OH, GIVE ME A FREAKING BREAK

Some members of the Hillary-for-VP crowd spin The Hill, and The Hill lets itself be spun:

Hispanic Dems warn Obama he risks losing Latinos

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) must commit to helping illegal immigrants achieve citizenship or else risk losing the vital Latino vote in the general election, Hispanic Democratic lawmakers are warning.

If he does not promise so-called comprehensive immigration reform, the lawmakers say, the only other way to win over Hispanic supporters of his erstwhile rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), may be to pick her as his running mate.

..."Hillary holds the entire Latino community in the palm of her hand," said. Rep. Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.), whose district went heavily for Clinton....

What's wrong with this picture? Oh, just this, which The Hill doesn't mention:

A new Gallup Poll summary of surveys taken in May shows Obama winning 62% of Latino registered voters nationwide, compared with just 29% for McCain.... The Gallup survey of Latinos found that Obama, despite his string of losses to Clinton, performed just as well as Clinton in a theoretical matchup against McCain.

The Hill story does mention that Bush got 40% of the Hispanic vote against Kerry in 2004 -- but, for some reason, never gets around to mentioning the fact that Obama, supposedly struggling among Hispanics, is doing better than Kerry did, without Hillary as his running mate. So what's the problem?

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And if you still believe that how a candidate does with a particular voting bloc in the primaries is how that candidate will do in the general election, then shouldn't you believe that Hillary Clinton, if she'd won the nomination, would have gotten only about 10% of the black vote against McCain?

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UPDATE: A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll has very similar numbers for Hispanic voters: Obama 62%, McCain 28%.

In 2004, CNN's exit poll actually had the Hispanic vote as Bush 53%, Kerry 44%. In 2000 (an election in which the Democrats, of course, won the popular vote, and should have won the White House), it was Gore 62%, Bush 35%. So Obama's doing better than both of them already.

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(Also see my follow-up post about this poll, "Obama's Lead Among White Women Is Bigger Than Bill Clinton's in 1996.")