Latinos have the power (Si Se Puede!)

In politics, the surest path to irrelevance and powerlessness is to be taken for granted by one party and written off by another.

That's the road Latinos are on, thanks to major blunders by the Republicans campaigning for president.

In June, all but California's Duncan Hunter blew off an invitation to address the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

In September, a debate on Spanish-language television had to be postponed after all but Arizona Sen. John McCain refused to commit.

After taking criticism for the snub, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney have committed to taking part in a debate Dec. 9 at the University of Miami.

These missteps raised the question of whether Republicans respect Latinos enough to ask for their support.

That bothers Republican strategist Leslie Sanchez, who wrote "Los Republicanos: Why Hispanics and Republicans Need Each Other."

"With Hispanics, we don't make connections to parties," she said. "Hispanics make connections to individual people. Politicians have to earn our respect."

Latinos are big on respect. So the very Hispanics who might be attracted to Republicans because of their economic policies are being turned off by its insensitivity to Latino issues.

One reason is that Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is aggressively going after the Latino vote by racking up the endorsements of seemingly every Latino officeholder from East Los Angeles to the South Bronx.

Polls show Clinton earning about two-thirds of the Latino vote among Democrats and making up ground lost by the two previous Democratic nominees, John Kerry and Al Gore.

Both flunked Latino Outreach 101, in part because they had that deadly combination of ignorance and arrogance.

You see something similar in John Edwards, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, who either don't realize they've lost the Latino vote or don't care.

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois is trying to target younger Latinos. But he discovered this constituency too late.

Then there is New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who made history as the first Latino to run a credible campaign for the presidency but seems to be losing their support, perhaps because he's too preoccupied with trying to prove himself to non-Latinos.

Among Republicans, Giuliani has morphed from a champion of immigrants into a Tom Tancredo impersonator. He even promised he could end illegal immigration within three years by securing the borders and identifying every noncitizen in the U.S.

To those who live along the border, such talk is a signal that this city slicker doesn't understand the phenomenon he's promising to tackle - and so it probably will tackle him.

Romney's sin is hypocrisy. He spouts off about how immigrants should speak English and we should end bilingual education, while his campaign sends out weekly dispatches to Latino journalists - in Spanish.

If Romney strips Latino kids of their Spanish, how will they read his news releases when they grow up?

McCain has a history of appealing to Latinos in Arizona and earned 70 percent of their vote in his 2004 U.S. Senate re-election bid.

He stood his ground on immigration reform and took on the dishonest arguments of those who opposed it, such as the insistence Americans would happily do the hardest and dirtiest jobs if the wages were right.

McCain dared a roomful of angry union members in the Midwest to spend the summer picking lettuce in Yuma for $50 an hour, much more than the minimum wage most pickers earn. There were only a few takers, who apparently know little about picking lettuce and even less about Arizona summers.

It's only by exercising them and spreading their support among members of both parties that they'll stay relevant and earn the respect they crave.

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Navarrette is a columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune. His e-mail address is ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com.

Listen, Chief, not all Latinos or Hispanics are immigrants or illegal aliens. Millions are native born Americans and have been for generations.

Not that many. The original Spanish-American population in Texas, the Rio Grande valley, New Mexico, and California was tiny. Almost all the current Mexican-American population got here since 1900 and the outbreak of the 1919 revolution and civil war, by far the most in the big wave that came up after the "I wanna be a sucker" shamnesty of 1986.

Mexican-American immigrants have always, always split heavily for the Democrats, when they got the vote. Lyndon Johnson in the 40's, 50's, and 60's was always trying to flood the country with Mexican immigrants, because he was a partisan Democrat who wanted to play the old Boss Tweed game with them: I service your community, you give me 80% of your votes -- and power.

Lyndon Johnson tried to block repatriation legislation in the early 50's: President Eisenhower went around him by using the Executive power instead. LBJ was the one who blew up the old immigration laws, just so he could flood the country with another pro-Democrat, ready-made constituency who'd already lived for 45 years under socialism in Old Mexico under the PRI. He did it to undermine and cheapen the vote of every American who was fed up with Lyndon Johnson and his party. Period.

The article is correct in that writing them off will cost the Republicans the election.

Republicans have zero, zip, nada chance with Mexican-American voters. Now, or ever. Done deal -- why the hell do you think LBJ wanted them in, in the first place?

As an example, the Puerto Rican-dominated (again, native born Americans) I-4 corridor in Florida swung republican in the 2004 election and may have very well helped re-elect President Bush.

Puerto Rican? Or Cubano? The Cubans used to be pro-Democrat until the Bay of Pigs, and then they supported Republicans. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is no doubt familiar to you, as one of the most conservative members of the House of Representatives and prominent in the GOP hierarchy.

South Americans and Central Americans split their votes, according to polling info. That's why Bush and Karl Rove thought they could compete, when Bush got about 39% of the Hispanic vote overall in Texas while he was governor and when he ran for President in 2000. He did well again in 2004, among Texas Hispanics -- but that includes a) Central Americans and b) norteno Mexicans from Nuevo Leon and Durango and surrounding states, who are more business- and job-oriented and, at home, supported Vicente Fox's PAN party. They gave Bush a better split than otherwise he would have.

The best of all possible worlds, for Republicans, gets them about 40% of the overall Hispanic vote -- and they're big losers wherever there are lots of Mexican-Americans, esp. immigrants from central and southern Mexico, where people are much more Left in their politics and tend to support the PRI and especially the very pink PRD. Overall, Mexican-American voters vote 70% Democrat. That's an insuperable majority that will give the Democrats power for 100 years.

There's also an income gap in voting patterns. Wealthier Mexican-Americans will listen to the GOP arguments on many issues, and some participate in the party actively, like the late Ninfa Laurenzo in Houston, herself an illegal who came north in the late 40's or early 50's as a girl. In Houston's heavily-Mexican, poorer precincts, however, Bush 41, despite always having campaigned among Hispanics and having represented quite a few as a congressman in the 70's, in 1992 got maybe 6% of the vote against a dope-smoking, draft-dodging rapist. That's pretty tough, and more like what GOP'ers are going to be looking at in future, in all the power-center cities in the big swing states where Mexican immigrants congregate. In Texas, they'll be wiped off the map, and they know it and are already talking about it.

Also, not all Hispanics/Latinos are on the wrong side of the immigration issue.

True, but not enough to make a difference. The reality is, Mexican-Americans overwhelmingly identify with the Democratic Party, and the 'Rats and rich Republican employers have conspired to let them in -- more than 30,000,000 of them, enough to put the political future of the entire country firmly in the grip of the Democrats, who anymore poll somewhere just to the right of Hugo Chavez.

This is a disaster for the American Experiment in self-government and liberty. You can't paint it any other way. Latin personalismo, referred to in the article, bossism, and political dirigisme will destroy the American political system. It's like pouring a gallon of gasoline in your radiator, or a gallon of Prestone in your gas tank. No offense to Prestone or gasoline, but this just isn't going to work. Except for the Democrats, who are already licking their chops -- esp. the NALEO kingmaker-wannabe's.

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