[NYTr] Latinos and the GOP: Words, Deeds Belie Sales Job
 
Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2007 22:46:46 -0500 (CDT)

Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
Progreso Weekly - Sep
http://progreso-weekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=164&Itemid=1

Latinos and the Republican Party: Words and deeds belie sales job

By Max J.Castro

It is an awful time to be selling the Grand Old [Republican] Party
(GOP) to Latinos. Yet some Republicans persist despite the pounding
their party is giving the Latino community every day.

It didnbt seem that tough just a few years ago when the GOP was gaining
ground on the Democratic Party so fast it looked as if the Republicans
might soon overtake their rivals. It would have been a momentous
accomplishment for the Republicans. The GOP lost African Americans
almost fifty years ago. Latinos had been loyal to the Democrats for
decades, and they are now the largest minority and the fastest-growing
group in the country.

In the past, GOP efforts to woo Latino voters have mostly failed. Bob
Dole, for example, captured only about one in five Latino votes in
1996, fewer than Ronald Reagan. Dole was not helped by the fact that
the election took place just two years after Republican Governor Pete
Wilson of California spearheaded the approval of Proposition 187, a set
of measures hostile toward undocumented immigrants or that Newt
Gingrichbs bContract with Americab contained proposals targeting both
legal and undocumented immigrants.

The picture began to change when George W. Bush and Karl Rove entered
the scene. They brought a message starkly different from the harsh one
Newt Gingrich and Pete Wilson had been sending the Hispanic community.

The Bush-Rove strategy, far from communicating a message of fear and
loathing, was to appeal to Latino voters with a highly personal
approach centered on a clear and unmistakable theme: inclusion.

One particularly effective ad featured the President talking directly
to Latinos and saying: bNos conocemos.b We know one another. The
underlying message -- byou are part of the familyb -- was delivered
most powerfully by the young George P. Bush, whose good looks are
unmistakably Latino and who happens to be the son of the presidentbs
brother Jeb and his wife Columba, a Mexican American. We know one
another -- in the Biblical sense. Somos la misma sangre. We have the
same blood!

It was powerful stuff, and it worked very well, especially among those
Latinos most anxious about their place in the United States,
foreign-born naturalized citizens. In 2000, Bush won one of every three
Latino votes. He did even better in 2004, winning four in ten Hispanic
votes. Republican Congressional candidates increased their share of the
Latino vote too. It seemed to some Republicans that the sky was the
limit when it came to tapping into the Latino vote.

The honeymoon was short-lived. In the 2006 election, many Latinos
returned to the Democratic fold. The reasons for the reversal suggest
why the trend away from the GOP is likely to continue and possibly
intensify.

To a significant degree, the credit for Republican success among Latino
voters goes to George W. Bush, whose personality and moderate stance on
immigration appealed to a significant number of Hispanics. Bush was not
on the ballot in 2006, and he wonbt be on it 2008 either -- or ever
again for that matter.

Then, too, the Iraq war is even more unpopular among Latinos than among
the American population as a whole. It was clear by 2006 that the
Republicans had been the most enthusiastic supporters of a disastrous
war and the main impediment to phasing it out. More recently, while
Democrats in Congress have proposed measures to at least limit the
duration of the war, Bush and the Republicans have stymied them at
every turn. The President and his Congressional supporters thus offer
the country an unending war, a prospect that displeases the vast
majority of swing voters, including the kind of Hispanic swing voter
Bush had been able to win in 2000 and 2004.

But the biggest reason Republicans have been losing ground -- and will
continue to lose ground -- among the Latino electorate is that the
party has abandoned any semblance of the old Bush-Rove politics of
inclusion. Instead, in the guise of a campaign against illegal
immigration, Republican politicians and policy makers at every level
are engaging in the kind of crusade of fear and loathing that made the
GOP unpopular with Latinos in the past. This time, however, they are
waging it on a vaster and more pervasive scale, and against a Latino
community that is more numerous and more politically aware than the
last time.

The campaign to root out billegal immigrationb is a multi-faceted
phenomenon. Itbs the increasing number of raids on homes and workplaces
by federal immigration agents, and the stepped up pace of deportations.
It is legislation passed last year in the House of Representatives with
strong Republican support that would have made unauthorized immigration
a felony. Itbs the stubborn refusal of the vast majority of Republican
lawmakers to consider any legislation offering even a semblance of
amnesty, even an arduous and expensive form of amnesty. It is the vast
number of anti-immigrant measures passed in the last few years by state
legislatures and local governments controlled by Republicans.

This campaign consists of a lot of sticks and stones, but there are
also words and symbols. These hurt too, but the Republicans will be
feeling their own pain soon at the ballot box. The targeting of
immigrants in the rhetoric of Republican candidates, from those running
for the presidency to those standing for local office, will not go
politically unpunished. Neither will the sheer disrespect that all
Republican presidential candidates, with the exception of John McCain,
display when they fail to show up for signal Latino events, including a
forum held by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed
Officials, the convention of the National Council of La Raza, and the
UnivisiC3n presidential debate.

The people who are promoting xenophobic campaigns can say that they are
not attacking all immigrants or all Latinos, only the billegals.b They
can say it until they are blue in the face. Yet the experience of
California in the 1990s should have taught Republicans that if they
launch a virulent attack against the undocumented sector of the Latino
community they can expect a tough political backlash from the whole
community.

There are Republicans who understand all this and are sounding loud
alarm bells. Michael Gerson, formerly a Bush speech writer and now a
columnist for the Washington Post, recently wrote that, while
conservatives say the want to build a more attractive Republican Party
after the end of the Bush presidency, btheir most obvious change so far
is to reverse remarkable Republican gains among one of the
fastest-growing groups of American voters.b

Gerson says Republicans should be terrified that today their party is
alienating Hispanics the way it alienated blacks in the 1960s. bIn
politics,b Gerson writes, bsome acts are so emblematic and potent that
they cannot be undone for decades -- as when Republican presidential
candidate Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.b

It remains to be seen whether the Republican-engineered defeat of an
immigration reform bill that would have given undocumented immigrants a
chance at citizenship, may represent such an emblematic and potent act.
What is clear is that Republicans are in a big hole when it comes to
Latinos, and they are still digging.

Yet there are still some Republicans have not gotten the message. They
seem to believe that their party can bash immigrants and get Latino
votes too.

Leslie Sanchez, author of a new book, Los Republicanos: Why Hispanics
and Republicans Need Each Other, is a case in point.

A publicity ad for the book reads:

bHispanics comprise one of America's largest business-minded,
faith-based, culturally-conservative entities, and their numbers
continue to grow. Long assumed to be aligned with the Democrats,
Hispanics have been ignored by many Republicans. Noted Hispanic
marketing expert and political commentator Leslie Sanchez passionately
argues that, after years of watching Democrats fail them, Hispanics
need to shift their bets to Los Republicanos or risk gambling away
their political future.b

It is a hackneyed argument, one that ignores the reality of what
happened in the 2006 election and fails to understand how the bentityb
is really feeling and acting in the face of the current Republican-led
campaign of intimidation and hate.

It is hard to see how anyone, and especially a Latina, can make a case
for a Hispanic-Republican romance in 2007. Then you learn more about
Sanchez and you begin to understand it.

Leslie Sanchez is the former executive director of the White House
Initiative for Hispanic Education. Is she perhaps one of the many
excellent Latino teachers or educational experts in this country? She
is not. Who, then, is Leslie Sanchez?

Gabriel Arana, a graduate student at Cornell, wrote a scathing portrait
(bleslie sanchez, machiavellian) last year in his blog, Wharf and Weft:

bI met Leslie Sanchez, the former executive director of the White House
Initiative for Hispanic Education, when I was there as an intern, the
summer after my freshman year of college...

bShe is perhaps the best embodiment I've ever seen of the flashy,
showboating, influence-peddling politicob&She is an binsider,b a
shameless self-promoter exchanging glib commentary on bthe processb (a
term connoting the specialized profession that politics has become and
the bexpertiseb needed to truly participate) for moments in the
spotlightb&

bHer image as a Hispanic leader is only a gimmick; she exploits
Hispanics, the image of being Hispanic, for her personal gain. When
Telemundo wanted to do an interview with her about Hispanic education,
she passed up the opportunity when she found out the interview would be
in Spanish, which she doesn't speak. Rather than let someone else in
the office take the spotlight, she declined the interview altogether.
She did no substantive policy work, instead taking unannounced trips to
the Bahamas and appearing when a photo opportunity arose...b
 

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