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Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Romney's Anti-Latino Rhetoric Renders Him Actually Unelectable

Quite apart from everything else (lack of enthusiasm for Romney in the white-racist patriarchal prick Randroid-and/or-Dominionist fundamentalist GOP Base even before the Mormon issue taken into consideration, lack of Robots for Plutocracy demographic more generally in the United States, the whole flabbergasting flip-floppery problem, and so on), BooMan draws out the implications of Republican anti-Latino anti-immigrant racist hysteria and especially that from still-likely eventual nominee Mitt Romney's horrid "hey, guys, I can be a scary racist too!" schtick this year:
Staking out a position on immigration well to the right of Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry hasn't done Mitt Romney any favors with Latinos, according to a new survey from the Pew Hispanic Center. Let's remember that Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 despite getting 32% of the Latino vote, and he barely won the Electoral College in 2004 despite getting 44% of the Latino vote. When John McCain only mustered 31% of the Latino vote in 2008, his campaign was crushed. A Republican can no longer hope to win less than a third of the Latino vote and still scrape their way into the White House. Those days are over. So, how is Romney doing? President Obama holds a wide lead among Hispanic voters when matched against potential Republican challengers... The [Pew] survey… revealed a dramatic general election weakness for Republicans among an increasingly influential voting bloc -- with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Texas Gov. Rick Perry each winning less than one-fourth of the Hispanic vote in hypothetical matchups against Obama. Obama leads Romney 68-23 and Perry 69-23 among Hispanic voters, with an error margin of plus or minus 5.2 percentage points for the voter sample… Twenty-three percent isn't going to get it done. And the numbers would be considerably worse if the Obama administration were not deporting 400,000 Latino immigrants a year. That aggressive policy is tearing apart families and hurting Obama's standing in the Latino community. But the Republicans are far from being able to capitalize on this weakness… [as t]hey do everything they can to make sure Latinos know that they aren't welcome in this country, whether they're here legally or not…
I've said it a million times, that Obama is going to win isn't the most urgent issue in my book, given the clown college the GOP has thrown up (perhaps literally?) this round -- what keeps me up nights is that Obama must win in a way that has coattails that keep the Senate (this makes the difference in Nevada, for example, and so makes all the difference, even assuming Elizabeth Warren will topple bankster-bunny Scotty Brown, especially now that asshole Ben Nelson, who justified his asshole betrayals by saying they were necessary for his re-election is retiring after hovering up scads of Democratic cash on the expectation that he would not) and also regain the House and so makes the Obama win relevant for more than Supreme Court nominations (which isn't exactly chopped liver either) by giving him a Congress that can actually implement his mandate over GOP idiot evil obstruction. There's a difference between the popular vote and the electoral college, of course, but the larger point here is well nigh unassailable: when the GOP realized that anti-gay hate speech no longer worked its evil magic for them they shifted back to the white-racism that worked for them so long with the Southern Strategy (consigned by demographics to the electoral dustbin just as surely as their gay-bashing was, and roughly simultaneously) and in their ugly abject panic doubled down on the anti-brown-folks hate speech only now directed at gale-force to Latinos and Muslims. The GOP didn't adapt to the realities of diversity and now confront marginalization into a rump of crazytown Christianist-Taliban and white-racist Neo-Confederates on their deathbeds.

2 comments:

jollyspaniard said...

The useful idiots in the GOP base are now the GOPs own worst enemy.

Good luck taking control of both houses though. I used to think that America had the best designed Democracy on paper. Not anymore.

Dale Carrico said...

The Electoral College is a catastrophe. And since we are not just electing "representatives" but "Administrations" (a term that implies a basic capacity to accomplish the basic work of establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, providing defense, promoting general welfare) the post-American Parliamentary systems have a lot on us. I think it would be better if every four years in electing an Executive Ticket we voted in not only a President and Vice-President of a party with a clear platform clearly contrasted with alternatives and with a real mandate, but also the Speaker of the House and with the Vice-President functioning not just as the occasional tie-breaker but as the Senate's Majority Leader. In moments of divided government when the Executive presided over majorities of other parties, the majority would have the power to force real compromises on the Administration but not abuse grind the people's business to a halt. In a mass media environment, our present system invites dysfunction -- and gets it.