RACE SCARES THE U.S. RIGHT!

The Shrinking White Base of the GOP Cannot Accept the Country In Which It Now Lives

 

 

 

 Written by Gary Younge

 

GUEST WORDS-In the early 1980s veteran pollster Stan Greenberg, conducted a focus group in Macomb County, a Detroit suburb, of former Democrats who had switched allegiance to the Republican Ronald Reagan. After he read a statement by Robert Kennedy about racial inequality, one participant interjected: "No wonder they killed him." 

"That stopped me and led to a whole new analysis of Reagan Democrats," wrote Greenberg in a recent report, Inside the GOP.  "I realized that in trying to reach this group of people race is everything," he told me.

While conducting a focus group with Republicans over the summer he had a similar revelation, although it came not from a sole outburst but almost throwaway comments, often left on cards after the session. As one man left his handout he half-joked: "It's probably digital, so you can check it on the NSA files."

Another asked: "Now you're going to guarantee that what we put down here, we won't be getting a call from the IRS about an audit or anything like that?" Alongside this sense of being spied upon was relief that, in these Republican-only groups, they had found kindred spirits. "I'm not alone in the way I view things for the most part," wrote one on a postcard. "Not by myself in thought process," confided another.

Those seeking to understand what drove the Republican party to shut down the government this month in a strategically disastrous move that laid bare its deep internal divisions – and ultimately led to humiliating defeat – could do worse than start here. The report reveals a sense of ideological, demographic and cultural siege, on the American right, from which there is no obvious escape.

Unable to comprehend or process last year's election defeat, they feel the nation has become unmoored from its founding principles and is on a full-scale, unrelenting descent into chaos. Obama has been victorious in implementing socialism and the party they identify with has proved incapable of halting the decline, leaving them alienated not only from the country at large but one another. If it appears as though they are howling at the moon, it's because they feel all earthly options have been exhausted.

Describing Ireland's economic and cultural transformation in his book The Deportees, Roddy Doyle wrote: "I went to bed in one country and woke up in a different one." Many Republicans have precisely the same feeling.

Central to this deep-seated sense of angst is race. In 2012, 92% of the Republican vote came from white people who, within 30 years, will no longer be in the majority. "They are acutely racially conscious," says Greenberg. "They are very aware that they are 'white' in a country that is becoming increasingly 'minority'."

Growing increasingly dependent on an ever-shrinking base, they see their electoral fortunes waning but are resistant to adapting their message to broaden their appeal beyond their narrow racial confines. Race is less the explicit target of their anxiety (issues such as affirmative action and civil rights no longer dominate) than the primary (if not exclusive) prism through which their political consciousness is being filtered. "Race," writes Greenberg, "is central to their worldview."

There are three main ways in which this has been a factor in the recent government shutdown and Republican schisms. First is gerrymandering. Since race is one of the best predictors of voting behavior, House congressional seats have been manipulated largely on racial grounds. Politicians at state level carve constituencies into odd and unlikely shapes, shuffling around various racial groups to protect incumbents.

Both parties do this when they have the chance but Republicans, who run more state houses, have had more chance and have undertaken the task with much zeal and guile.

As a result, in 2012 the Democrats won more votes nationally for Congress but still got fewer seats, giving the Republicans who shut down the government a fragile mandate. It also means incumbents need not fear losing their seats, leaving them able to act out.

Second is the perceived beneficiaries of government spending. Republicans are more likely to regard intervention as being to support minorities rather than to support the poor. This goes not only for food stamps and welfare but also for Obamacare – which was the issue that initially sparked the shutdown.

"Obamacare is a racial flashpoint for many evangelical and Tea Party voters," writes Greenberg.
Their despair is largely rooted in the assumption that by championing programs that disproportionately help minorities, Obama is effectively buying votes and securing a growing tranche of the electorate who will for evermore be dependent on government.

One participant, echoing the views of many, said: "Every minority group wants to say they have the right to something, and they don't. It's life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It doesn't say happiness. You get to be alive and you get to be free. The rest of it's just a pursuit … you're not guaranteed happiness. You have to work for it."

Finally, there is Obama – the black son of an African immigrant and white mother – who stands as an emblem for all this unease, personifying, in their minds, not only their political impotence today but their demographic irrelevance tomorrow. The word they're most likely to use to describe him is "liar". But their hostility goes beyond his policies and pronouncements to a deeply rooted suspicion of his authenticity.

"[There] is a sense of him being foreign, non-Christian, Muslim – and they wonder what really are his motives for the changes he is advancing." As he moves into his second term, there is now an elision in the Republican mind between what they think he is (an immigrant, a fraudster, a non-American) and what they think he does (assist immigrants and fraudsters in contravention of American ideals).

Their inability to craft a credible strategic response to these insecurities only serves to reinforce them.
"You don't like a particular policy or a particular president?" taunted Obama last week. "Go out there and win an election." The trouble is Republicans can't because their racially charged rhetoric alienates minorities, leaving them more electorally isolated, prompting defeat – which leaves them ever more divided.

Meanwhile, their reckless obstruction in Congress, which nearly triggered a default, makes the nation's descent into chaos more likely. Unable to come to terms with the country in which they live, they are complicit in creating the very future they most fear.

(Gary Younge is a Guardian columnist and feature writer based in the US. This column was posted first by The Guardian/UK and most recently by the excellent CommonDreams.org)

The Cry of the True Republican

I AM a genetic Republican.

Five generations of Tafts have served our nation as unwaveringly stalwart Republicans, from Alphonso Taft, who served as attorney general in the late 19th century, through William Howard Taft, who not only was the only person to be both president of the United States and chief justice of the United States but also served as the chief civil administrator of the Philippines and secretary of war, to my cousin, Robert Taft, a two-term governor of Ohio.

As I write, a photograph of my grandfather, Senator Robert Alphonso Taft, looks across at me from the wall of my office. He led the Republican Party in the United States Senate in the 1940s and early 1950s, ran for the Republican nomination for president three times and was known as “Mr. Republican.” If he were alive today, I can assure you he wouldn’t even recognize the modern Republican Party, which has repeatedly brought the United States of America to the edge of a fiscal cliff — seemingly with every intention of pushing us off the edge.

Throughout my family’s more than 170-year legacy of public service, Republicans have represented the voice of fiscal conservatism. Republicans have been the adults in the room. Yet somehow the current generation of party activists has managed to do what no previous Republicans have been able to do — position the Democratic Party as the agents of fiscal responsibility.

Speaking through the night, Senator Ted Cruz, with heavy-lidded, sleep-deprived eyes, conveyed not the libertarian element in Republican philosophy that advocates for smaller government and less intrusion into the personal lives of citizens. but a new, virulent strain of empty nihilism: “blow it up if we can’t get what we want.”

This recent display of bomb-throwing obstructionism by Republicans in Congress evokes another painful, historically embarrassing chapter in the Republican Party — that of Senator Joseph McCarthy, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, whose anti-Communist crusade was allowed by 

 Republican elders to expand unchecked, unnecessarily and unfairly tarnishing the reputations of thousands of people with “Red Scare” accusations of Communist affiliation. 

Finally Senator McCarthy was brought up short during the questioning of the United States Army’s chief counsel, Joseph N. Welch, who at one point demanded the senator’s attention, then said: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” He later added: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Watching the Republican Party use the full faith and credit of the United States to try to roll back Obamacare, watching its members threaten not to raise the debt limit — which Warren Buffett rightly called a “political weapon of mass destruction” — to repeal a tax on medical devices, I so wanted to ask a similar question: “Have you no sense of responsibility? At long last, have you left no sense of responsibility?”

There is more than a passing similarity between Joseph McCarthy and Ted Cruz, between McCarthyism and the Tea Party movement. The Republican Party survived McCarthyism because, ultimately, its excesses caused it to burn out. And eventually party elders in the mold of my grandfather were able to realign the party with its brand promise: The Republican Party is (or should be) the Stewardship Party. The Republican brand is (or should be) about responsible behavior. The Republican party is (or should be) at long last, about decency.

What a long way we have yet to go. 

John G. Taft is the author of “Stewardship: Lessons Learned From the Lost Culture of Wall Street.”

Latinos want national leader, have trouble naming one

(In a recent poll, 5% of Latinos questioned named Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Florida Senator Marco Rubio as an important Hispanic or Latino leader.)

by Suzanne Gamboa, @SuzGamboa 

More than 50 million and growing, Latinos are hard-pressed to name someone among them as their national leader, even though there is desire for one, according to a new report from Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project.

The study released Tuesday reported that nearly three quarters of Latinos in the United States believe their community needs a national leader. But about the same share of the 5,103 Latinos surveyed could not name one. The study was done by Pew’s Hispanic Trends and Religion and Public Life projects.

Mark Hugo Lopez, lead author of the study, said the finding that Latinos feel they need a national leader to advance the concerns of the community is a new one. Earlier studies only asked Latinos to name national leaders. That prompted questions of whether Latinos thought one was needed.

Lopez said the desire for a national leader was more important among foreign-born Latinos who prefer Spanish, which he said may be a function of getting news from media outlets that give more attention to issues within the Latino community.

When respondents were asked to name the most important Hispanic or Latino leader, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who is Puerto Rican, and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, of Cuban descent each were cited by 5 percent of participants.

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and immigration reform champion Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., were cited by 3 percent and 2 percent respectively.
The leading answer was “don’t know,” 62 percent, while 13 percent came up with other names and 9 percent said no one.

The lack of a name of a national leader on the tip of Latinos’ tongues reflects a cultural aspect of the community where years ago the leader was a mother, a father, a parish priest or a local wise person living in the neighborhood, said Sylvia Puente, executive director of the Chicago-based Latino Policy Forum.

“What’s happened with the Latino community as it has developed and matured is there are literally thousands of leaders at the local and community level,” Puente said.

Look at immigration reform, she said. “You can look at the community and see hundreds of people working to keep that issue alive,” said Puente, whose organization advocates on issues of education, immigration reform and housing for Latinos and works to build leaders in the community.

Puente said part of the reason Latino leaders are not better known is because as the community has grown and their issues have matured, the community is not given its fair share of coverage in the media. Latino leaders are not turned to by the media and “it’s the media who designates who those leaders are,” Puente said.

Ray Suarez, who compiled the stories of several Latino leaders over the centuries in his book “Latino Americans,” said the idea that a community of 53 million people can have a single recognized leader “seems a little bit of a long shot to me, but I can see why that has appeal.”

The idea of a single national leader does not seem that useful in the 21st century, Suarez said. “What we need in a disperse community growing in every part of the country is lots of people who come to mind locally,” said Suarez, whose book accompanied a six-part PBS series on the 500-year legacy of Latinos in the United States.

Suarez said a national leader – even a Latino president – is something that emerges organically, from being governor of Texas or a U.S. senator from Califorina. “It won’t be the kind of thing where everyone thinks you are a leader and therefore you are one. You have to have real influence over real events.”

Potential leaders varied by Hispanic origin for some groups. Rubio was most named among Cubans and Sotomayor most named among Puerto Ricans.

Hispanics of Mexican and Salvadoran origin were least likely to name a leader, with just a quarter coming up with a name. But Latinos of Mexican origin split at four percent each in naming Sotomayor and Villaraigosa.
Salvadorans named Gutierrez, 7 percent, and 9 percent of Dominicans named Sotomayor.

The need for a leader also became less of interest if the Latino surveyed was born in the U.S. While 82 percent of foreign-born Latinos said it was extremely or very important the community have a national leader, 64 percent of U.S.-born Latinos said the same.

The Pew study was conducted May 24 through July 28 by landline and cell phone in English and in Spanish. It carries a margin of error of plus or minus 2.1 percentage points.
Other findings of the survey included:

_ Four in 10 Latinos surveyed say that Latinos of different origins share a lot of the same values, while 39 percent say they share some and 19 percent say only a little or almost nothing.

_ One in five of the respondents say they most often describe themselves as Hispanic or Latino. A majority, 54 percent say they most often describe themselves using Latino origin descriptions such as Mexican, Dominican or Puerto Rican and 23 percent use “American” most often.

_ Half of the respondents say they have no preference for being called Hispanic or Latino. But when a preference is expressed, Hispanic is preferred over Latino by 3-1.

President Obama should not be so quick to penalize the IRS for questioning Tea Party groups, argues Stephen Nuño. (Photo/Getty Images )

Opinion: Time for Republicans to recover grand in Grand Old Party

by Stephen A. Nuño, @StephenANuno 

Conservatives should not need to be told this, but there is more to leadership than being smart.  A Harvard law graduate, Senator Ted Cruz is smart but a seriously flawed individual who has taken on a cultish following of political amateurs who have no greater sense of achievement beyond their noses.

Ted Cruz came out swinging like William Wallace and ended up looking like a prostrate George Wallace.  At a political rally in which he attempted to gather the troops, someone showed up with a Confederate flag.  Jonathon Capehart of the Washington Post was repulsed by the display, and pointed out that the Confederate Flag was seen as a “hostile act” by black families.

The confederate flag represents much more than that.
It represents separatism, slavery, and a Dark Age culture of backwardness towards minorities and women. It is the opposite of how we should aspire to be as a country.

No other flag has been flown in this country to support an economic and social system that so systematically destroyed the lives of so many Americans.  The murder, subjugation, and tyranny over the hearts and minds of not only millions of people, but generations of American families is unprecedented and should no longer be accepted in civilized society.

It is more than a hostile act to display that flag on the lawn of a black family; it is a terrorist act.  It is a hateful act.  It is a shameful act.

And yet when the flag was waved at their rally, neither Ted Cruz nor Sarah Palin bothered to say anything. Not that we should be surprised, since Senator Cruz is an admiring fan of one of this country’s grandest supporters of Jim Crow in the Senate, Jesse Helms.

Ted Cruz was warned before this latest episode of holding the government hostage over the attempt to extend health care to working class and poor families that he and his confederacy of dunces would ultimately lose a showdown between the President and the Senate. Yet Cruz ignored those warnings, he ignored the costs it imposed on working families, on our distressed financial system, and on the poor.

If there is anything salvageable in the Republican Party it will come from those who believe in honorable opposition for the benefit of the country.

Currently, there is nothing grand about this party.  There are no more grand ideas to improve the country, improve our society, and move forward as a nation.

Where Ronald Reagan once envisioned a grand economic and social cooperative between Mexico and Canada, today’s Republicans build walls and quite literally try to convince people that freedom lies within one’s right not to have health care.

This is a party of fear and resentment, whose only display of grandeur is in the remarkable littleness of its leaders. The utter lack of courage to stand up to populism, to succumb to the anxiety of a changing society, and to profit off the misery of its fellow neighbors without one scintilla of effort to try to educate their constituency is an utter failure of what a political party is supposed to do.

Our democracy needs a responsible opposition. Today we have none.

The GOP was once an innovator of ideas in an era of lethargy.  They may not have always been right, but they did think big.  Embracing a global economy, families of all stripes, spirituality in its many positive forms, and our pride in improving opportunities for our future entrepreneurs should be the nexus of where the GOP goes from here.  Driving forward with both eyes on the review mirror is neither conservative, nor healthy.

Perhaps some day the GOP will embrace the power of diversity in society as they do their portfolios. Hopefully that day comes sooner rather than later, because the Democrats are content that it comes later rather than sooner.


Stephen A. Nuño, Ph.D., NBC Latino contributor and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and International Affairs at Northern Arizona University. He is currently writing a book on Republican outreach into the Latino Community.

Opinion: Tea Party’s hostile takeover

 

 by Stephen A. Nuño, @StephenANuno 

This is not how a modern society is supposed to act.  Over the last week, we have seen more concern for national monuments than we have for our poorest neighbors.

We are now at a point where we are being pulled by the ear by a Tea Party faction who no longer cares about the very basic function of democracy,

Due to the shutdown brought about by the refusal of the Tea Party to engage in actual governance – and the Republicans who have gone along with it – private charities have had to pick up where the federal government has eschewed its collective obligation to our poor, our children, and to those families who make the ultimate sacrifice for our nation.  The Laura and John Arnold Foundation has pledged ten million dollars to hold several Head Start programs over until Congress can come to an agreement. Another charity, Fisher House Foundation, has promised to pay survivor benefits to families who have lost loved ones abroad defending their country until we get our act together.

Even if the House approves piecemeal solutions, if this shutdown continues, hundreds of thousands of American families who have fallen on hard times throughout the recession may have delays in the delivery of nutritional support through food stamps, which have already been reduced. This will be beyond the capacity of temporary fixes by charity.

Apart from the real-world effects of this shutdown, most disheartening is what the current GOP has done to our basic understanding of what it means to be conservative.

Rather than looking at society as a cohesive unit with basic civic responsibilities for each other, conservatism has descended into a self-interested libertarian fantasy land that never existed but for a time in which life expectancy was 35 – 40 years. 

Today, by the way, it is eighty years.

Long-time conservative columnist, George Will equated the Affordable Care Act to the Fugitive Slave Act and to the Jim Crow South. One wonders what sense of entitlement one has, in order to feel like a slave simply because the government has set forth regulations of an insurance market that curbs practices that other modern societies have addressed for decades – such as denying coverage for pre-existing conditions.
There has been a stream of libertarian bravado that demonstrates a lack of basic human empathy not only for our fellow Americans, but a language that poisons the well of discussions about how to move forward as a society.

Representative Brenda Barton of Arizona publicly compared President Obama to Adolf Hitler for shutting down the national parks. Governor Brewer offered to reopen the parks using state funds, but was denied.  Perhaps because she needed to be reminded to focus on other priorities, like her initial decision to halt Temporary Cash Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) from reaching the poorest members of the State she represents; the only state in the union to do so.

A recent book by Dr. Chris Parker and Dr. Matt Barreto finds that beyond the conservative values is a sense of anxiety, conspiratorial fantasy, and delusion about the state of the country.

The fundamental flaw of conservatism in our past has been the refusal to view the poor and minorities as full members of society, entitled to the same basic obligations expected from government to assist with, such as Medicare and Social Security.

The President has simply expanded our notion of citizenship and membership, if ever so slightly.
True, by doing so, the President has encroached on the sense of individuality and empowerment that others have felt since the beginning of our founding.

Still, this Tea Party sense of paranoia cannot be allowed to decay our nation.
We should do what we can to prevent this hostile takeover from happening.

Stephen A. Nuño, Ph.D., NBC Latino contributor and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and International Affairs at Northern Arizona University. He is currently writing a book on Republican outreach into the Latino Community.

Reporting on government shutdown has failed democracy

by Dan Froomkin

@froomkin

Aljazeera America

October 1, 2013  

 

Commentary: We need journalists to hold politicians accountable for extremist actions, not to enable them.

A man reads morning newspapers from around the U.S. at the Newseum in Washington October 1, 2013.

Gary Cameron/Reuters

American news reports are largely blaming the government shutdown on the inability of both political parties to come to terms. It is supposedly the result of a "bitterly divided" Congress that "failed to reach agreement" (Washington Post) or "a bitter budget standoff" left unresolved by "rapid-fire back and forth legislative maneuvers" (New York Times). This sort of false equivalence is not just a failure of journalism. It is also a failure of democracy.

When the political leadership of this country is incapable of even keeping the government open, a political course-correction is in order. But how can democracy self-correct if the public does not understand where the problem lies? And where will the pressure for change come from if journalists do not hold the responsible parties accountable?

The truth of what happened Monday night, as almost all political reporters know full well, is that "Republicans staged a series of last-ditch efforts to use a once-routine budget procedure to force Democrats to abandon their efforts to extend US health insurance." (Thank you, Guardian.)

And holding the entire government hostage, while demanding the de facto repeal of a president's signature legislation and not even bothering to negotiate, is by any reasonable standard an extreme political act. It is an attempt to make an end run around the normal legislative process. There is no historical precedent for it. The last shutdowns, in 1995 and 1996, were not the product of unilateral demands to scrap existing law; they took place during a period of give-and-take budget negotiations.

But the political media's aversion to doing anything that might be seen as taking sides — combined with its obsession with process — led them to actively obscure the truth in their coverage of the votes. If you did not already know what this was all about, reading the news would not help you understand.
What makes all this more than a journalistic failure is that the press plays a crucial role in our democracy. We count on the press to help create an informed electorate. And perhaps even more importantly, we count on the press to hold the powerful accountable.

That requires calling out political leaders when they transgress or fail to meet commonly agreed-upon standards: When they are corrupt, when they deceive, when they break the rules and refuse to govern. Such exposure is the first consequence. When the transgressions are sufficiently grave, what follows should be continued scrutiny, marginalization, contempt and ridicule.
In the current political climate, journalistic false equivalence leads to an insufficiently informed electorate, because the public is not getting an accurate picture of what is going on.

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Journalists have been suckered into embracing 'balance' and 'neutrality' at all costs.

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But the lack of accountability is arguably even worse, because it has the characteristics of a cascade failure. When the media coverage seeks down-the-middle neutrality despite one party's outlandish conduct, there are no political consequences for their actions. With no consequences for extremism, politicians who have succeeded using such conduct have an incentive to become even more extreme. The more extreme they get, the further the split-the-difference press has to veer from common sense in order to avoid taking sides. And so on.

The political press should be the public's first line of defense when it comes to assessing who is deviating from historic norms and practices; who is risking serious damage to the nation; whose positions are based in irrational phobias and ignorance rather than data and reason.

But instead, journalists have been suckered into embracing "balance" and "neutrality" at all costs, and the consequences of their choice in an era of political extremism will only get worse and worse.
One of the great ironies of the current dynamic is that political scientists Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, who for decades were conventional voices of pox-on-both-your-houses centrism, have now become among the foremost critics of a press corps that fails to report the obvious. They describe the modern Republican party, without any hesitation, as "a party beholden to ideological zealots."

But as Mann explained in an interview last year: "The mainstream press really has such a difficult time trying to cope with asymmetry between the two parties' agendas and connections to facts and truth."

Even with a story as straightforward as the government shutdown, splitting the difference remains the method of choice for the political reporters and editors in Washington's most influential news bureaus. Even when they surely know better. Even when many Republican elected officials have criticized their own leaders for being too beholden to the more radical right wing.

Media critics — and members of the public — have long decried this kind of "he-said-she-said" reporting. The Atlantic's James Fallows, one of the most consistent chroniclers and decriers of false equivalence, describes it as the "strong tendency to give equal time and credence to varying 'sides' of a story, even if one of the sides is objectively true and the other is just made up."

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen argues that truth-telling has been surpassed as a newsroom priority by a neither-nor impartiality he calls the "View from Nowhere."
Blaming everyone — "Congress," "both sides," "Washington" — is simply the path of least resistance for today's political reporters. It's a way of avoiding conflict rather than taking the risk that the public — or their editors — will accuse them of being unprofessionally partisan.

But making a political judgment through triangulation — trying to stake out a safe middle ground between the two political parties — is still making a political judgment. It is often just not a very good one. And in this case, as in many others, it is doing the country a grave disservice.

So no, the shutdown is not generalized dysfunction, or gridlock or stalemate. It is aberrational behavior by a political party that is willing to take extreme and potentially damaging action to get its way. And by not calling it what it is, the political press is enabling it.

We need a more fearless media.

Has the GOP stopped worrying about Latinos?

by Benjy Sarlin, Hardball 
- reposted from NBC Latino


If the 2012 election was a wakeup call for Republicans to address their relationship to Latino voters, the 2013 immigration debate is starting to resemble a chloroform-soaked rag.

After November’s stunning loss, an array of influential Republicans argued that immigration reform was the party’s best chance to claim Latino voters before they become permanent Democrats. But in a mere eight months, a counter-narrative has taken hold in conservative circles, nurtured by a shrewd group of anti-immigration lobbyists and Tea Party enthusiasts. The new argument sees immigration reform at best as a divisive distraction from the GOP’s real problem of countering “white flight” from the polls. At worst, they view it as an electoral apocalypse, a seventh seal behind which lies an unbroken line of future Democratic presidents.

As the Senate’s bipartisan immigration bill moves to the House, whose members are overwhelmingly planted in safe GOP districts, the stakes couldn’t be higher for comprehensive reform. Whether it passes will be determined in large part by which of the two narratives can win over the conservative mainstream.

At the moment, the anti-immigration argument appears to be gaining converts fast. On election night, Fox News anchor Brit Hume called the “demographic” threat posed by Latino voters “absolutely real” and suggested Mitt Romney’s “hardline position on immigration” may be to blame for election losses. On Monday, Hume declared that argument “baloney.” The Hispanic vote, he said, “is not nearly as important, still, as the white vote.”

Sean Hannity, a reliable bellwether on the right, has been on a similar journey since the fall. He announced the day after President Obama’s re-election that he had “evolved” on immigration reform and now supported a “path to citizenship” in order to improve relations with Hispanic voters. Hannity has now flipped hard against the Senate’s bill.

“Not only do I doubt the current legislation will solve the immigration problem,” he wrote in a June column, “but it also won’t help the GOP in future elections.”

Hannity and Hume didn’t arrive at their latest destination by accident. They’re just the latest figures on the right to embrace the compelling new message that’s whipping Republicans against immigration reform while still promising a better tomorrow for the GOP’s presidential candidates.

‘You Don’t Get To Come Over Here And Be Takers’
 House leaders have been cagey about their views on immigration reform, political or otherwise, suggesting a “wait-and-see” approach to the ongoing civil war over the Senate bill. Speaker John Boehner says he supports immigration reform in an abstract sense, but won’t bring forward any bill that doesn’t have the support of the majority of his caucus. Majority Leader Eric Cantor has shifted since the November election to favoring a path to citizenship for young undocumented immigrants, a far more modest position than the Senate’s “Gang of Eight,” but one that suggests he’s at least nominally concerned about the rising Latino vote.

The most vocal advocate for passing a far-reaching bill along the lines of the Senate’s has been Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Perhaps not coincidentally, he’s also the member most likely to face a national Latino electorate in 2016 as the party’s presidential nominee. But he’s gone out of his way to avoid the political argument over the bill, focusing his attention on advocating for its individual policy provisions instead.

But other House leaders are moving in the opposite direction. After entertaining the idea of bipartisan immigration reform earlier this year, House Judiciary Committee Bob Goodlatte and Immigration Subcommittee Chair Trey Gowdy are pushing an enforcement-oriented bill modeled after Arizona’s SB 1070–despised by Latino groups–that would criminalize unauthorized immigrants and task local police with investigating suspected violators. This doesn’t look like the behavior of politicians who are terribly worried about courting Latino voters.

At the heart of their dueling approaches is a basic question: can the party win back the White House without winning more Latinos?

Rush Limbaugh argues that it can, and if House Republicans and their constituents take his side, the motivation to pass immigration reform will vanish. For months, he’s tried to convince his listeners that Latinos are unlikely to vote for the current Republican Party even if immigration reform passes. During one on-air confrontation with Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Limbaugh asked whether “the Republican party is committing suicide” by adding “nine million automatic Democrat voters” through a path to citizenship.

Reformers such as Rubio counter that Latinos are only voting for Democrats in such large numbers because the immigration debate has drowned out Republicans’ compelling message of low taxes and deregulation. Often they describe the bill as a “gateway” issue, one that won’t win the GOP any votes by itself, but will at least open the doors to outreach.

“I believe if we pass this legislation, it won’t gain us a single Hispanic vote, but what it will do is put us on a playing field where we can compete,” John McCain said in an April breakfast with reporters.
Or, as Rubio is fond of saying, “It’s really hard to get people to listen to you on economic growth, on tax rates, on healthcare if they think you want to deport their grandmother.”

But Rush has some compelling data to back up his electoral claim. An April 2012 survey by the Pew Research Hispanic Center found that 75% of Latinos preferred a “bigger government” that provides more services versus 19% who favor a “smaller” one. Among the general population, smaller government won out by a 48-31 margin. Obama’s healthcare law often polls well with Latinos–a dynamic Romney infamously cited as one of the Democratic “gifts” that cost him the election.

“This is scholarly data in academic reports: 75% of illegal immigrants in the country also believe that government is the source of prosperity,” Limbaugh said in a January 31 broadcast. “So they’re naturally going to be inclined to vote Democrat.”

This helps explain Michele Bachmann’s warning last month to conservative fringe site World Net Daily: “We will never again have a Republican president, ever, if amnesty goes into effect.” The Limbaugh argument is especially powerful in Tea Party hands because it flatters their self-image as rugged independents fighting off the welfare-hoarding invaders.

“The things that made America great are Americans like you that work and understand that it’s sacrifice,” Congressman Randy Weber of Texas said at a June rally against the Senate bill. “You don’t get to come over here and be takers.”

Some conservative commentators argue that Latinos’ faith gives them an advantage on social issues instead. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote after the election that Latinos “should be a natural Republican constituency: striving immigrant community, religious, Catholic, family-oriented and socially conservative (on abortion, for example)” and plenty of others have made similar arguments.

But on abortion, there’s little evidence Latino voters are as conservative as they’ve been portrayed compared to the general population. And on gay marriage, an issue the national GOP isn’t too inclined to highlight these days anyway, some polls suggest they’ve actually grown more liberal than the average voter.
Their rhetoric may be crude, but here the skeptics raise a legitimate point: if Republicans can’t win Latinos on the economy and they can’t win them on religion, there isn’t a lot left to go on at the moment.

‘Natural Conservatives!’
Talk radio hosts and conservative lawmakers didn’t just stumble upon this narrative. Anti-immigration groups like NumbersUSA have pushed the argument for months in the hopes of increasing opposition to the bill.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies and a leading spokesman for the anti-reform movement, has made it a special focus. Each day, he tracks and then highlights every poll or news story that indicates Latinos are to the left of the general public, often tweeting them out with a mocking “Natural conservatives!”

According to Krikorian, his group doesn’t have a “thought-out strategy” when it comes to undercutting pro-reform political arguments, but they try to showcase evidence as it arises.

“The debunking of this ‘natural conservatives’ storyline isn’t ongoing: it’s over,” he told MSNBC. “You only really see Lindsey Graham making this kind of argument and nobody takes him seriously,” he said of the South Carolina senator.

To further stiffen wavering conservative spines, CIS sponsored a study by University of Houston researcher George Hawley in February demonstrating that Republican members of Congress who supported immigration reform in 2006 fared as poorly with Latino voters as those who opposed it. More brazenly (and less successfully), NumbersUSA president Roy Beck has tried to persuade Republicans that opposing immigration reform will actually endear them to Latinos.

Krikorian and his fellow activists have done a bang-up job convincing conservatives that Latinos won’t vote for them after they pass immigration reform. But that conclusion raises the obvious problem: Obama beat Romney by 5 million votes in 2012 in a lousy economy. If Latinos aren’t going to close that gap in 2016, who is?

The Case Of The Missing Whites
In the run-up to the 2012 conventions, a Republican strategist predicted to the National Journal that Romney’s plan to run up the white vote at the expense of minorities would be “the last time anyone will try to do this.”

Wrong. A new view on the right is taking hold: Romney lost because he didn’t go after whites hard enough.
This will probably sound a little odd if you were watching TV on election night 2012. Romney won 59% of the white vote in exit polls, better than President Bush’s 58% in 2004. Unfortunately for Romney, the white share of the electorate declined from 79.2% to 73.7 % over the same period. The result: Obama won by an even bigger margin than Bush did thanks to blowout margins with minorities.

But conservative commentators are convincing themselves they can find a few million more whites tucked between the couch cushions–at least enough for one more election. Two columnists have been particularly influential in this regard. Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics has argued that census data shows about 5 million mostly poor and rural white voters were “projected” to vote in 2012 based on population growth and past turnout but didn’t show up to the polls. Byron York, a columnist at the Washington Examiner, published a related piece noting that Romney would have lost even if he had racked up a majority of Latino voters.
“Recent reports suggest as many as 5 million white voters simply stayed home on Election Day,” York wrote in May. “If they had voted at the same rate they did in 2004, even with the demographic changes since then, Romney would have won.”

The problem is there’s no way Romney would have won all 5 million of those whites, so Obama’s lead would have held. But if Obama had failed to replicate his 2008 performance with minority voters and Romney had matched Bush’s 2004 performance with whites, the GOP could have narrowly prevailed. This was the exact scenario Romney was shooting for.

York and Trende have some nuanced ideas about how the GOP can accomplish what Romney failed to do, many of which involve tacking left on the economy. But to the talk radio right, the main takeaway is that there are several million angry white votes ripe for the taking if the party can swing even more to the right.
White voters stayed home, Limbaugh said in May, because “they didn’t think the Republican Party was conservative enough.”

You can hear the “missing whites” thesis everywhere once you start looking for it. Hannity cited York’s piece in his column opposing the “Gang of Eight” bill. Social conservative leader Phyllis Schlafly recently told a radio host that “the people the Republicans should reach out to are the white votes, the white voters who didn’t vote in the last election and there are millions of them.” There’s “not any evidence at all that these Hispanics coming in from Mexico will vote Republican,” she said.

“Their idea seems to be gaining currency,” Frank Sharry, executive director of immigration advocacy group America’s Voice, told MSNBC. “Right after the election most of the conservative commentariat said they had to do something to get right with Latino voters. Now there seems to be this bizarre conversation that could only happen in the conservative bubble about how Romney didn’t win because he didn’t mobilize enough white voters.”

Underlying these claims is a belief that Romney lost because he was a blue-blooded moderate who failed to connect to conservative white voters on a visceral level. Nominate an American bad-ass in 2016 and those missing whites will reappear in a hurry. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to add a few Hispanic voters, but the GOP can do that with some kind of inoffensive “outreach” program instead. After all, look at Congressman Steve Pearce of New Mexico, an immigration hawk whose retail politicking has earned him an impressive Latino following.

‘The Demographic Death Spiral’
If Bachmann, Schlafly and Limbaugh are able to convince the party that it doesn’t need Latinos, then the GOP may be screwed for generations. That’s because the coming Latino wave isn’t some hypothetical outcome that can be undone by blocking “amnesty” or bringing a few more white voters to the polls. It’s already baked into the demographic cake.

The Latino share of the electorate was 8.4% in 2012. What’s worrisome to the GOP is that the Latino share of the population in 2012 was 17.2% and growing. The reason for the disparity has much less to do with illegal immigration than it does with the relative youth of the Latino community, where the median age is 27 versus 42 for whites. According to Pew, there are about 7.1 million undocumented Latino adults who could become citizens under the Senate bill–and only some of them would do so, let alone vote. That group is dwarfed by the 17.6 million Latinos under 18, the overwhelming majority of whom (93%) are U.S.-born citizens. Every election cycle, more of them will become eligible to vote, while the oldest, whitest and most Republican generations age out of the electorate on the other end. (“Age out of the electorate” is a euphemism for “die.”)

It actually gets worse for the GOP. Hispanic turnout is extremely low–48% in 2012–in part because their eligible voters are so young. By comparison, white turnout was 64% and black turnout was 66%. That gives Democrats room to grow their Latino base through registration and voting drives–an area where they’ve been incredibly successful with black voters already–while Republicans may be operating near their ceiling with whites.

The white vote also looks so GOP-friendly because the Deep South backs Republicans by huge margins: Obama won 51% of the white vote in Iowa, for example, but just 10% in Mississippi. And according to Trende’s analysis, a lot of the “missing” white vote is concentrated in rural portions of the Northeast. So even if Republicans boost white turnout, a bunch of the gains will go to running up the score in Southern states they already win or to improving their margin in Northern states they don’t contest.

This is the “demographic death spiral” Sen. Graham is so worried about. And pro-reform Republicans are growing panicked as the new revisionism on Mitt Romney’s loss takes hold. Karl Rove, whose Crossroads group is spending millions promoting immigration reform, confronted his critics head on in the Wall Street Journal last month in an op-ed titled “More White Votes Won’t Save The GOP.” Graham and fellow immigration co-sponsor John McCain aren’t just warning of a 2016 loss anymore, they’ve taken to publicly guaranteeing one if their immigration bill fails.

“[If] we don’t pass immigration reform, if we don’t get it off the table in a reasonable, practical way,” Graham said on Meet The Press last month, “it doesn’t matter who you run in 2016.”