Julián Castro Announces Candidacy for President

Former HUD Secretary Julián Castro has become the latest Democrat to officially throw his hat into the 2020 ring. Maggie Astor at the New York Times reports:

Julián Castro, the former housing secretary and former mayor of San Antonio, announced on Saturday that he would run for president, one of the most high-profile Latino Democrats ever to seek the party's nomination.

His first campaign stop will be in Puerto Rico, where he will speak on Monday at the Latino Victory Fund's annual summit and meet with residents still struggling to recover from Hurricane Maria. Later in the week, his campaign said, he will go to New Hampshire.

"When my grandmother got here almost a hundred years ago," Mr. Castro said at the Plaza Guadalupe amphitheater in San Antonio, in the neighborhood where he was raised, "I'm sure that she never could have imagined that just two generations later, one of her grandsons would be serving as a member of the United States Congress and the other would be standing with you here today to say these words: I am a candidate for president of the United States of America."

...His message was firmly progressive. He called for a higher minimum wage, denounced police killings of African-Americans, which he described as "state violence," and embraced the Black Lives Matter movement. He also condemned [Donald] Trump's immigration policy, including the practice of family separation and the proposed border wall, and declared that his first executive order if elected would be to rejoin the Paris climate accords, which Mr. Trump left.

After his announcement, I messaged the other contributors: "Well, Julián Castro's announcement was very good. He really impressed me. His mom introduced him as a man of integrity and vision, which is such a good line. His brother acknowledged that they like and respect many of the other people who will be running. He spoke about his grandmother coming to this country as an orphan and how amazed she'd be that he and his brother are now a member of Congress and a presidential candidate. It was genuine, and very moving. It was full of love and respect, and it was such a stark contrast to Trump."

Castro's campaign slogan is "One Nation. One Destiny." In an era in which his party's political opponents actively seek to divide the nation with bigotry, nativism, and othering of every stripe, that's a damn fine slogan.