Former US vice president Joe Biden’s presidential bid got a boost on Monday from one of the leading Latinos in the US Congress, with US Representative Tony Cardenas endorsing Biden as the US Democrats’ best hope to defeat US President Donald Trump.
“People realize it’s a matter of life and death for certain communities,” Cardenas said in an interview, explaining the necessity of halting Trump’s populist nationalism, hardline immigration policies and xenophobic rhetoric that the congressman called “cruel.”
Cardenas is chairman of the Bold PAC, the political arm of the US Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
His announcement follows a weekend of mass rallies by US Senator Bernie Sanders, another presidential candidate, with US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a freshman congresswoman who has become a face of the progressive movement and a key supporter for Sanders’ second White House bid.
The dueling surrogates highlight a fierce battle for the Hispanic vote between Sanders and Biden, whose campaigns each see the two candidates as the leading contenders.
Biden leads the field among Democratic voters who are non-white, including those who are Hispanic, with Sanders not far behind, recent national polls showed.
Another top national contender, US Senator Elizabeth Warren, draws less support from non-white voters.
There are few recent national polls with a sufficient sample of Hispanic Democratic voters to analyze them independently.
The dynamics also demonstrate the starkly different approaches that Biden and Sanders take to the larger campaign.
Biden is capitalizing on his 36-year career in the US Senate and two terms as former US president Barack Obama’s vice president to corral Democratic power players across the party’s various demographic slices.
Cardenas joins four other Hispanic caucus members who have backed Biden, a show of establishment support in contrast with some Latino advocates who have battered Biden over the Obama administration’s dismal deportation record.
Sanders, true to his long Capitol Hill tenure as an outsider and democratic socialist, eschews the establishment with promises of a political revolution, just as he did when he finished as runner-up for the Democrats’ 2016 presidential nomination.
Sanders and his supporters like Ocasio-Cortez argue that existing political structures cannot help working-class Americans, immigrants or anyone else. That argument, they insist, can draw enough new, irregular voters to defeat Trump in November.
“We need to be honest here,” said US Representative Vicente Gonzalez, a Biden supporter whose congressional district includes part of the US-Mexico border. “If Joe Biden loses the primary, Democrats will lose in 2020.”
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
RSS