Black-Latino Animosity?

In a non-joking vein, I've been a bit surprised at the volume of commentary speculating that Hillary Clinton will have some kind of a firewall among Latino voters, much of which seems pretty reductive to me. In a lot of urban areas, you see conflict between black and hispanic local political elites as they compete for power and patronage. But it would be a mistake to assume this will carry over into some latino antipathy to Barack Obama. After all, Hillary Clinton has actually secured the support of a lot of black leaders. What's more, it seems very likely that Obama being elected president would undermine the power of African-American urban machine politicians -- a President Clinton or a President Edwards would rely on such politicians to be intermediaries between them and black voters, but a President Obama would be much less in need of their support.

Now that said, Obama probably will have trouble with the Cuban exile community because of his position on Cuba policy, and since Hillary Clinton represents New York in the Senate she may have the Puerto Rican vote in the NYC region locked down. None of that, though, would be about Obama's race. I'm not at all surprised to see that out west Obama's gotten the support of unions with large Latino membership in Las Vegas and LA or the endorsement of Rep. Linda Sanchez.