The New Republic

Didn't watch this, but Rove was right on Hispanics, the xenophobic base of the GOP killed them, and the GOP obviously has to do more outreach to this naturally culturally conservative base. Rove was weird, he was definitely the 'dirty Atwater' guy, but he can count, and he knows he needed to expand into the Hispanic base, but those same guys who respond to his Atwater tactics frequently loathe hispanics.

Rock and a hard place.

- mmathog

November 5, 2008 at 4:55pm

That is a tough needle to thread, finding people who are bitter, frightened, bigoted, or just plain anti-American enough to embrace the overall conservative agenda, but who also think there ought to be more brown-skinned people speaking Spanish in their own neighborhoods.

Then again, it is probably just as challenging to find liberals who are nonetheless willing to embrace the nationalist, assimilationist politics that will be necessary to sustain any meaningful immigration reform other than "build a wall." Our current inflow of immigrants of all types is unsustainable unless native-born Americans can be persuaded that immigrants are becoming "Americanized" much more quickly than they believe to be the case, and that kind of apparently jingoist anti-pluralism probably makes most liberals as uncomfortable as does an embrace of brown-skinned Spanish speakers for conservatives.

- rhubarbs

November 5, 2008 at 5:47pm

Whew, the GOP is branded as xenophobic-even with Bush giving speeches in Spanish, practically having sex with Vicente Fox and McCain all but doing the Mexican Hat Dance on the floor of the Senate. I love cultural diversity and would be horrified if an ICE agent came in the diner where a smiling, hard-working, pleasant Mexican was filling my water glass and hauled him away in shackles, but shouldn't those who express the notion that a sovereign nation be allowed to control it's borders and immigrant quotas be considered as legitimate and not always xenophobic? Can't it simply be cost benefit analysis whatever the country of origin?

- lesserliz

November 6, 2008 at 9:42am

Wow lesserliz, that was kind of an inspiring list of false dichotomies, do you need me to list them for you?

McCain, with pressure from the GOP base (the xenophobic part of it), flip flopped on his own immigration bill, (which of course in itself, like ALL immigration legislation, has 'quotas' and 'border controls') say buh-bye to Bush's Hispanic vote.

- mmathog

November 6, 2008 at 11:48am

So no immigration legislation should have quotas or border controls-just asking.

- lesserliz

November 6, 2008 at 12:29pm

"So no immigration legislation should have quotas or border controls-just asking."

Of course not. ALL immigration legislation should have quotas and border controls.

That's the false dichotomy you're setting up, you're pretending that there exists liberal immigration legislation that doesn't contain those things, when in fact, the most 'liberal' of such legislation still contains quotas and border controls.

Hispanics will support immigration legislation, as long as it's sensible, sane, non-racist, etc... I think by and large they're fine with McCain-Kennedy....

- mmathog

November 7, 2008 at 7:03pm