After spending 34 years in D.C. and serving under former President Bill Clinton, Mickey Ibarra says Latinos need to become engaged in politics and leadership.
Ibarra was on Clinton’s senior staff in the late ’90s and started a nonpartisan nonprofit organization, the Latino Leaders Network, shortly after leaving the White House in 2001. The nonpartisan group’s luncheon series has featured a mix of Republican and Democratic leaders since 2004.
The luncheons are held four times a year, with one arriving in Las Vegas for the first time come March 15, Ibarra said. The series started in 2004, and Ibarra said one of the highlights was hearing from Rep. Joaquín Castro, twin of Julián Castro, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Barack Obama.
“These two twins being raised by a single mother in San Antonio, it’s inspirational,” Ibarra said.
Ibarra is working to build relationships with local officials in the lead-up to the Las Vegas luncheon. He said the network is interested in activism among Latinos in Nevada, were voters elected Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto in 2016, the first Latina to the Senate, and term-limited Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval, who won more than 70 percent of the vote when he was reelected in 2014.
“The significant Latino leadership population in Nevada, I mean, that is clear,” Ibarra said. “The Latino community is making an impact, growing in influence.”
Ibarra spoke with the Sun to discuss his career, the nature of discourse in D.C. over the decades, and the future of Latino leadership. His comments have been edited for length and clarity.
What prompted you to start the Latino Leaders Network?
When I left the White House, and that was exactly at noon on Jan. 20 in 2001 with President Clinton, I wanted to figure out a way that I could stay engaged with the people that I became so well acquainted with and respected so much, namely our partners in government at the local and state levels as well as Latino leaders around the country.
And there was a second piece to this as well. I observed President Clinton share his personal story often. As I witnessed him share his personal story and the impact, time and time again, either at the White House or away, I realized it was time for me to share mine. A Mexican kid from Salt Lake City, Utah, finding his way to the West Wing of the White House was certainly an improbable and unpredictable journey. And so as I share my story I like to conclude, if it happened to me it can happen to you. I find that our stories are powerful, they need to be told and when they are it gives others motivation, it gives them inspiration, it gives them hope that they too can succeed. The Latino Leaders Luncheon series is intended for a leader to share their personal story of obstacles overcome to achieve success.
How has the political landscape changed for Latinos in D.C.?
The good news, the highlight, is it’s so many more Latino leaders in Congress. I’m just delighted that we now have 38 Hispanic members of Congress. That is a big, big improvement and increase.
In addition to that, we have Latino government relations firms. In the major advocacy firms in Washington that aren’t owned by a Latino, there aren’t very many that are owned by a Latino like mine (Ibarra Strategies Group), but they formed divisions. They now have Latino staff and are prepared to engage our community, and that’s all I think very positive. There are many more Latino leaders, very many more than there were when I first arrived in Washington over 34 years ago in 1984. So I’ve seen a lot of change.
What brought you to D.C. initially?
I was hired by the National Education Association and brought to Washington from Albuquerque, where I was working for the local association, NEA New Mexico. That was a time when the association, NEA, was working very closely with Nevada and all of its state affiliates to really help educators, members of the union, understand the intersection where policy and politics intersect and to urge our teacher members to get more involved politically with campaigns and candidates. That was a big sea change that occurred in the late ’70s, early ’80s, leading to a much more robust government relations and advocacy program here in Washington and in most of our state capitals.
How has political discourse evolved in D.C. in your time there?
There’s no question that discourse has been diminished in terms of the civility, in terms of its partisanship and the whole notion of personal destruction. I find that hostile is not an exaggeration too often. And that is bad for our country and certainly bad for good government. It makes it very very difficult. I don’t know why it is, but somehow compromise is now seen as something bad, not something to aim for, and there’s no question that our political dialogue, discourse considerations at the highest levels, the White House, the Congress, have been diluted by this whole notion of winners and losers.
How are people in D.C. working to overcome partisan challenges?
It’s very difficult. Bill Clinton believed that he could work with everybody and tried and he did have some success. President (George W.) Bush, who followed him, certainly tried as well. President Obama, who came as a man with hope believing that he could bridge the fissures, wasn’t very successful at it.
And Donald Trump has really gone contrary to a basic lesson that I believe in, and that is: Winning in politics, and I’d argue winning in life, is about addition and multiplication; losing is about division and subtraction. We have a president of the United States today who’s going to try to prove me wrong. It seems to me that his whole embrace of governance is based on subtracting and dividing rather than adding and multiplying.
My hope is that we are starting, starting, starting to turn the corner. I’ve been here for 34 years. I thought I’d seen it all until Donald Trump was elected. I thought I would never live long enough to see a president of the United States inaugurated who didn’t win a majority of the votes, and now I’ve seen it twice with (Al) Gore, who clearly won by over 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush and never was inaugurated president, and now a president that lost by over 3 million votes and is the 45th president of the United States. That has really caused an uproar that we’re still trying to figure out.
I see us having turned a corner a bit on Nov. 6. By that I mean, I think the folks that believe our country is moving in the wrong direction have activated themselves as they need to. Politics is a contact sport and we’ve got to get out there and make our voices heard. I’m very encouraged by what happened in Nevada on Nov. 6 and in so many other places. Finally we have a House of Representatives that will install new leadership in January and I think begin playing the important role that the constitution defines for the Congress, and that is a check and balance related to the executive branch of government. That’s progress and a good start to having the kind of open debate that we ought to have to see who the next president of the United States will be in 2020.
What leadership advice would you have for young Latinos today?
Engage. Engage, engage, engage. It is so important for our Latino community. I am very, very concerned about the Latino community’s struggle to engage. The fact of the matter is we still have way, way too many Latinos that are eligible to vote and are not voting. We as a community, the Latino community, must figure this out. We still have millions of Latinos that didn’t show up on Nov. 6, didn’t show up two years before that, and we’ve got to turn that around.
I believe the Latino community has to confront this challenge of having young people and all of those that are eligible, meaning that they’re over 18 and are U.S. citizens, they are eligible to vote. You've got to register and you've got to show up. That remains a major challenge to the Latino community and we’ve got continue to work on that.