distorted form)[3] until most people assume that some extreme variation of the story is true.[4]

Similarly, the term is also used to name the media effect, whereby an incorrect story is reported through a biased channel, often first appearing in a new-media domain, and it is this simple presence of a story which is reported in more reputable mainstream media outlets, often using intermediary sources or commentary for reference, independent of the factual merits of the story. The overall effect often being to legitimize false claims in the public eye, through sheer volume of reporting and media references, even if the majority of these reports acknowledge the original factual inaccuracy of the story.

[Wikipedia]

— although what is being echoed is not truely an echo but resembles more the product of Chinese Whispers (telephone game):

Chinese whispers[1], Russian Scandal[1] or Telephone is a game in which each successive participant secretly whispers to the next a phrase or sentence whispered to them by the preceding participant. Cumulative errors from mishearing often result in the sentence heard by the last player differing greatly and amusingly from the one uttered by the first. It is most often played by children as a party game or in the playground. It is often invoked as a metaphor for cumulative error, especially the inaccuracies of rumours or gossip.[2]

[Wikipedia]

While the successive diminution of sources in this particular telephone game — from presumably longer conversations with some House members to the CQPolitics journalists, to the partial citation at The Weekly Standard Blog, to the further reduced citation at tdaxp — may have caused the truth to undergo a similar reduction, the would-be echo chamber would amplify the disgruntlement of a handful of House members into a general disgruntlement among the Latino population.

Perhaps it is time to backtrack, on this blog if not down the chain of Chinese Whispers. An early statement at The Weekly Standard’s Blog may have initiated some spin:

1. “Throughout the Democratic primary campaign, Hillary Clinton bested
   Senator Obama among women, latinos, and middle and lower income white
   voters.”

Whereas little doubt about the Latino support was displayed by Brian Faughnan, Gallup might disagree that Clinton bested Obama “throughout the Democratic campaign.” Polling from May 16 through May 18, 2008, showed that among Democratic voters and those leaning Democrat at that time, Hispanics supported Obama by a 51% to 44% margin.

What about tdaxp’s assertion, quoted in the lead-in to this blog post, that Obama has been harmed by Latino disaffection? An LA Times article for June 6, 2008, suggests that Obama may have a significant lead over McCain for the Latino vote, 62% to 29% (following a summary of surveys by Gallup for May 2008) although other surveys put the margin at 19% or 14% for Obama. Compare that margin to the 2004 vote, in which it is estimated that GWB received 44% to 40% of the Latino vote.

But fact is of such variable quality on the Blogosphere. The race-based arguments put forth by tdaxp, in which a monolithic Latino antagonism for Obama is suggested to exist by 1) the flippant quoting of another citation of an article discussing the irritation of a few House members and 2) a convoluted imagining of what might be considered the “worst-case” motivation of affirmative action and the subsequent imputation that Obama shares that convoluted imagining, would pass for fact on any good propaganda rag — or even a thread-bare propaganda rag.