The Republican party’s middling efforts to fake out black and latino voters is running full speed into the reality wall .
President Bush, strategist Karl Rove and other top Republicans have wooed Latino and black leaders, many of them evangelical clergy who lead large congregations, in hopes of peeling away the traditional Democratic base. But now some of the leaders who helped Bush win in 2004 are revisiting their loyalty to the Republican Party and, in some cases, abandoning it.
"There is a fissure, and I doubt it will be closed in this election," said the Rev. Luis Cortes Jr., a Republican who founded the annual National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast that has featured Bush every year since 2002. His Philadelphia-based Esperanza USA boasts a national affiliate network of more than 10,000 churches.
The Latino backlash has grown so intense that one prominent, typically pro-Republican organization, the Latino Coalition, has endorsed Democrats in competitive races this year in Tennessee, Nebraska and New Jersey. The coalition is chaired by Hector Barreto, the former administrator of the Small Business Administration under Bush; its president is a former strategist for the Republican National Committee.
The lesson for the Republicans is this: don’t go through the motions of pretending to be a party that welcomes minorities while at the same time pandering to the racists in your base. There is no tent big enough for that, and you have to make tough choices (like the Dems did in the ’60s).
While it is true that the GOP has racists in its base that don’t want more brown people in the country, it is also true that a great many Democratic voters want an end to illegal immigration.
A failure to understand this could have real world consequences for Democratic candidates.
Note that I said “illegal” immigration. Far too many people talking on the subject are conflating legal and illegal immigration, and the public views are very different about legal immigration. Let’s not muddy the water.
The United States cannot absorb all the people in Central and South America who want a better life. That’s the path we’re on now, and it can’t work.