DID THE KKK WING OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY JUST FORFEIT THE HISPANIC VOTE FOR A GENERATION?

Do you remember Linda Chavez? She's a right-wing ideologue and Republican hack who they'd trot out every now and then to show how multicultural they are. She had come up in the union movement and then sold them out at the first opportunity, endearing herself-- for some reason you can probably guess-- to Ronald Reagan, who gave her a series of sinecures. The Republicans ran her, with no success, for a U.S. Senate in Maryland against Barbara Mikulski who she outed as a lesbian. Eventually Bush's father thought she was anti-labor enough to nominate her to be his Secretary of Labor but she had hired an illegal immigrant and the nomination was withdrawn. As with all discarded Republicans of this type, she wound up at Fox News. Her read on the defeat of the immigration bill is similar to most right-wing Latinos: "There may be some short-term gain from this. But in the long term, it is disastrous for the Republican Party... The tone of the debate, and the way it was framed in sort of an ‘us against them’ way, has done great harm in wooing Hispanics to the party."

People like Chavez, GOP Chairman and Florida Senator Mel Martinez, as well as Bush's Commerce Secretary, Carlis Gutierrez, dread what's in store for their party. More sensible Latinos see it as the one upside of the bill pill of defeat. McCain warned Republicans that "the Hispanic vote is turning against us in very large numbers." And in many states, like Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, California, Illinois, Nevada, Florida, that's the difference between electoral victory and defeat.

“I think it’s bloody for the Republicans,” said Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velasquez Institute, a Latino-oriented research and policy organization with offices in San Antonio and Los Angeles. “The Democrats said pro-immigrant stuff, and even if they didn’t support it, it was because they said it wasn’t good enough. The Republicans said anti-immigrant stuff and so now they are going to get killed with this.”

Clearly, most Republicans haven't a clue how to address the issue. Even Democrats who opposed the bill are widely perceived as having done so because the bill wasn't generous and fair enough-- which may have been true in a couple of instances but certainly wasn't across the board. Not-ready-for-prime-time-Freddy, in his haste to come across as big a panderer to the extreme Know Nothing wing of the GOP as Tancredo, Hunter and Willard, couldn't wait to frighten simpleminded, backward nativists in South Carolina that Cubans are immigrating to the U.S. to kill us. He's been busy lobbying for billion dollar corporations so much that he's befuddled when it comes to politics and doesn't seem to understand that the Republicans win elections in Florida-- when they do-- for one reason only-- Cubans, a constituency they is more and more up for grabs in recent years as older right-wing anti-Castro fanatics die and younger Florida-born Cuban-Americans get a grip on Republican bigotry. This weekend they're watching this short video clip:



Hillary and other Democrats were quick to point out what a clueless doofus Thompson is. "I was appalled when one of the people running for or about to run for the Republican nomination talked about Cuban refugees as potential terrorists," Clinton told Hispanic elected officials. "Apparently he doesn't have a lot of experience in Florida or anywhere else, and doesn't know a lot of Cuban-Americans."