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
didn’t 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.
By
Max J. Castro Read Spanish Version
majcastro@gmail.com
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
didn’t 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
Gingrich’s “Contract with America” 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: “Nos conocemos.” We know one another. The
underlying message — “you are part of the family” — 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
president’s 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 won’t 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 “illegal immigration” is a multi-faceted
phenomenon. It’s 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. It’s 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 Univisión presidential debate.
The
people who are promoting xenophobic campaigns can say that they are
not attacking all immigrants or all Latinos, only the “illegals.”
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, “their most
obvious change so far is to reverse remarkable Republican gains among
one of the fastest-growing groups of American voters.”
Gerson
says Republicans should be terrified that today their party is
alienating Hispanics the way it alienated blacks in the 1960s. “In
politics,” Gerson writes, “some 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.”
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:
“Hispanics 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.”
It
is a hackneyed argument, one that ignores the reality of what
happened in the 2006 election and fails to understand how the
“entity” 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
(“leslie sanchez, machiavellian) last year in his blog, Wharf and
Weft:
“I 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…
“She is perhaps the
best embodiment I’ve ever seen of the flashy, showboating,
influence-peddling politico…She is an ‘insider,’ a shameless
self-promoter exchanging glib commentary on ‘the process’ (a term
connoting the specialized profession that politics has become and the
‘expertise’ needed to truly participate) for moments in the
spotlight…
“Her 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…”
