Big difference in media’s treatment of Clinton and Trump ‘Hispandering’

The press mocked Donald Trump Thursday for declaring on Cinco de Mayo that he “loves Hispanics,” but media was much more subdued last year when it was Hillary Clinton who tried her hand at “Hispandering”

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“Happy [Cinco De Mayo]!” the casino tycoon said Thursday on social media. “The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics!”

Reporters and media commentators were quick to jeer at the GOP presidential candidate, especially for the last note of his holiday message.

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And there was another point that didn’t escape social media users Thursday: The taco bowl, which can also be called a taco salad, is a strictly American invention.

“Taco salad is a modern variation on the traditional Tex-Mex dish. These recipes begin to show up in American cookbooks/magazines in the 1960s,” Jean Anderson wrote in the American Century Cookbook: The Most Popular Recipes of the 20th Century.

“This salad arrived with the Tex-Mex fast-food franchises, which began to pepper the country in the 60s,” she added. “The man who whetted our appetite for ‘hot and spicy’ was Glen Bell, who opened the first ‘Taco Bell’ in Downey, California. That was 1962. Did Taco Bell originate the Taco Salad? I’ve been unable to proved it did. Or didn’t. The first recipe I could find for Taco Salad appeared in the May 1968 issue of Sunset.”

This isn’t to say, however, that Clinton hasn’t also been mocked by the press for her efforts at Hispanic outreach.

In December, the Democratic front-runner and her team were accused of “Hispandering” when they published a post on her campaign website titled “7 things Hillary Clinton has in common with your abuela.”

“It’s no secret that Hillary is loving her role as grandma. And she was thrilled to learn that next summer, her granddaughter Charlotte will have a sibling to play with,” the website read.

Though Clinton’s attempt to play up her role as an “abuela,” which is Spanish for grandmother, and a supporter of immigration reform fell mostly flat with Hispanic voters and the press, the media criticism she earned that month pales in comparison to what Trump received Thursday.

“Hillary Clinton wants to win the Latino vote. And that’s not a bad thing. Endeavoring to run a kindly, inclusive campaign is much more noble than running a divisive, fear-mongering one,” Fusion reported.

NBC News noted in its coverage of her outreach attempts, “Clinton’s … a candidate who has hired several Latino staffers, as well as a couple of Latino pollsters.”

“She’s tacked further left on her own view of immigration and taken positions on issues that many progressive Latino groups back, such as raising the minimum wage and finding a way to bring legal status to the 11 million people in the community who are not here legally,” the report added.

Similarly, when Clinton sought to make headlines last year with an “impromptu” stop at a Chipotle restaurant, there was more cooing in newsrooms than booing.

The presumptive Democratic nominee “showed how unassuming she … could be,” the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman wrote after Clinton made an “impromptu” stop at a Chipotle and ordered a burrito bowl.

A Times tweet linking to a separate article on the story read, “Hillary Clinton passed her first real test of the primary season: she ordered wisely at Chipotle.”

The linked article awarded the former secretary of state’s burrito bowl order an “above average” rating.

Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin meanwhile awed at Clinton’s choice of eats.

“The two words she needs are fun and new. And part of why yesterday was so successful is, she looks like she’s having fun and she’s doing, for her, new stuff,” he said during a panel discussion on MSNBC. “We’ve never seen her get a burrito before.”

There’s a big reason, though, for the difference in the press’ treatment to Trump’s taco bowl and Clinton’s Chipotle run.

Clinton’s burrito bowl was seen by reporters simply as an attempt to appear spontaneous and pedestrian, while Trump’s mugging with Tex-Mex cuisine appeared to all to be an all-too-obvious and ham-handed attempt at pandering to Hispanic voters; ripe for mockery.