Are The Republicans Killing Themselves By Playing Up Their Know Nothing Attitude Towards Hispanic-Americans?

Sunday on CNN's State of the Union one Republican who knows he will never get to give one, scratched around the reason why. “On the issue of the Hispanic voter," pontificated John McCain, "we have to do a lot more. We Republicans have to recruit and elect Hispanics to office. And I don't mean just because they’re Hispanics, but they represent a big part of the growing population in America. And we have a lot of work to do there.”

They have a lot more work to do now than they even did before McCain went down to his historic defeat last year, losing far more Hispanic voters than even George Bush. McCain only managed to eke out a disappointing 31% of Hispanic votes, where Bush had won 44% in 2004-- in a population that made up 9% of those who voted (up by a percentage point from 2004).

Latino voters shifted in huge numbers away from the Republicans to vote for Senator Barack Obama in the presidential election, exit polls show, providing the votes that gave him unexpectedly large margins of victory in three battleground states: Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada.

Mr. Obama’s pull on Latino voters also extended to Florida, where a majority of them [57%] voted for a Democratic presidential nominee for the first time since at least 1988, when exit polls were first conducted in the state.

In a year when turnout among many groups surged nationwide, the number of Latinos who went to the polls increased by nearly 25 percent over 2004, with sharp rises among naturalized immigrants and young, first-time voters, according to a study by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. Hispanic support for the Democratic nominee increased by 14 points over all compared with 2004, the biggest shift toward the Democrats by any voter group.

For the first time, Latino voters emerged as a mobilized Democratic voting bloc in states across the country, Latino officials said.

It was even worse for McCain and Republicans among younger voters. The Republican candidate didn't even crack 20%. Could it get worse? Well, with high profile xenophobes and racist spokespersons like Jim DeMint (R-SC), Mike Pence (R-IN), John Boehner (R-OH) and the two senatorial Oklahoma kooks getting lots of TV face time, it can get a lot worse, especially with divisive GOP allies in the media like Limbaugh, Dobbs, Beck, Hannity, Coulter, etc, being looked at as existential dangers to the Hispanic community. The impending confirmation vote for Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina nominated to the Supreme Court, is turning into a disaster, for both the GOP and, potentially, for McCain himself. Last Thursday we talked about how McCain is in the awkward position of having to decide to alienate his own state's large and growing Hispanic population or his own party's crazy and getting-crazier-by-the-day base when he decides on his confirmation vote. Yesterday, shamefully, he decided to stick with the racists and xenophobes in the base and forget the Hispanic voters he used to court. He's voting against confirmation-- and his statement is filled with gross lies and pandering to white supremicists.

Sunday, Digby went much further in explaining the danger Republicans face from their own crazed opposition to all things Obama mixing in with a virulent nativist strain of racism and xenophobia, to make jackasses of themselves voting against Sotomayor for no discernible reason.

This is what I find inexplicable about Republican strategy. They knew before she was nominated that the person Obama named was 99% likely to be confirmed. They knew she was replacing a liberal on the court, so no harm no foul in terms of the balance on the court. And they know they have a problem with Hispanics, the fastest growing demographic in the country. Allowing a large margin to vote for Sotomayor would be an easy way to ease some of those tensions, buy some good will and provide some cover the next time the Democrats try to block a nominee, without having to actually do anything. It's just good politics.

And yet they've gone out of their way to publicly sully the woman's reputation and now are pulling every possible string to keep the vote as tight as possible, thereby reinforcing the notion that they hate Hispanics so much that they will do everything in their power, even when they are sure to lose, to keep one from the Supreme Court.

I've heard people make the case that this is payback for Thomas, which is seen as the destruction of a good man's reputation for no good reason. But aside from the merits of the case, (which was about sexual harassment being ignored by a bunch of powerful, pompous men, not race) the Democrats weren't in the process of losing the black vote in vast numbers when it happened and because the Dems had been the party of civil rights by that time for more than 30 years. If anything, they were going against type.

This is so politically obtuse that makes me wonder what in the hell these people are really worried about. It occurs to me that they are seeing something much more devastating in their numbers than just losing the Hispanic vote of the future. It seems they must be afraid of losing the white working class. Assuming they are behaving rationally (which is assuming a lot) the only logical reason they could have for ginning up all this racial animosity is if they feel the need to secure their base with the old tried and true racial resentment. If they were secure there, they could afford to be magnanimous toward Sotomayor in a situation that makes no substantial change in policy.

Of course, it could also just be that they are a bunch of sexist, racist bastards themselves and just can't stand the idea of a woman of Puerto Rican extraction being in power. With these people it's usually a good idea to apply Occam's Razor and call it a day.

Even just putting aside other Hispanic groups and just looking at Puerto Ricans-- and forgetting about big city votes that always go Democratic in NYC, Chicago, Philly, Newark and Hartford where so many Puerto Ricans have been concentrated traditionally-- the GOP is endangering 6 of their own candidates in Florida (where Puerto Rican voters put Alan Grayson and Suzanne Kosmas over the top in 2008 and where they could pose a significant threat this year for birther Bill Posey, for doddering relic Bill Young, and for whomever runs for Adam Putnam's old seat and against Kathy Castor), 2 in Pennsylvania (Charlie Dent and whomever they get to run for Jim Gerlach's seat) and Frank LoBiondo in New Jersey. Surveys of non-Puerto Rican Hispanics show that they aren't terribly pleased with the Republican Party jihad against Sotomayor either and it isn't going to help Republicans reclaim lost seats in New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and Nevada and could jeopardize Republicans in almost every region of the country. McCain has been wrong about almost everything but he wasn't wrong yesterday when he told the CNN audience that “I am of the belief that unless we reverse the trend of Hispanic voter registration, we have a very, very deep hole that we’ve got to come out of." Not wrong-- just too late... and still digging it deeper and deeper. Even radical right sociopath Pat Toomey acknowledges Sotomayor is a qualified and mainstream nominee, implying that McCain is nothing but a partisan hack.