While Ralph Nader's run for President this election isn't as problematic as it has been in elections past, alot of the focus is on his running mate, Matt Gonzalez, and yes as his name betrays, he is Latino.Matthew Edward Gonzalez was born in McAllen, Texas to a Mexican mother, Oralia, and Mexican-American father, Mateo. Gonzalez spent his first four years in San Juan, Puerto Rico.He has a history as an activist lawyer and ran (and lost) for San Francisco Mayor.
Gonzalez said about his childhood in South Texas: "The Mexican-American–Latino–Chicano culture in California is different than my experience in Texas. I grew up in a town that is majority Mexican and Mexican-American. In McAllen, we didn't refer to ourselves as Latinos or Chicanos. We referred to ourselves as Mexican. There's a different feel in that border area.
Source : Wikipedia
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Matt Gonzales is the single most interesting intellectual on the political stage. once you get past his too-cool for TV manner, you realize you're listening to a gifted thinker.
He's also a man of extreme integrity. For years, he had hammered Mayor Gavin Newsome as someone who didn't know the truth, and, with that observation, which seemed true enough, Gonzalez drew a run off against Newsome and the entire Democratic established, from here to Hillary.
Alas, SF wasn't ready for his ideas about staying out of the school board's problem. the spin doctors tarred him as "anti-kid." it's BS, of course, but the Dems get too much support from the Teachers to ignore Matt's alternate ideas about breaking down the whole system into smaller, discreet units with a stronger connections to the communities in which the schoolhouses exist, a go local plan that panicked the state unions.
For him, it sounded like a "we ought to stay out of this, but, if we can't, let's do it right," sort of thing.
well, it turns out that when Gavin Newsome said that in terms of allowing gays to marry one another he couldn't see anyway to read the Constitution as not expanding Civil Right, Matt must have thought that Gavin could see truth after all and subsequently resigned.
he's also a rabid fighter for the underdog, with a distinguished record of pissing-off judges in futile attempts to defend the indigent.
He continued that practice as board President. As you may know, SF (like many major cities in the US) is overrun with the nation's homeless. Since they don't have anyplace to sleep, they frequently sleep on the sidewalk. Well, businesses don't like it. But a few downtown high-end Hotels go ballistic, encouraging their car-parkers to intimate physically homeless people from walking in front of their buildings.
Matt threatened to review (if not actually reviewed) the hotels' telephone charges log. the ugliness stopped.
If you want to know how young US American left-wing thinkers really think, Matt's a good one to listen to.
If Hillary wins, I'm voting for Nader.
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