A couple of months ago, in the heat of the superdelegate struggle, Steve Ybarra made a bold and public request. Basically, he requested a $20 million commitment to voter registration efforts targeted at Latinos. The media ridiculed him as some sort of vote seller. As I wrote back then, the request was  in actuality a request for party building. And that’s a perfectly good request from a member of the DNC to the presidential candidates.  Nonetheless, even Comedy Central got in on the make fun of the superdelegate who wants to accomplish something act.

Fine.  But, in the end, Ybarra got the last laugh when the DNC and the Obama campaign announced a, you guessed it, $20 million effort for Hispanic voter mobilization.  From the Washington Post:

Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee are expected to unveil a $20 million investment in Hispanic voter mobilization Tuesday that targets most major battleground states.

DNC Chairman Howard Dean said the sum is unprecedented for a presidential campaign and represents a show of Democratic confidence that Latino voters could prove pivotal in states including New Mexico and Michigan.

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Targets will include Florida; Western states such as Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico; and Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, industrial battlegrounds with sizable Hispanic populations. The money will be spent on niche advertising and other outreach, along with mobilization efforts aimed at identifying, registering and turning out new Democratic voters.

It’s not everything that Ybarra had requested, because I’m guessing that big chunk of that money will end up as ads on Univision. You have to start somewhere, though. Latino registration, if done properly in California, could be a boon for Democrats in our state as well.  The voting patterns in California were about ten years ahead of the rest of the country, due to the reactionary Prop 187 and other anti-immigrant stances of the GOP wingnut base and the politicians that pander to them.

If Democrats solidify the votes of Millenials alongside other growing voting blocs like Hispanic voters, we have the opportunity to build a progressive governing coalition for a generation or more.  Projects like these are just the beginning of an investment project for the development of this coalition.

To hear the big media folks frame it, you'd think Steve was also requesting a mansion in St. Moritz as well. But, in fact, Steve Ybarra's got a pretty good eye for good tactics, and this is just that: a tactical request. Ybarra wants the campaigns to spend $20 million on registering Latino voters in the Southwest.  From the Comedy Central Blog:

Well, that's kind of, um, honorable. It's kinda not fair the way the article was written; it didn't mention his intentions until midway through and tricked me into thinking he was being greedy. …

Still, it seems unlikely that Ybarra will get $20 million dollars out of the candidates, who need to spend that money ads calling each other names and accusing each other of being unAmerican.

Plus, I'm sure they can find ten or twenty superdelegates from below the border who will register and educate eligible Mexican-American voters for $2 million and a mattress to sleep on.

Well, obviously the last part was Daily Show-esque satire, but the campaigns are just not that likely to give up control of their precious dollars. I agree with Steve that such an investment would pay off quite handsomely in both the short and long term.  But given the Obama campaign's tendency to move power inward, I wouldn't expect them to start taking orders from external sources.