It was the Jack Chi.
Posted on 03/25/2015 9:16:16 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
RONALD REAGAN ONCE said that Latinos were Republicans. They just didn’t know it yet.
Ted Cruz, the Republican U.S. senator from Texas who has become the first major candidate to officially enter the 2016 presidential campaign, is quietly gambling that those words were never truer than in the upcoming campaign where he also apparently becomes the first major Latino figure to run for the White House.
The importance of Cruz’s entry into the race, however, is not that he is running as a Latino. Clearly he is not. Nor, quite frankly, should any Hispanic be running for that or any office on his ethnicity any more than, say, a Jewish candidate entering any campaign as little more than a Jewish candidate.
Instead, the significance of Ted Cruz is that he has not made his Latinoness an issue nor a cornerstone of his candidacy, and that the news media has not been quick to make him being Hispanic the historical importance that it placed on Jesse Jackson when he ran for president in 1984 or Barack Obama when he announced he was entering the 2008 campaign.
All that is important for the large segment of Latinos in America who are not recent immigrants, who are no more the activists of immigration reform than they were of the Chicano movement back in the 1960s.
Those Latinos made up most of the 8 million Hispanic Americans in the U.S. in 1972, and they along with with children and grandchildren still make up the bulk of the 50 million now in the country and, more importantly, of those who are eligible and registered to vote — and who do vote.
They are the ones that Ronald Reagan was talking about. And they are the ones that Republicans are now targeting.
It is not new that many, including some conservative Republicans, believe that Latinos hold the fate of upcoming political elections in their hands.
What is new, though, is just how diligent and undeterred the GOP has been in quietly wooing the traditionally loyal Hispanics, trying to help them discover that, as the party patron saint Ronald Reagan said, they are Republicans and just haven’t realized it.
In the past year, the GOP has spent more than $10 million in improving its Hispanic field operations in key states and flooding the air with Spanish-language advertisements.
The Republican National Committee has also launched “Hispanic engagement field teams” in nine states, with two dozen paid staff members on the ground reaching out to Latinos.
“The message we are going to give Latinos is about jobs, about education and about Obamacare,” says the GOP’s Rosario Marin, the California political operative who was U.S. treasurer under George W. Bush.
Marin, now a RNC advisory board member, insists that the national debate on immigration has not hurt Republicans, pointing to Chris Christie carrying 51 percent of the Hispanic vote in his gubernatorial reelection triumph last year in New Jersey, and the GOP’s David Jolly winning a special congressional election in Florida.
In fact, a Pew Hispanic Center survey agreed that immigration is not the most important issue to Latinos, ranking behind education, the economy and health care.
Marin and others maintain that the anti-Republican sentiment over the congressional impasse is exaggerated and offset by President Obama’s struggles with the immigrant community over deportations.
The GOP is also drawing encouragement from a Gallup poll in Texas in which more Latinos identified themselves as Republican than in the country as a whole.
Democrats hold a 30 percent advantage among Latinos over Republicans nationally, but that difference is only 19 percent in Texas, where Democrats had hoped to make inroads into the GOP’s two-decade stranglehold on the Lone Star State in last year’s mid-term election but failed miserably.
James Duarte, a retired state employee a former Democrat and current independent, typifies third and fourth generation Latino Americans who he couldn’t see himself voting for gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis – paradoxically over the issue that made her the state’s Democratic Party darling.
“I (couldn’t) get behind a candidate whose chief claim is being pro-abortion,” Duarte, an American G.I. Forum leader among Latino veterans, says of Davis, who skyrocketed to national fame last year because of a legislative filibuster opposing an abortion bill.
But Duarte’s disenchantment goes even deeper. Asked if he would be more enthusiastic over a Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, he shook his head.
“I don’t see myself being any more interested in a Hillary Clinton campaign,” he said.
“I think I have just lost faith in the Democrats asking us to vote for them but not having one of us as the candidate at the top of the ticket.
Looks like there is more to take in this time. :)
It was the Jack Chi.
Just for the record, when RR said ‘Republicans’, he meant it as in patriotic conservatives; not to be confused with today’s crop of RINO’s and GOPe.
Amen to that!
Ted Cruz is the prescription to the illness that infects this once great land.
I stand with Ted
[Ted Cruz is the prescription to the illness that infects this once great land.]
TED CRUZ - Pro-GOD, Pro-FAMILY, Pro-COUNTRY - 2016
Everyone knows that the ‘rats hate Latinos. That’s why they immediately reacted so negatively to Cruz. They clearly had not even listened to his message. What else could it be?
Libs and rats hate Latinos. Make sure everyone knows.
However, about half of them tend to vote contrary to their naturally conservative lives because there is a disconnect between how they live and how they think.
Rally to the sign of the Holy Cross (Cruz, in Spanish).
It is a sign from God!
The first Ted Cruz ad released after he announced was in Spanish, so he seems to be bucking for their votes.
It would be interesting to see how well he has done among Hispanic voters in Texas previously.
Over 40% in 2012. Do you know what you call a Republican that gets 40% in a national election?
I work around and talk politics with a few Mexican workers and think RR is right.
With the success of Conservative talk radio I can only hope someone is broadcasting the Word in Spanish.
They love talk radio.
Most Hispanics are pro-life, pro-family and pro-business.
There will be no problem reaching out to the Hispanic electorate with Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio able to speak Spanish fluently. They will be on Spanish radio and the Hispanics will love them for it.
AMEN! Same here
Today I listened to a young Mexican man tell me Obama is no good!
The ease for illegals to cross the border irks him, makes work for him harder to get.
And yes.... he’s anti abortion
And also birth control
“There will be no problem reaching out to the Hispanic electorate with Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio able to speak Spanish fluently. They will be on Spanish radio and the Hispanics will love them for it.”
Then I hope they get on the air soon and start talking. Some of the Spanish talk radio that comes from our universities is outright communist whacko stuff.
I sure like the Mexicans I work with. Smart guys, funny, principled and I believe on the cusp of being some tough Conservatives
Except that RINO is you and me, people that aren't going to just vote for a candidate because of the (R); the true Republicans are McConnel, Boehner, McCain, Romney, Jeb Bush, et cet.
Latinos love entitlements when “somebody else” is paying for them. Until that changes, they may be “natural Republicans,” but not natural conservatives.
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