Was Hillary playing to her Hispanic base?

  SAN DIEGO -- You notice certain things about a Hillary Clinton crowd. First and foremost, there are a lot of women, especially women of a certain age, who will tell you: if not her, who? And if not now, when?

   But there's one other thing that's notable about the Clinton crowds other than the vast numbers of women who want a woman president. Particularly in states like California, you will notice a disproportionate number of Hispanics.

   Clinton won the Latino vote in Nevada by a margin of 64 percent to 26 percent over Barack Obama. And judging from the way things look, the same thing could happen here, in the biggest state in the union, on Super Tuesday.

   I say this having spent the last two days in California, talking to Latino voting experts and Latino voters at Clinton and Obama campaign events.

   Not one of those voters brought up the issue that threw Clinton off her stride last fall: driver's licenses for illegal immigrants.

   But just about every one of the Hispanic Clinton supporters brought up the good times of the 1990s and Hillary Clinton's long-standing relationship with the Latino community nationwide.

   That's surely good news to Clinton, but it does also raise a question: might those voters have been on her mind during that debate last fall when she stumbled all over that question on driver's licenses?

-- Jerry Zremski