The guy pictured making a V sign with his fingers and wearing a hoodie and baseball cap? A USC student who mentors East Los Angeles youngsters and is "a rising star in the community," Pleitez told me.
"We're throwing up the peace sign," Pleitez said Thursday of their hand signals, frustration evident in a voice still soaked in disappointment from his third-place finish.
"To try to say that I'm romanticizing gangs, to try to make college students look like thugs. . . . They tried to find pictures with white and African American women, and only mailed them to Latino households."
"I expected to be hit at some point," he said, "but I didn't expect it to be as blatant as that."
Millennial Generation meet Geezer Politics.
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Cedillo saw nothing wrong with ads "intended to show voters that Mr. Pleitez lacks not only the experience to be a member of Congress, but also the maturity," a campaign statement said.
But young voters lit into the tactic on political blogs, pointing out that the so-called gang sign in one photo is the symbol of Voto Latino, a national voter outreach program.
And the woman pictured making a V with her fingers alongside Pleitez is Rosario Dawson, who starred with Will Smith in "Seven Pounds" last fall. Either Cedillo didn't recognize the popular young Latina or thought she was throwing a gang sign as well.
That made Cedillo look foolish. But it also put young activists on notice.
"This is an embarrassing ad," one poster wrote on the Calitics political blog. "Everyone in the Facebook generation has photos like this. Will every Young Dem that decides to get into politics have to deal with this kind of garbage?"
On Tuesday night, Pleitez's headquarters was packed with dozens of young volunteers. The only party animal I saw was his 58-year-old mother, Isabel Bravo, trying to impose a celebratory mood.
"I am so proud of Emanuel," she told me. And ashamed of the political machine's low-brow efforts to smear her son.
Cedillo ought to be ashamed as well. Pleitez is the kind of role model every neighborhood needs. He grew up in East Los Angeles, the son of an immigrant single mother so poor the family lived in garages and he slept on the floor.
Yet he became a sports star and honor student at Wilson High and earned a scholarship to Stanford, a job at Goldman Sachs and a spot on Barack Obama's transition team. And he is being ridiculed for dancing at parties and having diverse friends?
