There’s nothing like campaign season to kick Hispandering into high gear. Suddenly prospective candidates start falling all over themselves to let us know they speak Spanish, care about immigration issues, or, that they, too, possess the ability to tan. Last summer, a former GOP candidate running for a Congressional seat in Arizona even switched parties and legally changed his name to “Cesar Chavez” to try to get the Latino vote.
So far, Jeb Bush hasn’t had to resort to any of these tactics to appeal to Latino voters. After all, the likely presidential candidate is married to a Mexican woman with whom he has bicultural children, he speaks fluent Spanish, and he’s spent time living in Latin America. But it looks like all the “cred” he’s banked went to his head: the New York Times reported today that Bush marked himself as Hispanic in the “race/ethnicity” field of a 2009 voter-registration application obtained from the Miami-Dade County Elections Department.
He later hopped on Twitter to clarify that this was a mistake:
Univision, may have labeled him a “Hispanic candidate,” but in our round up of Honorary Latinos only Lou Diamond Phillips has made the cut.