WASHINGTON – A day before the pivotal midterm elections, President Barack Obama pulled back from remarks he made last month when he called on Latino voters to punish their "enemies" on Election Day. In an interview Monday with radio host Michael Baisden, Obama said he should have used the word "opponents" instead of enemies.
Republicans were quick to criticize the president's remarks. House Minority Leader John Boehner was expected to use Obama's words in an election eve speech in Ohio to paint the president as a staunch partisan.
"Sadly, we have a president who uses the word 'enemy' for fellow Americans, fellow citizens. He used it for people who disagree with his agenda of bigger government," Boehner said, according to prepared remarks released in advance of his speech.
Obama's original comments came during an interview with Eddie "Piolin" Sotelo, a Hispanic radio personality. Piolin questioned how Obama could ask Latinos for their vote when many don't believe he's worked hard to pass comprehensive immigration reform.
Obama responded: "If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, 'We're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,' if they don't see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it's gonna be harder."
The president said Monday that the message he was trying to send was that voters need to support lawmakers who stand with them on the issue.
"Now the Republicans are saying that I'm calling them enemies," Obama said. "What I'm saying is you're an opponent of this particular provision, comprehensive immigration reform, which is something very different."
With Republicans poised to score sweeping victories in Tuesday's election, Obama has been imploring the Democratic base to vote in hopes of turning some close races in his party's favor.
Though Obama had no publicly announced campaign events on his schedule Monday and Tuesday, the president has been doing radio interviews targeting young people, African-Americans and voters in key states. He was also to hold a conference call Monday night with campaign volunteers in Florida, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Hawaii
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An Interactive Blog to Accompany the Book
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Book Description
The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory (NYU Press, 2007) tells the story of the United States Latino body politic and its relation to the state: how the state configures Latino subjects and how Latino subjects have in turn altered the state. This interactive blog continues some of the discussions initiated in the book and, in the process, expands the book’s obsessions by further interrogating national conceptions of Latina and Latino forms of personhood and how these have been written on the Latino body. (The book was published by NYU Press' Sexual Cultures Series.) Irreverent, polemical, visually provocative, and hopefully fun to peruse, the interactive blog is meant to persuade and influence conversations on and about the Latino body politic. Send related images, videos, art and text to me at lazlima@gmail.com. You can get the book directly from NYU Press and Amazon.
Book Blurbs
"Through a bricolage of carefully crafted textual readings, Lima has produced a text that traces the relationship between corporeality and citizenship by marking the process by which the Latino body has become historical. Situated in moments of national and bodily crisis, his archive is decidedly precise and imaginatively expansive, metaphorically rich and politically dynamic. Drawing on texts central to third world feminism, queer studies, and Latin and Latino American literatures, this work is as central to rethinking the American literary canon as it is to an invigorating remapping of Latino Studies."
—Juana María Rodríguez, University of California, Berkeley, author of Queer Latinidad
—Juana María Rodríguez, University of California, Berkeley, author of Queer Latinidad
"Lima's Latino Body promises to productively disrupt the business-as-usual of critical and scholarly practice in the still-emerging field of U.S. Latino studies; it will contribute directly to the next stage in the long process of what it itself terms Latino identity's 'becoming historical' in North American cultural, political, and intellectual contexts. For this reason alone, The Latino Body could not be more welcome, or more timely."
—Ricardo L. Ortíz, Georgetown University, author of Cultural Erotics in Cuban America
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