Scarlet12's Blog

Debating the ground rules for a Spanish debate
Sunday, June 24, 2007

By ROGER HERNANDEZ

When Univision initially invited candidates earlier this month to the first-ever presidential debate en espa?? linguo-political fires flared all over.

The Tom Tancredo campaign was eager as ever to work the we-are-being-overrun-by-Hispanics angle. A spokesman issued a statement proudly proclaiming, "I can say with 100 percent certainty that we will not be attending."

On the opposite side were Bill Richardson and Chris Dodd, eager to jump all over the chance to show off their fluent Spanish. The New Mexico governor is a native speaker, and the Connecticut senator learned while serving in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic.

Other candidates are still figuring out whether the Univision debate (anchors Jorge Ramos and Maria Elena Salinas ask questions in Spanish, with simultaneous translations of candidates' answers) presents an opportunity or a threat.

Representatives for John McCain, John Edwards and Mitt Romney said that their campaigns have not decided whether to participate. Romney spokesman Alex Burgos added that the idea of reaching Hispanic voters in Spanish is something his guy "is already familiar with." The Rudy Giuliani and Barack Obama campaigns did not respond before deadline for this column, but people at Univision told me neither campaign has made a final decision.

Hillary is saying No, and giving an oddly punctilious rationale. "What we have said is that the (Democratic National Committee) has six sanctioned debates from July to December, and that during that window we were just going to participate in the six sanctioned debates," spokesman Mo Elleithee told me. Univision is still working to change her mind.

Last week, Univision issued a clarification. The network notified candidates that under the format, nobody except the anchors will be able to speak in Spanish and thereby pre-empt the translator -- all candidates will be required to speak in English. Richardson and Dodd cooled off their initial linguistic enthusiasm and are now threatening not to participate.

"The senator feels it is a service to the Univision audience, a majority of whom speaks Spanish, to communicate to them in their first language," said Christy Setzer, a spokeswoman for Chris Dodd. Richardson spokesman Pahl Shipley said to me: "No final decision yet, but it is likely the governor won't attend unless candidates are allowed to answer in Spanish if they choose."

Maria Elena -- who is also my columnist colleague at King Features Syndicate -- defends Univision's decision to require English even from candidates fluent in Spanish.

"I interviewed (Richardson, in Spanish) the day he announced his interest in running, but this is a debate of all the candidates," she told me. She said her network has "plenty of other shows" where candidates can speak in Spanish, and that for this debate "it is important for us to be fair and balanced and give each candidate the same opportunity."

That a race for president of the United States is almost certainly going to feature a debate in Spanish -- even if some of the major candidates don't show up -- is a sign of the growing political power of Hispanics. "I have covered the last five presidential elections, and the Hispanic vote in each election increases more and more," Maria Elena said.

She is right. I've covered presidential campaigns going back to the Reagan victory in 1980, first as a television producer then as a columnist, starting with the Clinton victory in 1992, and have seen the number of Hispanic voters grow from 2.6 million in 1980 to 7.6 million in 2004. As more potential voters become citizens, Spanish-language presidential debates are likely to become a regular feature of American political life.

That is good -- immigrants who do not know English well enough to follow a political debate can become better informed in preparation for when they become eligible to vote. But there is a problem. As things stand now, Univision's simultaneous translation to Spanish will make it difficult to hear the English-language responses from candidates.

That is not good.

Americans who do not know Spanish must not be shut out. But there is an easy fix: If Univision provides English-language captions, neither Spanish speakers nor English speakers need miss out what the next president of the United States has to say.