Twelve years ago against Bill Clinton, Bob Dole ran a spectacularly inept effort to win Hispanic votes. There was little money, almost no ads and a couple of staffers cut off from campaign insiders. The candidate was an honorable man, a war hero with a dry sense of humor, but worried too much about protecting his right flank from the likes of immigrant-bashing Pat Buchanan. He was also clueless about Hispanic America.

Dole ended up with a record-low 21 percent of the Hispanic vote. Can something similar happen to this year's Republican, another honorable man and war hero with a quirky sense of humor?

Last week, a national survey by the Pew Hispanic Center showed that Barack Obama held a sizable lead among Hispanic registered voters, leading John McCain by 66 percent to 23 percent. That's Dole numbers, surprising for a Republican from Arizona, a state with a large Hispanic population that gave McCain a majority in his most recent race for Senate. Even more surprising: among Cuban-Americans, the poll claimed, Obama was up 53 percent to 28 percent.

There are many Cuban-Americans who have come to believe the current administration has wreaked enormous damage to this country in almost every conceivable way. They believe, like so many others, that a profound transformation in leadership is mandatory to rebuild American power and international prestige.

But 53 percent? Everything I know about Cubans tells me that figure is off. Obama is not going to win the Cuban-American vote because there simply is too much mistrust, especially among older voters, about his Cuba policy.

The Dole-McCain parallels work sometimes, sometimes not. Both men are coming off primary seasons in which the far right of their party demonized Hispanics. Both candidates also know that to win, they can't disregard the vociferously anti-immigrant GOP base.

But McCain is more Hispanic-savvy than Dole was. He is trying a balancing act Dole never attempted. McCain has television spots in Spanish, runs a Spanish-language campaign Web site, and has also spoken to Democrat-leaning, Mexican-American-dominated organizations. McCain, however, has one burden Dole never had: The enormous unpopularity of a sitting Republican president.

Yet, the same poll claimed that among Miami Cubans, Obama has Dole-like numbers: 21 percent support him.

I don't believe it any more than the 53 percent in the Pew poll. My sense is that enough Cubans have turned against Republicans to put Obama in the place Clinton was in 1992: He's got a shot at 40 percent.

Nationally, of course, other Hispanics do not much care about Cuba policy, and they are traditionally Democratic to begin with. Add to that the anger about GOP xenophobic rantings, even though nobody thinks of McCain as part of the anti-immigrant crowd.

Also add the lackluster performance of the McCain campaign — the maverick of 2000 may have had a chance against Obama's political superstar, but eight years later McCain is reduced to a technophobe fuddy-duddy given to foreign-policy gaffes.

At this point, there are no political developments on the horizon to help McCain win more than 30 percent of the national Hispanic vote. Better than Dole, but not enough to win the Hispanic-heavy swing states of Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada.

— Roger Hernandez is a syndicated columnist and writer-in-residence at New Jersey Institute of Technology.