"La puerta es abierta, mis amigos!"
Posted on 01/20/2007 11:20:17 AM PST by VU4G10
WASHINGTON -- Florida Sen. Mel Martinez on Friday took the helm of a national Republican Party splintered over illegal immigration, vowing to reach out to black, Hispanic and "all communities that may have never believed that Republican ideals spoke to them."
President Bush's selection of Martinez sparked a backlash from border-state Republicans and other conservatives who oppose the Cuba-born Martinez's embrace of proposed immigration revisions that they consider "amnesty."
But a charm offensive by Martinez, aided by a White House meeting with Bush for some delegates and what some charged was pressure to accept Martinez, dissolved the protest into a few lonely voices in a cavernous ballroom at the winter meeting of the Republican National Committee.
Still, the rift illustrates a division in the party over the as-yet-unsettled immigration issue and represents just one fissure Martinez faces as he tries to raise money and create a message for a party that lost both chambers of Congress in November.
Martinez said he expected that message to include "big ideas" and more outreach to independents.
"To be the party of the future means that we also have to be a party that opens the door wide open so that all Americans feel welcome," he said in a speech that had the crowd hushed as he recounted his voyage as a 15-year-old from Fidel Castro's Cuba to the United States, sent by his parents, who feared Castro's oppression.
"There are too many Americans who do not understand that the principles of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan speak to their hopes, their dreams and their aspirations. I will take the message of our party to all Americans."
Martinez's selection reflects the party's intent to boost its appeal among Hispanic Americans, the fastest-growing electorate in the United States. Bush attracted record number of Hispanics in 2004 but they returned to the Democrats in 2006.
Democrats said they were skeptical that Martinez could bridge the gap in his party.
"The underlying problem remains that part of the Republican base is xenophobic," said Joe Garcia, the director of the New Democrat Network's Hispanic Strategy Center. "It has become very difficult for the president to reconcile his vision for an American future with a significant portion of his party."
Speakers who introduced Martinez took pains to underscore what they called his bedrock Republican principles.
Martinez, noted Sharon Day, a Republican activist from Florida, has a 100 percent anti-abortion, anti-tax voting record. "Mel is not a halfhearted Republican; Mel is not a wishy-washy Republican," she said.
Rep. Luis Fortuno, who represents Puerto Rico in Congress, suggested that Martinez can reach out to communities where Republicans haven't gone before.
"That should not scare anyone here," Fortuno said. "Perhaps it should scare the other party."
Martinez will serve as honorary party chair; day-to-day details of running the Republican National Committee will be left to Mike Duncan, a longtime committee operative.
In an interview earlier this week with Florida reporters, Martinez said he'd told Bush that his primary role was as a U.S. senator. "I made it very clear to him that I needed to be -- and intended to be -- a full-time senator for the state of Florida," Martinez said, adding that "I will not be going to every Lincoln Day dinner around the country. . . . I'm still going to coach basketball on the weekend."
At a news conference after his election, Martinez illustrated his appeal with little effort: switching into Spanish to answer several "preguntas."
He noted in his remarks that as a Cuban, "it was easy for me to understand that the Republican Party _ the party of Ronald Reagan _ was a party for us."
"I want to make sure that we take that message to the broader Hispanic community, to the African-American community and to all communities that may never have believed that Republican ideals spoke to them," he said.
In a statement, Bush said he expected the new team to "encourage more Americans to join our party.
"Sen. Martinez will help our party effectively communicate the Republican message of hope and opportunity for all Americans."
I'm getting tired of "hope" as a political buzzword. Hope is a virtue, not a policy. Selling hope is selling snake oil and empty rhetoric. Leave that to the democrats - it's their stock in trade.
Where's the beef?
The beef is what the groups that Martinez is already pandering to will receive......."vowing to reach out to black, Hispanic and "all communities that may have never believed that Republican ideals spoke to them."
The rest of us can 'eat cake'.
Hope is a town in Arkansas.
I guess the Republican leadership don't want to win anymore...
I am a middle class working man of modest means. I wish I were a big contributor to the Republican party though, then I could stop my financial support as a way of showing my unhappiness with them!
Mel is one of my two senators here in Florida.
I see NO difference in the two and i would not have either over for dinner. Both are for amnesty of all illegals.
If President Bush thinks this clown is going to help reinvigorate the Republican party he is sadly wrong.
"La puerta es abierta, mis amigos!"
President Bush does not want to reinvigorate the Republican party, he is more interested in getting amnesty for illegals.
That should have been obvious to all quite a while ago.
How about some outreach to conservatives?
I won't donate a single peso to the RNC.
I won't donate a single peso to the RNC.
Maybe we should all send them one.
Not a bad idea.
You are so right: "I guess the Republican leadership don't want to win anymore..."
After working so many years to get almost to the point that we conservatives wanted - we have people who don't care what the conservatives wanted to do and are willing to throw it so easily away!
This appointment of Martinez really angers me. He obviously doesn't understand - like some other Republicans - that in order to get the minority votes - whether Hispanic or Black - you need to follow a true conservative way and Not waver from it!
Just look at Reagan! Conservatism always works!
That is what those in Washington don't seem to understand!
As I said on another thread, same subject:
There were many good Republicans who could have been chosen. Lt. Gov. Steele, Newt, etc.
It is not amusing having a chairman who reps. the Party
who supports amnesty.
The taxpayers of Southern Calif. and other border areas are paying
For the illegals who get their health, education, food, and also
dealing with their crime rate into the multi, multi Millions of Dollars a year.
My City & Co. San Diego has tens of thousands of illegals.
Those who deny there are millions of illegals in the U.S.
or just laugh it off because they can't face it or say so what
should take into their flyover states some of the
millions of illegals and help support them or your states reimburse
we taxpayers who are forced to pay for this disaster
Also you can help by taking over some of the crime rate we
also put up with.
Better yet vote for a candidate who is proven strong on border issues
not one who jumps onboard in expediency or those who support amnesty.
Day-to-day details of running the Republican National Committee will be left to Mike Duncan, a longtime committee operative.
It sounds to me like Mel is the GOP's token Hispanic in charge of pandering outreach.
Just look at Reagan! Conservatism always works!
That is what those in Washington don't seem to understand!
I think they understand, it's just that conservatism is a 180 from where they want to go.
How about some outreach to conservatives?
Pretty soon, an outreach to conservatives will be an outreach to independents because there won't be any conservatives left in the Republican party.
They are fools to think that illegals will come over and vote Democrat Lite when they can have the real thing.
With an influx of millions of illegal hispanics that the GOP wants to legitimize why shouldn't there be a sense of xenophobia?
There is no equity in the source of immigrants both legal and illegal. Why shouldn't Americans be concerned?
If he wanted to reach out to minorities why not Michael Steele? This is all for the illegals, it has nothing to do with the black voter. It is ashame.
Face of a thug creep.
And so the solution is, get rid of the base!
Or perhaps, Communist style re-education camps so we can all learn the Superiority of Hispanic "civilization".
DUMB DUMB DUMB DUMB, reaching out to the illegals is the most IDIOTIC notion ever!!!!! They want to import an entire population who cannot live without goverment aid, WELFARE!!! It is like beating a dead horse. What is it that these people cannot understand!!!!! WE THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICAN DO NOT WANT AMNESTY, WE DO NOT WANT TO IMPORT MORE POVERTY, WE CANNOT CONTINUE TO SUPPORT 50 MILLION PEOPLE, WE CANNOT KEEP HAVING OUR HOSPITALS CLOSE, WE CANNOT AFFORD TO EDUCATE ALL OF THESE KIDS WITHOUT OUR OWN CHILDREN SUFFERING. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!!!
Can't you just scream!!! Why is it xenophobic for me to love my country, my culture, my language and my way of life. There is a such thing as overkill. The honest to goodness truth is the illegals have absolutely NOTHING TO OFFER. That is what I believe. They can only bring with them their poverty. I don't care how hard working they are, you cannot live on the depressed wages they get paid. So, therefore WE have to pick up the slack. How many freaking years have been trying to do something about welfare and out of wedlock pregnancies only to have the hispanic population have it rise again. How many years have we tried to combat the high school drop out rates, just to have it rise again. If they come for the education for their children, why is the drop out rate so high? The asians don't drop out of school, nor do the indians. For every talking point the pro amnesty crowd brings up, we see the reality and the numbers back it all up. I'm sick of it.
Well, I have been for the past 6 years on this forum, and most people agree with me, but it would seem that the party "leadership" - you know, the guys who just lost the House and the Senate - don't agree with us.
Leading to the rather obvious question....why are they the "leaders"? The appear to have no support, other than a thin group of themselves at the top.
Ask yourself this: does a leader call his own people despicable names like xenophobe and bigot? That's something the Left does. So what does that make Senor Martinez?
truth is the illegals have absolutely NOTHING TO OFFER
That's right. They have less than nothing: their presence is a net negative financially and culturally. Are these the skilled craftsmen of Europe, coming to a virgin country to create something? No. They have nothing, they have been told that we have what should rightfully be theirs by seedy creeps like Martinez, and so they come with their paws out: give us your country. They told us it's ours, so hand it over.
This is the road to hispanic oligarchy and socialism, like what is happening in Venezuela.
Mr. Bush put this creep in charge in retaliation against his own party. He's now just an angry man, embittered and estranged from the people who voted him in, engaging in petty vendettas. So he puts in the first man to speak Spanish on the Senate floor in official business, an act of contempt and hatred towards the Evil Gringos who managed to build a far better society than the despicable descendants of the Conquistadors, and so humiliated them when they thought they were the greatest guys on the planet.
This goon show will play out for another year or so, and then they will all fall away. Either the Republican party gets back in step with its base or it will simply fracture and come apart. With a crude creep like Mel in charge, look forward to lopsided wins for the Dems, with 70-30 votes happening all over the country.
What struck me about that line was how it was allowed to go completely unchallenged. There was no voice defending the base, or pointing out that if opposing amnest and unending mass legal immigration makes one 'xenophobic', then its the majority of Americans (not just the GOP base) that is xenophobic.
Of course, I wasn't surprised by that line, as its typical bias, and on immigration the media is especially biased.
The Path to National Suicide by Lawrence Auster (1990)
An essay on multi-culturalism and immigration.
How can we account for this remarkable silence? The answer, as I will try to show, is that when the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 was being considered in Congress, the demographic impact of the bill was misunderstood and downplayed by its sponsors. As a result, the subject of population change was never seriously examined. The lawmakers’ stated intention was that the Act should not radically transform America’s ethnic character; indeed, it was taken for granted by liberals such as Robert Kennedy that it was in the nation’s interest to avoid such a change. But the dramatic ethnic transformation that has actually occurred as a result of the 1965 Act has insensibly led to acceptance of that transformation in the form of a new, multicultural vision of American society. Dominating the media and the schools, ritualistically echoed by every politician, enforced in every public institution, this orthodoxy now forbids public criticism of the new path the country has taken. “We are a nation of immigrants,” we tell ourselves— and the subject is closed. The consequences of this code of silence are bizarre. One can listen to statesmen and philosophers agonize over the multitudinous causes of our decline, and not hear a single word about the massive immigration from the Third World and the resulting social divisions. Opponents of population growth, whose crusade began in the 1960s out of a concern about the growth rate among resident Americans and its effects on the environment and the quality of life, now studiously ignore the question of immigration, which accounts for fully half of our population growth.
This curious inhibition stems, of course, from a paralyzing fear of the charge of “racism.” The very manner in which the issue is framed—as a matter of equal rights and the blessings of diversity on one side, versus “racism” on the other—tends to cut off all rational discourse on the subject. One can only wonder what would happen if the proponents of open immigration allowed the issue to be discussed, not as a moralistic dichotomy, but in terms of its real consequences. Instead of saying: “We believe in the equal and unlimited right of all people to immigrate to the U.S. and enrich our land with their diversity,” what if they said: “We believe in an immigration policy which must result in a staggering increase in our population, a revolution in our culture and way of life, and the gradual submergence of our current population by Hispanic and Caribbean and Asian peoples.” Such frankness would open up an honest debate between those who favor a radical change in America’s ethnic and cultural identity and those who think this nation should preserve its way of life and its predominant, European-American character. That is the actual choice—as distinct from the theoretical choice between “equality” and “racism”—that our nation faces. But the tyranny of silence has prevented the American people from freely making that choice.
He simply doesn't like us.
What upsets the oligarchical hispanic the most is that we refuse to accept his authority. In his country, the little people grovel before Big Men like him - the "Caudillo".
So he resorts to cheap insults to try to bully us into submission. It is, as I said in a previous post, a Leftist tactic, similar to the finger pointers screaming "Racist!". In fact, he basically just called us all that - yet he himself is a white man from Spain!
It comes down to this: the Spaniards cannot stand that their age old enemies - the Anglos - create far better societies than they could with their backwards, crude authoritarian social norms. Mexico is a far worse place than most here can imagine - even the idiots at the UN recently called the Mexican judicial system "19th century". That's putting it about 400 years ahead of where it is. Since 1520, Mexico - and all of Latin America - has hardly changed, and where they have, it's usually towards something even worse - naive, theoretical socialism, which leads almost immediately to financial collapse.
Martinez and his compadres represent something called the "oppressed ubermensch" - like the Muslims, they are convinced that they are superior, but concrete evidence to the contrary is right before their eyes: the existence of truly modern societies, built by those they thought were "beneath" them. This is an affront, a humiliation they cannot bear; so they must seize control of it, kill it, destroy it, lest it show them for what they are: miserable failures, dimwitted thugs who create nothing, but merely use criminal power to take what isn't theirs and redistribute it to themselves.
Martinez is one of them. His anger towards the Communists is not the anger of the yeoman farmer towards unresponsive, illegitimate power; his is the anger of the plantation owner whose plantation was stolen by an even meaner, more vicious Caudillo - Senor Castro. Martinez' "conservatism" is not the Conservatism of the egalitarian Americans, but rather a quaint, pathetic Latin longing for the ancient past when only the strong and the willingly brutal controlled everything.
He faces a difficult challenge in subjugating us: he has to play a new game because physical intimidation is difficult to get away with here. But because of the activism of Leftists making critique of hispanics essentially a crime, he is enabled to engage in what is merely Hate speech towards us. The idea is to force the base to preface every statement about immigration with "I'm not a xenophobe, but....". It's the old "when did you stop beating your wife" gig. You're on the defensive from the start.
Martinez, I think, is sort of the death knell for the Republicans. If a man who is so very obviously not a part of the group he pretends to be in can end up in this position, then there is something beyond wrong. It won't last; something will have to give.
There was no voice defending the base
That's because the leadership is now openly at war with the base. They don't like our opinions, but they want to retain their power and authority. Rather than accept the judgement of their constituency, they hope to force us to submit to their demands. There will be no defense of the "base", just unrelenting arrogance and criticism from those who claim to represent us.
Reaching out to all those others while leaving the conservatives out. That's rich! (sarc)
This appointment is supposedly about "outreach" to "hispanics", because allegedly it's the evil xenophobia of all of us bigots that upset the average illegal alien voter, and caused the House and Senate to fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks.
Only one minor problem: this is the third such appointment this guy has made. The Cabinet is disproportionately hispanic: Alberto Gonzalez and Carlos "I only became an American 'cuz my company told me to" Gutierrez.
These appointments were supposed to communicate "inclusiveness" and "tolerance" - to show that the Republican Party is just like the Democratic Party, not just a bunch of bigots and xenophobes, see.
And that was all before the election. So it doesn't appear to have worked. So why should it work now?
The Republican Party is not merely Stuck on Stupid, they're inventing new depths to it.
Indeed he is. And just as unacceptable as Mehlman. Looks like my policy of cutting off the RNC/NRSC/NRCC from all cash donations will have to continue.
Apparently, the Big Tent GOP learned nothing from its 2006 midterm election disaster. In addition to Mr. Amnesty, we see the GOP busy rehabilitating Trent "Chester" Lott who has been placed in what passes for a "leadership" position in the Senate.
With brilliant moves like these, can a repeat election disaster be far behind?
Or perhaps some outreach to the taxpayers that are carrying all the illegals and liberals and the rest of the leeches that have gravitated to our society since the slow infestation of socialism.
This party is losing me very quickly. I hope that they can gather enough illegal votes to offset all the fed-up conservatives that are leaving the party!
And they will succeed! I hereby declare my independence, as witnessed by all freepers that care to read this thread.
I've had enough of the crap - this party is no different from the tax-and-spend liberals that they claim to loathe.
"I'm getting tired of "hope" as a political buzzword. Hope is a virtue, not a policy. Selling hope is selling snake oil and empty rhetoric. Leave that to the democrats - it's their stock in trade. Where's the beef?"
Beef? Oh, we ship that in from Mexico now.
As opposed to a bunch of America-hating, religious bigots as is the case with most Democrats, Mr. Garcia?
how about reaching out to conservatives?
That seems like a more fruitful plan for the GOP
---"The idea is to force the base to preface every statement about immigration with "I'm not a xenophobe, but....". It's the old "when did you stop beating your wife" gig. You're on the defensive from the start.---"
Yes, this is a very annoying, frustrating, and as you say, destructive habit conservatives have allowed themselves to be intimidated into. Sean Hannity is one of the absolute worst, as he has prefaced just about every critical statment I've ever heard him make about immigration policy with one of those nauseating opening lines. He's hardly alone, however, as you hear it from a whole host of conservatives/Republicans, be they talking heads in the media, or members of Congress.
You'd think the fact that such qualifiers don't achieve their purpose -- to protect and insulate one from bogus charges of racism, xenophobia, bigotry, etc lobbed by the Left -- would convince conservatives to stop wasting their breath with them, but sadly, it doesn't.
As to the bigger picture, I do wonder sometimes if some of the more established elite American leftwing circles will someday come to regret the unending mass immigration they have imposed on the nation (though to be fair, it could only have persisted this long with Republican acquiescence). Obviously, it will be of great benefit to them for a time, as it alters the demography of the nation in such a way that undeniably favors the Democrats. If it continues, it will eventually grant the Left/Democrats a long-term dominance over US politics. With this, they will no doubt get most of their agenda put into law, but as you say, so much of the attitudes and beliefs of the third world immigrants coming today are anithetical to classical liberal ideals. Europe is already discovering this the hard way with its Muslim immigrants, and I fear we will suffer a similar fate at some point.
Whether or not this monster of unending mass immigration turns on its leftwing creators, one thing is certain; and that is how it is bad for conservatism and Republicans. It is amazing that so many conservatives still believe that unending mass immigration is compatible with (or indeed even beneficial too) conservatism, despite all of the evidence to the contrary.
I think it's the tag line to the "I'm not a (fill in objectionable characteristic here), but....". Essentially, they don't want to oppose mass Third World immigration because they don't want to be called names, names that stick and not only invalidate your position in people's eyes, but will probably soon open you up to prosecution (which is already the case in Britain and the EU).
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