Since March, Amanda Renteria, an experienced political aide and the first Latina chief-of-staff on Capitol Hill, has been floating through the rumor mill as the likely choice to fill a revered top spot in Hillary Clinton’s campaign and, on Wednesday, those rumors materialized. Already, Renteria, the campaign’s newly official National Political Director, has made her media rounds and let her presence be known, sharply defending Mrs. Clinton and criticizing comments regarding the former Secretary of State’s alleged detachment from today’s world of real-time politics.
“She’s talking about the future,” said Renteria. “When you do look at yesterday, you look at all the fights she’s been waging long before this campaign, whether it was helping kids make sure they got education…when she’s been fighting for health care for kids and for moms and for women, that’s who she is and what we’re working on now, what she’s working on and talking about now is the future.”
Renteria comes to the campaign as Jose Villarreal, another longtime Clinton insider, was recently named as the campaign’s treasurer. If the former head of the State Department has come under fire for her secrecy in the past, these appointments, to the contrary, make it blindingly apparent that Latino outreach will be paramount in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign mission. Still, her stance on President Obama’s immigration actions will be key in determining just how successful she will be with the Latino vote.
“We found that while people generally have pretty high favorability for her, there is a soft spot that I think exist for almost any candidate, but I think it’s interesting that it holds for her, too,” said Sylvia Manzano of Latino Decisions, referring to immigration, as Mrs. Clinton has yet to publicly come out in favor or against the President’s executive actions on immigration.
All eyes are on Hillary as she begins to staff her ranks – Latinos, it seems, will play an integral role in her agenda.
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