“We need to send her back to wherever she really came from. I suspect it’s Texas” – Dem Gubenatorial candidate Alan Webber regarding New Mexico governor Susana Martinez

I am sitting here wondering exactly what the media response would be, if an Anglo Republican candidate for office were to say of his or her Hispanic Democratic opponent “we need to send her back to wherever she really came from.” My suspicion would be that he or she would immediately be labeled a “racist” and there would be a concerted effort to force him or her out of the race on that basis.

But of course, Mr. Webber is a Democrat (a proudly Progressive Democrat, no less), and Democrats, by definition, can never be racists. Nor can anything they say ever be held against them.

Now I am not calling Mr. Webber a racist. I don’t know the man at all and feel totally unqualified, based on my level of knowledge, to make such an assessment. I have to wonder a bit about his good judgment, level of intelligence, and awareness of exactly what century he is living in. Has he never heard of the Internet?

My first thought, upon hearing what he had to say was, “Hmm; I wonder where Susana Martinez does come from?” And my first impulse was to check; Google is such a handy tool! I typed in Susana Martinez and what do you know? The second entry in the list was the Wikipedia entry for Susana Martinez. Ms. Martinez has been around for a while now and her Wikipedia entry has quite a bit in it.

I learned that indeed, Ms. Martinez is from Texas, as Mr. Webber asserted. She was born and raised in El Paso, which, if you are at all familiar with geography, is right on the border with New Mexico. When I was younger, my dad was stationed at Holloman AFB which is right outside Alamogordo, New Mexico. We used to go shopping in El Paso from time to time. My point here is that living in El Paso isn’t much different from living in Las Cruces, as anyone who has ever traveled Interstate 10 could tell you (nor that much different from Alamogordo, truth be told). So yes, Ms. Martinez is from Texas, but it isn’t as if she is from Austin.

I also learned that she graduated from the University Of Oklahoma College Of Law where she earned her Juris Doctor degree and, after graduation, began her career as an assistant district attorney for New Mexico’s third Judicial District in Las Cruces – right down the road from El Paso, as noted in the paragraph above. This was in 1986. She has lived in New Mexico ever since.

Google being such an easy tool to use, I next typed in the name Alan Webber. Surely, if Mr. Webber is, essentially, accusing Ms. Martinez of being a carpetbagger, he must be from New Mexico, right?

Well, not really. Mr. Webber’s Wikipedia entry was also the second link down. His entry was much shorter, but the relevant material was in the second paragraph.

Mr. Webber, it seems, also is not from New Mexico. Nor is he from a neighboring state. Mr. Webber is from St. Louis, Missouri. He is a graduate from Amherst College with a B.A. in English. He lived for a while in Portland, Oregon, moving to Washington D.C. in 1980, serving as Special Assistant to the Secretary of Transportation. In 1980 he went to the Harvard Business School, serving as “a senior research assistant and project coordinator on the auto industry in America.”[1]. He was the managing editor/editorial director of the Harvard Business Review for six years. He has also worked as a speechwriter and policy advisor for several governors including Michael Dukakis.

In 2003, he moved to New Mexico.

Mr. Webber, it seems, is a nationally-recognized editor, author, and columnist. He has, as far as I can tell, held no elective office of any kind. No big deal, I guess; while Ms. Martinez was elected district attorney three times, she herself had never held an elected position in a legislative or executive body before either.

Of course, she has been Governor for the past four years; the first woman elected Governor of New Mexico and the first Hispanic female governor in the United States. Were she a Democrat, this would have accorded her high accolades. Even so, in 2013 Time Magazine named her among the 100 most influential people in the world.

But Mr. Webber wants to “send her back to wherever she really came from.” As a Hispanic, were an Anglo Republican to make such a remark, it would be assumed by the left and the media that the remark was really “code language” for “send her back to Mexico from which she no doubt illegally came.”

Indeed, though she was born here in the United States, as were her parents, Gov. Martinez, as she publically stated in 2011, really didn’t know whether or not her paternal grandparents came here legally or illegally. Further investigation revealed that indeed, they had followed the rules as they existed at the time they immigrated and that, furthermore, she is a great-granddaughter of General Toribio Ortega, a leading general in the Mexican Revolution.

So where does Governor Martinez really come from? New Mexico, I would say; it’s where she has lived for the past 28 years. I come from a lot of places – I was a military brat. But I have lived 34 of the past 36 years in the great state of Texas. I am “from here” now. If you were to send me back to where I “really” came from, I wouldn’t know where that would be.

It seems to me that Ms. Martinez is more “from New Mexico” than is Mr. Webber. Hopefully, it will be her that sends him back, assuming he gets the Democratic nomination, to “wherever it is that he came from” – Missouri, Oregon, Washington D.C. or Massachusetts – take your pick.

Unless of course, he wants to remain in New Mexico, which of course he should be able to do if that is his desire. Only a Progressive Democrat would not only want to defeat his opponent, but actually drive her from the state in which she resides.

[1] Wikipedia article