Ted Cruz of Texas
Explaining the Senate’s growing conservative Latino caucus
A Ted Cruz win in November gives the Tea Party five supporters in the Senate
August 4, 2012
By: Achy Obejas
When Ted Cruz, the U.S. senate GOP nominee, wins in November — and it will be a helluva a scandal if he doesn’t — the world’s greatest deliberative body will have three Latino senators. And two of them will be Republican.
Given the Democratic Party’s much “greater civil rights record”(guess the author never herd of Lincoln) and its much more traditionally muscular grassroots efforts, there’s something off about those optics. So how did that happen?
Photo by Boyd Loving Robert Menéndez,swearing on Mayor Paul Aronsohn
Robert Menéndez, the Latino Democratic senator from New Jersey, rose up the old fashioned way, through a close and often controversial mentorship with an older pol, former Union City Mayor William Musto (against whom Menéndez eventually testified). Menéndez worked his way up steadily, from school board member to mayor, to state senator to U.S. congressman to U.S. senator.
Marco Rubio, the incumbent Republican senator from Florida, appeared to be following the same route as Menéndez when he began his political career. He interned for Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the powerful South Florida Cuban-American congresswoman, and got close to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Rubio did stints in local government, both as a city commissioner and as a state legislator. From 2007 to 2009, he served as the first Hispanic and the youngest Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives.
https://www.wbez.org/blogs/achy-obejas/2012-08/explaining-senates-growing-conservative-latino-caucus-101449