WASHINGTON -- Both the Bush and Kerry presidential campaigns talk about the need to unite the country, but when it comes to wooing Hispanic voters, their tactics can be divisive.

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President Bush has proposed a program to let illegal immigrants work, which even some dismayed Republicans brand as "amnesty." Back on the campaign trail in the Southwest, he is again dusting off his schoolboy Spanish in an effort to appeal to Hispanic voters.

This raises eyebrows among some Republican legislators on Capitol Hill who oppose bilingual education and champion English-only school curricula, arguing that poorly educated Hispanics who speak little or no English are a drain on the economy.

Bush's general counsel, Alberto Gonzalez, is on the short list to be on the Supreme Court if a vacancy occurs on Bush's watch. No Hispanic has ever served on the Supreme Court.

The Bush-Cheney campaign boasts that it has teams in 30 states aimed at getting Hispanic votes and intends to spend a significant percentage of the $100 million Bush has to spend on ads aimed at Hispanics.

Bush has been making appearances in the southwestern states, even though they are controversially billed as presidential visits, not campaign stops. In 2000 Al Gore won New Mexico by just a few hundred votes and lost Arizona but just a few percentage points. Bush is determined to win both states this year.

After their initially warm relationship turned chilly, Bush has recently moved to mend fences with Mexican President Vicente Fox, inviting him to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, last month.

Bush is backing his former housing secretary, Mel Martinez, who resigned in December, for a Senate seat from Florida. Florida, where the 2000 election was decided by a vote of the Supreme Court, is, of course, governed by Bush's brother Jeb, who is married to a Hispanic and who was re-elected with a majority of the Hispanic vote.

For his part, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., is not quashing speculation that Gov. Bill Richardson, the popular Hispanic governor of New Mexico (with a population that is 40 percent Hispanic) is in contention to be his running mate, even though Richardson has publicly said no. No Hispanic has ever been on the ticket of a major political party in the United States, and in a close race, just about everyone agrees that New Mexico's five electoral votes may be vital.

Kerry is making an effort to appeal to Hispanic voters, who have traditionally voted Democratic, by promising a climate that will give them better jobs, home ownership and their own businesses. Hispanics now own 30 percent more small businesses than they did just five years ago and are predicted to own one out of ten of all small businesses in the United States in just three more years.

Stan Greenberg, who was a pollster for the Clinton White House, says that both parties must pay attention to Hispanic voters because they will play a "critical role" in such close battleground states as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada.

His firm, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, recently polled 1,564 Hispanics who are likely to vote and concluded that "comparing current support for Bush with 2000 exit polls, there is no evidence that the president has expanded his support among Hispanics over the past three years." Greenberg's polling puts Kerry's support among Hispanics nationwide at 56 percent and Bush's support at 34 percent. In 2000, 62 percent of Hispanic voters said as they exited polling stations that they voted for Gore.

Nonsense, says the Bush campaign, arguing that Bush's policies have made him increasingly popular with Hispanic voters.

Bush just returned from a trip to Phoenix and Albuquerque where he announced that minority home ownership is above 50 percent for the first time in modern U.S. history. By the end of the decade, the White House says, 5.5 million more Hispanics will own their own homes than owned them in 2000.

The Kerry campaign immediately went on the attack when Bush touted home ownership increases among Hispanics last month. The Kerry campaign said in a statement, "As George W. Bush travels to New Mexico and Arizona today to try to put a happy face on the nation's struggling economy, his administration's misguided housing policies have pushed the American dream out of grasp for many working families in New Mexico, Arizona, and across the country."

The Bush administration is touting a new policy to promote home ownership for those who have rented under the so-called Section 8 plan, but the Kerry camp points out the Section 8 program itself is being proposed for a $1.1 billion cut, under Bush's budget for 2005.

The Kerry campaign also argues that the president's domestic cuts, to pay for his tax cuts and the war in Iraq, are hurting Hispanics by cutting job training programs and aid to small businesses.

Nonetheless, support in California for Bush among Hispanics (he won 29 percent of them in 2000) is growing. They like Arnold Schwarzenegger. More Hispanics like Bush's proposals to let undocumented immigrants in the United States, especially from nearby Mexico, work legally for up to six years, than those who don't like it.

But Greenberg found that Kerry is not doing as well as Democrats traditionally have done with low-income Hispanics, with less-educated Hispanics, with rural Hispanics, with working Hispanic women and with unmarried Hispanic women. Greenberg's term is that Kerry is "underperforming" with those groups. And many Democrats are more nervous this year than they were in 2000 about the width and depth of Hispanic support.

One Democratic consultant suggested that many Hispanics don't know who Kerry is yet and that on first introduction, they may be put off by his New England reserve. Kerry's wife Teresa speaks Spanish (nearly eight out of ten Latinos in America speak Spanish although most also speak English), but Kerry does not. He speaks French and Italian.

With Hispanics or Latinos now outnumbering blacks as the largest minority in America for the first time, demographers are telling politicians they must be more cognizant of Latinos and their needs. They currently number about 39 million, including an estimated 8 million who are in the United States illegally but who have a tremendous impact. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that Hispanics now make up half of all new workers and that their average family incomes are $33,000.

It is possible that as many as 10 million Hispanics may vote this year, if they are motivated. With both Karl Rove, Bush's political strategist, and Mary Beth Cahill, Kerry's campaign strategist, saying the election is likely to be close, Hispanic votes in the 16 battleground states could be crucial.