“We Don’t Like You Either”: When “We Don’t Like Your Kind” Becomes A Problem
There are a lot of ways to parse a loss like the one the GOP suffered on Tuesday, but what ought to be increasingly clear to smart Republicans is that there’s something fundamentally problematic in how they’ve gone about assembling their electoral coalitions. Conservatives are complaining a lot in the last couple of days that Obama ran a “divisive” campaign, I guess because he once called rich people “fat cats” or something, but the truth is that Republicans have been experts at division for a long time. Much of their appeal, at one level or another, has been “We don’t like those kind of people.” Sometimes it’s welfare recipients, sometimes it’s undocumented immigrants, sometimes it’s people who come from big cities or have too much education or enjoy a coffee drink made with espresso and steamed milk. They’ve been very good for a very long time at telling voters, “We’re just like you, because we both hate those people over there.”
As a political strategy, this can be very effective, so long as the “them” at whom you’re directing your contempt isn’t too large a group. But once “them” grows too big, you’ve dug yourself an electoral hole. That’s the problem they now have with Latinos. Their anti-immigrant rhetoric sent two simultaneous messages, one about policy and one about identity. The first message was that we don’t support policies you do support, like the DREAM Act. The second message, which Latinos heard loud and clear, was this: We don’t like people like you.
The problem can be seen in other areas too. As Sommer Mathis and Charles Mahtesian point out, the GOP is getting crushed among urban dwellers, who are growing as a proportion of the population. Just like with Latinos, this happens because of both policy and identity. The GOP is opposed to policies that are supported by people in cities, like support for mass transit. But they also continuously tell them that they don’t like them. Every time they wax rhapsodic about the superior morality of those who live in small towns (what Sarah Palin memorably called “the pro-America areas of this great nation”), where people supposedly have “values,” while people who live in cities just have opinions, they are telling voters in cities, “We don’t like people like you.” So it’s no surprise that those voters respond, “You know what? We don’t like you either.”
If Republicans are going to solve this problem—with Latinos, with city dwellers, and with everybody else they’ve alienated—they’re going to have to it with both policy and identity. It won’t be enough to sign on to a comprehensive immigration reform. You have to convince the people at whom you’ve been sneering (or trying to stop from voting) that you don’t hate them. It’s not an easy task, but it can be done.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 9, 2012
“An Imaginary America Of The Past”: The GOP Pays The Big Price For Bashing Latinos
At last, bipartisan agreement! You don’t need a degree in political science to know this: demonizing and alienating the fastest-growing group in the country is no way to build long-term political success. Pair that with the fact that demonizing any group of Americans is un-American and just plain wrong. But in recent years, Republicans, and especially party standard-bearer Mitt Romney, just haven’t been able to help themselves. In an effort to win over a shrinking and increasingly extreme base, Romney and team have sold their souls to get the Republican presidential nomination. And they went so far to do it that even their famous etch-a-sketch won’t be able to erase their positions.
As Mitt Romney knows, the slipping support of the GOP among Latinos is no mystery. We’ve seen this movie before, in 1994, when Republican California Gov. Pete Wilson pushed anti-immigrant smears to promote California’s anti-immigrant Prop. 187, which in turn buoyed his own tough reelection campaign. It worked in the short term — both the ballot measure and Gov. Wilson won handily — but what a long term price to pay as California became solidly blue for the foreseeable future.
We’re now seeing what happened in California at a national scale. Harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric helped Romney win the Republican primary. But in the general election, it may well be his downfall.
In case you tuned out Romney’s appeals to the anti-immigrant right during the primaries, here’s a quick recap. He ran ads specifically criticizing Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina Supreme Court justice. He says he’d veto the DREAM Act, a rare immigration provision with overwhelming bipartisan support. He took on anti-immigrant leader Kris Kobach, architect of the draconian anti-immigrant measures in Arizona and Alabama as an adviser, then said his immigration plan was to force undocumented immigrants to “self-deport.” He even endorsed Iowa Rep. Steve King, who suggested building an electric fence at the Mexican border, comparing immigrants to “livestock” and “dogs.” Romney’s new attempts to appeal to Latino voters are clearly empty — he’s already promised the right that he will use their anti-immigrant rhetoric whenever it’s convenient and shut down any reasonable attempts at immigration reform.
If President Obama wins reelection, however, we have a real chance for real immigration reform. He told the Des Moines Register last week that if reelected he will work to achieve immigration reform next year. Beyond incremental steps like his institution of part of the DREAM Act by executive order, real comprehensive immigration reform would finally ease the uncertainty of millions of immigrants and the businesses that hire them. It’s something that George W. Bush and John McCain wanted before it was thwarted by extremists in their own party. It’s something that Mitt Romney clearly won’t even try.
If President Obama wins, and especially when he wins with the help of Latino voters turned off by the GOP’s anti-immigrant politics, he will have a strong mandate to create clear and lasting immigration reform. And Republicans will have to think twice before hitching their futures on the politics of demonization and exclusion. Whereas George W. Bush won 44 percent of the Latino vote in 2004 and John McCain 31 percent in 2008, Mitt Romney is polling at just 21 percent among Latinos. That’s no coincidence.
My group, People For the American Way, has been working to make sure that the GOP’s anti-Latino policies and rhetoric are front and center during the presidential election. We’re running a comprehensive campaign aimed at the large Latino populations in Nevada and Colorado and the rapidly growing Latino populations in Iowa, Wisconsin, Virginia and North Carolina. In each of those states, we’re strategically targeting Latino voters with TV and radio ads, direct mail, Internet ads and phone banking to make sure they hear the GOP’s message about their community. In Colorado, we’re going up against Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, which knows just as well as Romney that the loss of Latino voters “spells doom” for Republicans. In all of these states, higher turnout among Latinos motivated by Mitt Romney’s attacks could swing critical electoral votes.
This is a battle where the right thing to do and the politically smart thing to do are one and the same. Republicans have embraced racially-charged attacks against Latinos, pushed English-only laws, attempted to legalize racial profiling by immigration enforcement, dehumanized immigrants and even attacked the first Latina Supreme Court justice for talking about her heritage. They deserve to lose the votes of Latinos and others for it. This presidential election is a choice between right-wing scare tactics — the last resort of those fighting to return to an imaginary America of the past — and policies that embrace and celebrate our growing Latino population as an integral part of what is the real America.
By: Michael B, Keegan, President, People for the American Way, The Huffington Post, October 30, 201
Republicans And “Humane Self-Deportation”: A Nightmare Of Perpetual Harassment
It didn’t get the attention it merited because of the focus on the GOP’s usual platform plank endorsing a constitutional amendment to ban abortions without rape-and-incest exceptions, but the Romney-approved 2012 platform confirmed the party’s lack of interest in out-performing John McCain among Latinos. Julia Preston of the New York Times has a succinct summary:
In their debates this week in Tampa, Fla., over the party platform, Republican delegates hammered out an immigration plank calling for tough border enforcement and opposing “any forms of amnesty” for illegal immigrants, instead endorsing “humane procedures to encourage illegal aliens to return home voluntarily,” a policy of self-deportation.
I like that modifier “humane.” I suppose the idea is that it is more “humane” to make the lives of undocumented workers–and perhaps some documented immigrants as well–an un-American nightmare of perpetual harassment than to pursue some unstated alternative: presumably loading whole families into cattle cars and shipping them south (which would also be monstrously expensive). The trouble, of course, is that the “humane” strategy depends implicitly on making like miserable for anyone who might conceivably be undocumented in the eyes of the various authorities charged with various elements of the campaign to “encourage” self-deportation. We are somehow expected to believe this will not lead to “ethnic profiling” of Latinos, but nobody much buys it. To put it bluntly, jurisdictions like Alabama and Georgia, not to mention Joe Arpaio’s Arizona, do not have a great deal of credibility when it comes to disinterested enforcement of laws clearly aimed at particular demographic categories of the population.
So even as Republicans continue to claim they only want to enforce existing immigration laws, they are pursuing not only policies but a general philosophy guaranteed to repel Latino voters. Ron Brownstein estimates that Romney will need a percentage of the white vote equivalent to that won by George H.W. Bush in his easy 1988 victory over Mike Dukakis. No wonder Republicans are going to lengths in appealing to white voters that are so highly reminiscent of Lee Atwater’s strategy that year.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 27, 2012
“Quiet Room Magical Thinking”: Mitt Romney Pretends Congress Doesn’t Exist
Mitt Romney went before a group of Latino public officials today to offer some remarks on immigration. Calling it a “plan” would be too generous, although there were a couple of details, some of them perfectly reasonable, like giving green cards to people who get an advanced degree at an American university. But the part everyone has been waiting for—his reaction to President Obama’s recently-announced mini-DREAM Act—was pretty disappointing, because it engaged in a kind of magical thinking that has become increasingly untenable:
Some people have asked if I will let stand the President’s executive action. The answer is that I will put in place my own long-term solution that will replace and supersede the President’s temporary measure. As President, I won’t settle for a stop-gap measure. I will work with Republicans and Democrats to find a long-term solution.
I will prioritize measures that strengthen legal immigration and make it easier. And I will address the problem of illegal immigration in a civil but resolute manner. We may not always agree, but when I make a promise to you, I will keep it.
It’s certainly nice to know he’ll be “resolute,” but you may have noticed that getting a major immigration reform through Congress is kind of a difficult thing to do. George W. Bush and Barack Obama both tried to do it and failed. So how is Mitt going to accomplish this feat? He will “put in place my own long-term solution.” Now why didn’t anyone think of that before?
This isn’t something new, of course—most challengers act as though through the overwhelming force of their personality, they’ll sweep away all opposition, bring both parties together, and get things done. The messy details are left for when you’re actually in office. Obama certainly talked that way four years ago. But after all we’ve been through in the last few years, isn’t it incumbent upon a presidential candidate to at least not pretend that enacting large, sweeping legislation that requires bipartisan cooperation on an intensely controversial issue is going to be a piece of cake?
Last weekend, Bob Schieffer asked Romney what he would do about the Obama policy while he was getting his awesome new policy in place, and Romney dodged the question. But no one who knows anything about Congress believes it’ll be anything but enormously difficult.
And it’ll be particularly difficult for Mitt Romney. It isn’t a matter of the complexity of the issue, as it was with health care reform where there were hundreds of small and large details to be worked out. In this case, it’s about the fragile coalition that would have to be assembled to pass immigration reform. I spoke today to a staffer for one of the most influential members of the House on the immigration issue, and he pointed out that there have been comprehensive immigration bills sitting around for ten years. The problem, he said, is the House Republicans. As long as they’re in control, no immigration bill that grants any undocumented immigrant anything other than a swift kick in the pants has any hope of passing. If a President Romney was to pass immigration reform, he’d have to do it with overwhelming support from Democrats and enough moderate Republicans peeled off to get to 218 votes.
But this is Mitt Romney we’re talking about. The guy who is going to have to spend his entire first term convincing conservatives he’s still one of them, lest he face a primary challenge from the right. What do you think are the chances he’d take on a high-profile fight with his party’s right wing, with the odds stacked against him?
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 21, 2012
“Bobbing And Weaving”: GOP Caught Flat-Footed On Immigration
Republicans are bobbing, ducking and weaving around President Barack Obama’s move to allow hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants to stay in the country, fearing a lose-lose proposition no matter how they weigh in on the policy shift.
While most Republicans criticized Obama for circumventing Congress, they are far more circumspect about the plan’s merits or their preferred method of dealing with the 800,000 young illegals who will be affected by the order.
The GOP fear boils down to this: If it backs the plan, it would infuriate the right flank of the party, which considers the policy nothing short of “amnesty” for lawbreakers. But if Republicans attack it, it could turn off scores of Latino voters who are poised to play a huge role in crucial battleground states this November.
So the Republican response? Say very little.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said the GOP would follow the direction of Mitt Romney, who in turn has called on Congress to deal with the matter without laying out specifics himself. Arizona Sen. John McCain said Republicans are ready to embrace a proposal under development by Sen. Marco Rubio, but the Florida freshman now plans to shelve the proposal until after the election.
And there’s been virtual silence on the Senate floor from Republicans who have shied away from talking about the matter publicly.
Texas Sen. John Cornyn — the ranking member on a key immigration subcommittee and head of the powerful National Republican Senatorial Committee — was asked if the GOP needed its own policy proposal on the matter this election year.
“We were working on that, and the president basically undercut it by trying to do this unilaterally, something he said a year ago he couldn’t do,” Cornyn told POLITICO. “This isn’t going to get implemented in the next 140 days before the election.
“The most important thing we can do is to get America back to work.”
Republicans are in virtual agreement on that. The election, they believe, will turn on Obama’s stewardship of the economy, something they think will resonate with Latinos also frustrated with the president’s failure to deliver on comprehensive immigration reform.
But there’s far less unanimity among Republicans on how to deal with the emotional issue of children of illegals brought to the U.S. through no fault of their own.
Speaking to reporters Tuesday after a party lunch, McConnell refused several times to weigh in on the substance of the change, instead deferring to the party’s presumptive presidential nominee to address it at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials convention Thursday in Orlando, Fla.
“I think most of my members are interested in learning what Gov. Romney has to say about this issue, and we’re going to withhold judgment — most of us — until that time,” McConnell said.
Romney — who along with Obama will speak at the three-day convention — repeatedly declined to answer on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday whether he as president would make the same policy change as Obama did. Instead, Romney criticized the process by which Obama enacted the move.
McConnell declined to answer what should happen to young children and adults who are in the country illegally and would qualify under the new policy. He also deflected questions about whether the new policy constitutes “amnesty,” as immigration hard-liners charge.
“If it leads to citizenship as a reward for some kind of illegal entry, that could be argued,” McConnell said on amnesty. “But I think we’re going to wait and see what Gov. Romney has to say and then our members are going to be discussing his views on this and I think many of them will have similar views, others may not.”
But like other top GOP officials, the Kentucky Republican criticized Obama over his process.
“What I can say for sure is, the president said a year ago he didn’t believe he had the authority to do what he announces he was going to do last week. And I don’t think that’s an irrelevant thing to discuss,” McConnell said. “I mean, did he have the authority to do what he did?”
Twenty Republican senators, including McConnell, released a letter sent to Obama Tuesday demanding a detailed response from the White House on its authority to issue such a broad move. But the missive stopped short of picking apart the policy itself.
In the House, Speaker John Boehner said the immigration move puts “everyone in a difficult position” and accused the president of trying to shift the debate away from his stewardship of the economy.
South Dakota Sen. John Thune , No. 3 in the Senate GOP leadership, called Obama’s move “politically motivated” but acknowledged that “he’ll probably stand to benefit politically from doing that.”
Asked about the GOP approach, Thune said he preferred a broader solution, something he believed Romney was in the “process of formulating.” Like other Republicans, Thune said the president undermined the Rubio effort.
Rubio announced Monday he would likely punt the matter until after the election, since the president’s move sapped the legislative momentum out of his push — a decision that appears to have caught many Republicans flat-footed.
McCain, the 2008 presidential nominee, said Republicans should talk about the matter “as an issue of compassion and concern.”
Asked if the GOP needed a legislative proposal to show voters, McCain said: “Well, Marco Rubio had one that obviously was nearing completion.”
Informed that Rubio appeared likely to drop the effort now, McCain said: “Well, I don’t know what his decision is — but I know he’s close to completing one.”
There were many similarities between Obama’s and Rubio’s plans.
Rubio’s plan would have legalized undocumented children brought to the United States at an early age provided they have no criminal record and have completed high school. It would grant them “non-immigrant” visas and allow them to stay in the country and access the existing immigration system, through which they could eventually become green card holders or naturalized citizens.
Similarly, Obama’s executive action said that those who entered the United States before the age of 16, are younger than 30 and pose no security threat, served in the military and completed minimum levels of education can get a two-year deferral from deportation and apply for work permits.
The Democrats’ DREAM Act — which Obama supports and Romney promised to veto during the primary campaign — would provide a direct pathway to citizenship by providing green cards to children seeking higher education or military service of at least two years.
At least one Republican praised Obama’s decision: Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.), whose support for the DREAM Act became a political liability in his losing primary bid.
“The executive action is controversial,” Lugar said, “but nevertheless, on balance, it seems to me that it was a constructive move.”
By: Seung Min Kim and Manu Raju, Politico, June 19, 2012
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