Posted on 09/07/2001 11:16:11 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
President George W. Bush actively is wooing America’s largest minority group, but some within the GOP worry that Latinos are being pandered to for purely electoral reasons.
Since arriving in Washington, President George W. Bush has persisted in believing that the GOP can engineer a major shift in U.S. electoral politics and seize a sizable chunk of a voting bloc that the Democrats have come to assume is solidly loyal. Using Cabinet picks and tailoring policy — including floating the idea of granting an amnesty to more than 3 million Mexicans living in the United States illegally — the president has continued with a high-profile effort to woo skeptical Latinos away from the Democrats.
Some prominent Republicans, including Sens. John Warner of Virginia and James Inhofe of Oklahoma, worried publicly that Bush and his advisers are overplaying their hand and have been ill-advised in changing some policies because of what they see as a mistaken assumption that Latino votes can be won that way.
Even when Bush was considering in the summer whether to give the go-ahead for federal funding of stem-cell research, White House sources say, he tried to calculate how the predominantly Roman Catholic Latinos would react. His aides reckoned that funding for limited research wouldn’t endanger the grand realignment scheme to attract Hispanics to the GOP.
Likewise, the White House has made no secret that the electoral focus on Latinos was a major factor in the president’s decision to make Mexico his first foreign port of call after inauguration — snubbing the more traditional European venue or Canada — and to honor Mexican President Vicente Fox with Bush’s first state dinner. In less than eight months in office Bush has met five times with Fox, who is portrayed by White House staff as “Bush’s Tony Blair,” a reference to the chummy relationship formed between Bill Clinton and the British prime minister.
But the question remains whether Republicans significantly can cut the comfortable margin Democrats enjoy among Latino voters, say pollsters and political consultants. At first glance the task is daunting, even an impossible dream — but then skeptics abounded when Ronald Reagan targeted the votes of blue-collar workers and organized labor, GOP advocates of Hispanic-outreach programs in the White House and at the Republican National Committee (RNC) tell Insight.
America’s largest minority group — during the last census recorded at 12.5 percent of the population — Latinos traditionally have voted overwhelmingly Democratic in both presidential and congressional races, although their rates of turnout and registration are lower than those of blacks or whites (see sidebar, p. 39), according to exit polls conducted by the Associated Press and the Voter News Service. Last year, Al Gore secured 69 percent of the Latino vote, and Clinton garnered 72 percent in the 1996 election.
Across all Latin nationality groups except Cubans, the Democratic advantage in party identification among Hispanics is more than 20 percent — and even among Cuban-Americans the GOP’s once-healthy advantage has dwindled to a meager 6 percent, rendering Florida a toss-up state. More alarming for Republicans is that, unlike a lot of European minority groups in the past, Latinos appear to identify just as much with Democrats the more educated they are or, if they’re immigrants, the longer they’ve lived in the United States.
A Knight-Ridder study of the voting patterns of Latinos last year suggested also that income does not play a significant role in determining the party loyalties of Hispanics. That’s a disappointing conclusion for the White House, considering the high hopes Bush aides have placed on attracting wealthy and educated Latinos by appointing a handful of well-heeled Hispanics to government posts.
And, on the face of it, there is little succor to be found for the GOP with Latino immigrants waiting or wanting to become U.S. citizens. The margin of support for the Democrats among them is an even larger 39-to-15 percent, according to a 1999 study conducted jointly by Harvard University, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Washington Post.
“Mexican-Americans are culturally conservative and they are a potential swing vote, but I doubt the GOP will make much headway with Puerto Ricans and Central Americans. That’s an urban vote primarily. And I’m not sure that the way the Republicans are approaching the Mexicans will pay off, either — the GOP has a lot to live down before it will earn their trust,” Democratic pollster James Lauer tells Insight.
Lauer points out that the White House may be banking too much on influencing Mexican-Americans by arguing for substantial changes to immigration regulations, including the introduction of a more generous guest-worker scheme. Like most immigrants and nonimmigrants alike, Mexican-Americans share the view that there has been enough immigration already, according to opinion polls.
The broad statistics and the doubts, though, aren’t deterring the White House. Earlier in the year Karl Rove, the president’s senior political adviser, told reporters in Washington that grabbing a bigger share of the Latino vote is “our mission and our goal” and that it will require the effort of all Republicans “in every way and every day working to get that done.”
With this in mind, Rove lobbied the president hard — and in the face of stiff opposition from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon — to stop the U.S. Navy from using Vieques, a small island off Puerto Rico, as a bombing range, White House and Pentagon sources tell Insight. He argued that by doing so Bush would boost Republican standing with the ultraliberal Puerto Ricans and Latinos in general. RNC sources concede that they can’t find any specific opinion-poll bump in Latino support for Bush or the GOP as a result of the Vieques decision.
That may be because the president’s Vieques decision prompted high-profile attacks from senior Republican senators, who argued publicly in press conferences on Capitol Hill that the decision was purely one of electoral calculation worthy of Bill Clinton. “As much as I love George W. Bush, he was ill-advised by political advisers who thought this was a way to win some votes,” harrumphed Inhofe on CNN.
Small numbers could be as crucial as last year, and it isn’t hard to see the Latino vote making a monumental difference in a race that goes down to the wire. In Oregon, for example, Gore beat Bush last November by 6,700 votes. The state has 55,000 registered Latino voters and they backed the Democrat overwhelmingly. In New Mexico — the U.S. state with the highest percentage of Mexican-born people — Gore won by a wafer-thin 366-vote margin.
Syndicated columnist Raoul Lowery Contreras points to Iowa, Oregon and New Mexico as three good reasons for Bush to mount his Latino effort. He recently maintained in a column that it was wrong to think there are not “enough potential voters for Bush to appeal to — to make a difference.” He only has to gain 11,278 more Mexican-American votes in three states to increase his Electoral College victory by 40 votes, based on last year’s election, the commentator enthused.
Bush campaign advisers agree but tell Insight that the focus must be wider than a handful of small states. They insist the president has no alternative but to target Latino voters and improve his numbers by more than the 35 percent he secured last year — itself not a bad performance and the best showing for a Republican candidate since Reagan in 1980 and 1984. The demographics demand it for both Bush and the long-term future of the GOP. With the Latino population growing rapidly, Bush likely would lose the presidency by 3 million votes unless he boosts his share of the Hispanic vote.
“We got 35 percent of the Hispanic vote” in the last election, RNC spokesman Trent Duffy recently told Insight. “If we don’t get that up to 38 or 40 percent, it’s all over.” Matthew Dowd, a Bush adviser in last year’s election campaign, has chorused regularly in sessions with Rove that more must be done on the Hispanic front, White House sources say.
In 1998 the clout of the Latino vote was demonstrated to the GOP when Dan Lungren so decisively lost his gubernatorial race with Democrat Gray Davis in California. GOP outreach advocates contrast Lungren’s defeat with another governor’s race that year in Texas, where Bush courted Latinos aggressively and secured about 49 percent of the Lone Star State’s Hispanic vote.
They also maintain that Bush’s wooing last year of Latinos paid off — he grabbed 14 percent more Hispanic votes than Bob Dole, his GOP predecessor, who secured a mere 21 percent of the Hispanic vote cast. But was the reward substantial enough? Skeptics, Republican as well as Democrat, tell Insight that Bush should have done even better, considering the significant election resources that were thrown into the campaign to attract Latinos. These included fashioning a Latino-centered convention that prominently featured the president’s telegenic nephew George P. Bush.
The president appeared to acknowledge his own disappointment in a magazine interview last December when asked how he felt about his effort to get more black and Hispanic votes. “Got whipped pretty good,” he quipped to Time magazine. But Bush clearly believes he can make further inroads into Democratic territory. And of all Republican presidents or national GOP candidates of the past, he has the background and credentials to pull it off — especially with the help of his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and his Mexican-American wife and children.
Having grown up in the heavily Latino-influenced oil fields of Texas, Bush has far better instincts about how to communicate with Hispanics than his father, who at the 1980 GOP convention in New Orleans introduced his three Mexican-American grandchildren to Reagan as “the little brown ones.” The president has his own political grounding in Latino affairs as a former border governor — and his ability to speak Spanish as well, or as badly as his English, is worth a lot.
There also is polling evidence to encourage GOP hopes. Regular summer opinion polls conducted by Gallup recorded a 59 percent approval rating for Bush among Latinos. Remove Puerto Ricans and the rating breaks 60 percent.
Several other Bush issues also are resonating well, including a 75 percent approval of Bush’s plan to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement to the whole hemisphere, according to a Gallup poll. With that kind of polling, GOP outreach advocates tell Insight that Latino conservatism may assist Bush and the GOP to overcome the Democratic voter-registration drives to win more Hispanic support in 2002 and 2004. Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, puts it this way: “We do not concede the Latino vote.”
This is all a far cry from 1994, when California’s Pete Wilson crafted his re-election bid for governor around a nativist proposal to deny state benefits to illegal immigrants in a state where non-Hispanic whites no longer are a majority. Now a GOP president has proposed allowing more Mexicans the legal opportunity to live and work in the United States. Back then, Wilson broadcast an ad depicting Mexicans slipping across the Southwest border with the voice-over announcing grimly: “They just keep coming.”
California sums up the challenge for the GOP. While Latinos — and Mexican-Americans especially — tend to approve of the Republican line that taxes should be lower and remain in sympathy with some key social-conservative positions of the GOP, such as opposition to abortion, they associate the party with several “anti-immigrant” policies that strike at their pride, Democratic consultants say. Those include an unsuccessful measure backed by then-House speaker Newt Gingrich and then-Senate majority leader Dole to block the children of illegal immigrants from attending public schools.
A division remains at the national level, with some senators and congressmen concerned that the outreach effort will not bear the fruit promised. “I worry that we will be seen as pandering for purely electoral reasons,” a senior GOP senator tells Insight. “Take the Vieques decision — the Navy really needs that range and we did a disservice to the military. And take immigration — I’m not sure our own grassroots approved of the amnesty idea at all.”
The senator also points to another worry skeptics of the Bush approach frequently mention: that the White House fails to discriminate between the nationality groups within the Latino vote and fails in the sophisticated understanding of what appeals to the different groups. “Latino voters cannot simply be pushed into a single category,” he says.
The irritation caused by the amnesty Bush floated for Mexican-Americans is a case in point. Salvadorans, Hondurans and Guatemalans argue that the same rights and privileges also should be extended to them.
Maybe they would if their welfare check failed to arrive. Why can't this concept be understood by all the neo-conservatives here? We ALREADY HAVE a labor class, but we pay them NOT to work. And, we pay to import Mexican labor, who work very hard, send the majority of their tax-free wages back to Mexico (propping up THEIR economy), while their spouses and children ALSO collect on our social services.
So, we pay Americans not to work, we pay the families of Mexican workers not to work, the Mexican workers pay no taxes, and their income gets sent back to Mexico. Is that fair to the American taxpayer?
Full amnesty for all, no.
No, just for Mexicans.
But we need a solution to keep hard working willing people here.
We have potentially hard-working people here already. The reason they aren't currently working hard is because there is no incentive to work. They are receiving free taxpayer money to stay at home.
And working on solutions to help can only help to open the door just enough for our Spanish immigrants to peek at what the differences are between the 2 parties. I tell you what, if all of us here took the time to volunteer and talk to minorities on party politics, be a neighborly person, we could make some progress.
The GOP used to be the party of America, the Constitution, and against socialist handouts. Now, the GOP seems to be the Mexico-First Party.
P.S. One other thing , President Bush has spent his life in Texas. He has been around the latin heritage and culture quite a bit. He knows it. Hell,his nephews and nieces are 1/2 spanish. His brother is married to a mexican woman. His intentions may be very sincere and thoughtful.
You're right. They may be. And he also may be splintering the GOP into two factions that will keep the party out of office in the future.
Faction #1: Neo-Conservatives who support importing cheap labor from Mexico. (It's much easier than reforming welfare and strengthening our borders, that's for sure.) Plus, the idea of a North American Union to compete with the E.U. seems more important than American borders, language and culture.
Faction #2: Conservative Constitutionalists, who believe in sovereignty and borders. These poor "extremist" saps are still around. They wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
What I have a problem with is our immigration policies in general... they're a disaster and all we're doing is importing poverty and the american taxpayer is the big loser.
The same thing that is happening to whites in South Arfica & Zimbawe. It won't be pretty!
So Bush made a bad decision for purely political reasons, and then gets no political benefit from it. That is the entire point. Bush isn't going to get Democratic voters by taking a position contrary to his conservatism. You will NEVER outbid a Democrat.
Bush needs to come at it from the opposite direction, and seek to EDUCATE Hispanics and other potential Republicans that they too stand for life, lower taxes, and more freedom through less government, and that their families are better off that way.
Hispanics are overwhelmingly Catholic, the Catholic church is overwhelmingly pro-life, and yet Hispanics vote overwhelmingly pro-abortion. Solution? Do waves of photo ops, public statements and policy proposals with pro-life Catholic bishops, priests, and lay leaders, repeating over and over, "The Catholic Church has stood boldly for the unborn. They are a pro-life institution. I too am pro-life and will always defend the unborn. Its good for families and children."
With enough educations, Hispanics at large with eventually realize that their religion is pro-life, and that there families and children are better off in a pro-life culture. Eventually that will transfer to the ballot box.
The GOP did not win rural America by hawking every farm subsidy known to man. They did it by being culturally and fiscally conservative, and making rural dwellers understand that they were too.
Sorry for the long post, but its time the GOP took the bull by the horns and began to lead instead of trying to find how best to cater to non-GOP voters leftist sympathies.
I don't buy your assumption that President Bush's decision to withdraw from Vieques was made for the purpose of picking up Hispanic support.
As I understand the facts, Congress passed a bill last year allowing the citizens on Vieques to vote on whether we could stay. It was obvious that the vote was going to go against us. This would have been a tremendous anti-American publicity disaster. So instead of letting a couple thousand locals kick the American military off their island, President Bush prempted them by announcing that we would leave in a couple years.
Sort of like a person resigning from his job instead of being fired.
Any comment on the rest of the post?
Thats the point. A GOP that engages in ethnic pandering may suddenly become attractive to the group being pandered to (arguably) but it will turn off those of us who utterly despise and believe such tactics are poison to the nation as a whole.
What green card?
At least three times on this thread you've written "dirt poor people"...
What do you have against poor people that want to work?
They pay taxes, are family oriented, religious and coming whether you like it or not.
They are already here. Fight or accept, it's in the numbers.
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