BUSH: SOY LATINO. NO, HE IS WHITE. SUPER WHITE. lol. Let’s hear your immigration ideas! Blanquito!

Jeb Bush, who is “actively exploring” a Presidential run in 2016, has come under fire for a 2009 Miami-Dade County voter-registration application in which he identified himself as Hispanic. The Times has a photocopy of the document, which requires an original signature next to an oath declaring “that all information provided in this application is true.” A spokeswoman could offer no explanation for the error, but the most likely one is that it gives new meaning to the term “honest mistake.” Bush has a long history of identifying with and immersing himself in the Hispanic community. His wife, Columba, is Mexican-born, and his three children are mixed-race. But, as the media was quick to remind Bush (who was born in Texas, to two exceedingly American parents, George and Barbara), ethnic identities are not exactly elective.

Back in August of 2012, we were given a glimpse of Bush’s own discomfort with using his connection to the Hispanic community, in a sitdown interview conducted in Spanish by Jorge Ramos, of Univision. The two men discuss the Republican Party’s stance on immigration, which leads Ramos to ask about using Hispanic identification to one’s electoral advantage. Ramos cites Bush’s eldest son (who would later be elected Texas land commissioner, in a landslide) as an example, saying, “Your son, George P. Bush, he is Latino, right? He considers himself Latino? Because, of course, his mother, Columba, is Mexican.” (CNN’s John King once misidentified her as Colombian.) Bush replies with great pride, “Exactly.” But, as Ramos continues, Bush’s smile droops—he sees where he’s going next, with a more ambiguous example. Ramos says, “Governor Romney, his father is Mexican, he was born in Mexico, the laws say that he is Mexican.” Yes, Bush assents, and here he begins to look uncomfortable. “But he doesn’t consider himself Latino, nor does he put much emphasis on his Latino origin.” The camera catches Bush straining, confusingly both nodding and then shaking his head. Ramos then asks whether Romney’s reluctance to use his ties to Mexico might lose him some votes. Bush shrugs, and says, “I don’t know, I don’t know,” but one has the sense that he does—Romney ended up losing the Hispanic vote to Obama by a margin of seventy-one per cent to twenty-seven per cent.

At a Hispanic Leadership Network conference in Miami in 2013, the former Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez, who is a Cuban-born Republican, described Jeb Bush as “just as Hispanic as everyone in this room, and maybe a little more.” He was embellishing the truth, but not by much—Bush married Columba Garnica de Gallo, in 1974, after meeting her four years earlier while on a school trip to Mexico. He studied Latin American affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, and he and Columba lived in Caracas, Venezuela, for two years before settling down in Florida, where he began a long career in Republican politics. But does any of this make him more or less Hispanic than Elizabeth Warren is Native American? (He’s still more Hispanic than Romney, which is still not at all.)

Bush speaks fluent, near-effortless Spanish as the result of his long-term life choices rather than as part of an effort to win Hispanic votes (a political tactic I have previously called “Hispandering”). As a result, the Spanish-language media is taking him seriously as a candidate who might appeal to Latino voters. Earlier this year, on his Sunday morning talk show, “Al Punto,” Ramos told Gutierrez, “For the first time in history, we have two Hispanic candidates from the Republican Party”—Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz—and, with a good-natured shrug of his shoulders, he added, “and Jeb Bush, if we want to convert him to Latino as well!” Gutierrez responded, “I think it’s very good that we have Hispanics, but there are different types of Hispanics.” He wasn’t referring to Caribbean versus Central American Hispanics, or the difference between Mexicans and Chicanos. He said he preferred not to compare Cruz (a Canadian-born Cuban-American) with Rubio (an American-born Cuban), because the latter is more moderate and the former is on the extreme right. His Goldilocks candidate is the effectively Hispanic Jeb Bush, whose policies he says he knows and likes best. Like many centrists, Bush supports comprehensive immigration reform—legal status and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants—and has distanced himself from the Tea Party extremism of calls for sealing borders. He said in 2013 that immigrants are the economic engine of the U.S., and, in a brief interview last December, told Miami’s NBC affiliate, “I think there’s a compelling case that, if we want to be young and dynamic again, we have to make legal immigration easier.” So if heritage matters less than track records and platforms, then what should it matter to Hispanic voters how Jeb Bush identifies himself, mistakenly or otherwise?

It matters, generally speaking, because minority groups tend to recoil when outside individuals identify with them under false pretenses or with ulterior motives. It rankles, and feels disingenuous. A few months ago, many feminists in Silicon Valley were piqued by comments made by Vivek Wadhwa about women in technology as part of a larger article on the subject in Newsweek. The entrepreneur and academic has always vocally identified himself as a champion for women working in the tech industry, but when he posited, based on his research, that those women were reluctant to speak up for themselves, he was widely criticized and roundly rejected. Jeb Bush would do well to learn from Wadhwa’s precarious positioning, and to avoid the temptation to speak on behalf of any groups that have not voluntarily elected him to do so. And he certainly should not identify as a member, his wife and children notwithstanding.

Bush has at times criticized the G.O.P. for its tough tone in past elections on immigration, and he has gone so far as to call illegal immigration in the name of a better life “an act of love.” One could say about Bush that his own misidentification, along with his desire to be embraced by the Hispanic population, is something of an act of love, made with good intentions. He knows that, deep down in his DNA, he is not Hispanic, but he still hopes, in a way that seems at least partly genuine, that Hispanic voters will think of him as their candidate.

In fact, Bush has a history of polling well with Latinos—in 1998, he won the governorship of Florida with sixty-one per cent of the Hispanic vote to Democratic incumbent Buddy MacKay’s thirty-eight per cent. But, as the Washington Post has pointed out, that may not necessarily translate to similar numbers in 2016; in 1998, the Hispanic electorate in Florida was largely Cuban, a bloc that tends to vote Republican, whereas a national primary would call upon much wider and more diverse groups of Latinos. In 2011, nearly two-thirds of the Latino population, which consistently leans Democratic, identified as Mexican. Still, Florida, with its twenty-nine electoral votes and twenty-two-per-cent-Latino population, would be a hefty prize for Republicans.

SOURCE