LAS VEGAS — Hillary Rodham Clinton was sympathetic as, one after another, members of the audience discussed their unhappy dealings with shady home lenders.
"This is a problem we're going to talk a lot about in this campaign," the Democratic hopeful promised, suggesting that presidential candidates too often isolate issues like the sub-prime mortgage meltdown from the bigger economic picture.
"All of our problems are interconnected, but we treat them as though one is guacamole and one is chips," the New York senator said, drawing laughter and applause from the mostly Latino crowd gathered at the Lindo Michoacan restaurant off the Las Vegas Strip.
As the presidential campaign moves south and west from the mostly white, heavily rural states of Iowa and New Hampshire, Democrats are reaching out to Latino voters as never before -- and not just through strained similes, or rallies set to mariachi music.
In California, Nevada, Arizona and elsewhere across the country, the candidates are advertising extensively in Spanish, running bilingual phone banks and dispatching door-knockers fluent in English and Spanish.
They have ardently wooed and won the support of Latino political luminaries -- among them Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa for Clinton and former Transportation and Energy Secretary Federico Pena for Barack Obama -- and dispatched them to key states to campaign on their behalf.
They have promoted themselves on the pages of MyGrito, a Latino social networking site, and offered links on their campaign websites spelling out their platforms en espanol.
All that is quite a departure from the old style of "taco-and-sombrero politics," as USC's Harry Pachon put it.
"That's been a traditional way to approach the Latino vote in the Southwest," said Pachon, head of the university's Tomas Rivera Policy Institute. "The candidate would come into town, say a couple of words in mangled Spanish, eat a taco, wear a sombrero. Times have changed."
Nevada strategy
Nevada, which holds its caucuses Saturday, was granted an early voting slot by the national Democratic Party, in part because of the state's sizable Latino population, which is about 25% of the total population and growing. Only about half of Nevada's Latino residents are eligible to vote, however, because many are younger than 18 or do not have U.S. citizenship. Of the state's 1,036,462 registered voters, about 10-15% are Latinos.
